Eco Church Silver Award for Austerfield and Bawtry churches
St Helena’s Austerfield and St Nicholas’ Bawtry, both part of the same benefice, have recently received the A Rocha silver eco church award. Their curate, Liz Mack, shares some of their journey to receiving the awards below.
“We are focused on changing culture across the churches, rather than simply ticking boxes to say we are doing certain things that make us eco conscious. We now have an Eco Team that regularly meets to help each other with our award submissions, and share ideas as to how we can care for creation within our churches.
We have put Eco Church on every PCC agenda, and we have a regular eco news piece in Bawtry News, our parish magazine, plus displays inside our churches with information about how individuals can make eco conscious lifestyle decisions for themselves. One of our success stories is that we have created recycling points in our churches for things that are not cannot be recycled easily within the usual refuse collections; eye glasses, used stamps, bras, and medication blister packs – however, we didn’t realise how popular this would be and we now have the challenge of recycling a huge number of items! All this is making us more effective in bringing people along with the eco team who are already passionate about caring for creation.
These initiatives are also having a missional effect. Two of our churches have made eco pledge quilts, asking local people to make pledges of environmentally conscious things that they are committing to do written on the quilts and then displaying them.
St Helena’s has created a beautiful eco garden in a space that was completely overgrown with brambles, with plants that make natural seeds for birds, homemade bug hotels and creating a naturally diverse habitat for other wildlife. This was done with over 100 hours of backbreaking digging by two volunteers, and the story is charted through a display inside the church.
We hope to hold an outdoor communion service there this summer with a table made from reclaimed wood and bricks. The only cost to create this space has been £3 for a tap for the compost bin! It is also completely plastic free. We are adding prayer cards that will hang in the trees within people’s reach so they can sit in the space and pray.
St Helena’s also held a wreath making day last winter, using completely natural materials, and raised over £1200 for church funds.
We’ve been amazing at what is possible with passion, digging, skip diving and a desire to create a space that invites us into the beauty of God’s creation which was once overgrown and unusable.”
Find more tips and ideas on how your church can become an eco church here.