More election prep (and wildlife)

 After a Godly Play session last Sunday on Jesus calming the storm, I took the children into the courtyard to a much tamer aspect of the natural world and encouraged some wildlife photography (BBOWT have a competition with categories for photos by children and of urban wildlife). I lent our youngest member my phone so his are the only photos I have at present:

There is a bee here if you can spot it.

Then we moved on to water-painting - the following was not prompted by any adults:

After the service it was part two of our hustings - this time with Reform Candidate Andy Williams and Labour Candidate Matt Rodda. Matt got held up so it was a two stage event asking each of them to answer questions on the climate, poverty etc as previously. Rosemary was able to take the opportunity to present Matt personally with the three page petition asking him to support the CAN bill which we had been promoting at the school fair.

Although the church is in Reading Central constituency, some of the congregation live in the new Earley and Woodley Constituency. Together with some fellow Reading Area Green Christians and CTEER members, we organised a hustings on Sunday evening at Trinity Church (the one behind Asda). It was chaired by the minister at Trinity - Jon Salmon.  The photos are courtesy of Phil Creighton who was also the star who managed to organise all of the main candidates to agree to come:

I think we were all a bit worried that barely anyone would turn up, but as 7pm approached we began to fear we were actually going to exceed our 200 capacity - in the end we counted in 182, so pretty perfect. We opened with a question on the climate - which was genuinely the topic we had received more questions on than any other - Mike B at Trinity asked this one. Two of us from St John & St Stephen's asked questions too - Alison on foodbanks/poverty, myself on biodiversity and the CAN bill. It was disappointing that two of the candidates hadn't heard of it, and indeed surprising after the publicity given it at the Restore Nature Now demo the day before. (Many of us couldn't attend that demo due to other inescapable commitments, although I happened to bump into Margaret at the station on her way there so can confirm that the church did get represented!). I have of course written to those candidates unaware of the bill since, pointing them to the zero hour website and their fellow party members who are supporting it.

An extra bonus of being at the hustings was catching up with Simon Batchelor OBE - the first time I had seen him since the honour was announced for his exceptional contributions to international development and innovation - see more here.

Before proceedings began, I couldn't resist taking a few pictures of Trinity Church's 'meadow'. (Impressive solar array too!)

Finally this week, I had a chance to share news of our gold award at Deanery Synod, starting a couple of potentially useful conversations with other churches.

Reaching Gold!

It has been another very busy month on the Eco Church front, leading up to a momentous milestone. 

On the later May Bank Holiday four of us escorted our duck down to the river again, this time with nine ducklings. We got it almost all on video too, but there are no stills - do watch the epic journey on our Facebook page (posted 3rd June)!

Even before the election was called, we had invited local parliamentary candidates to join us for an informal hustings and our monthly church lunch on Environment Sunday. The Lib Dem and Green candidates as well as a representative of the Conservatives all joined us for a very enlightening and positive discussion that included climate justice/the loss and damage fund, the Climate and Nature Bill, housing, food banks, 'in work' poverty and more.

We also got to do some harvesting in the courtyard:

On 8th June Rosemary & Richard C and I were at Oxford Diocese's Celebration of Creation Care at Wesley Memorial Church in Oxford, hearing inspirational stories from around the diocese and found ourselves nominated for the Church Times Green Award for Congregation and Community Action. Bishop Stephen used the parable of the sower in a wonderfully encouraging way to explore Eco Church journeys and Ruth Valerio was the keynote speaker:

Forest Church next day was at a new venue, beside the river, and that morning we began Great Big Green Week by using WWFs carbon calculator to measure our footprints over coffee. We've been combining the week with being voter champions and produced leaflets for the school with the key dates for voter registration, postal votes etc as well as a mention of Greenpeace's recommended topics to ask candidates. 

This week began with our Gold Eco Church assessment - Sara from Eco Church was joined by Don from Mortimer Methodist Church and Linda from St John's Moulsham, Chelmsford. We had a lovely day, learning lots from them as we went along (we have a long list of new suggestions for our next meeting) and next day came the very exciting news that we are the first parish church in Oxford diocese to have achieved the Gold Award, and the 50th in the country. Here we are with Don and Linda beside the old St Stephen's font in our courtyard:

To finish the week, we've been at the school fair, selling plants, getting signatures for a petition about the Climate and Nature bill, and supervising games about naming wildlife and discovering the hottest years on record. (The last was inspired by this website).

Our next meeting is on Monday - time to start planning for the next chapter! 

From the garden to Christian Aid

 I am excited to report that the duck has indeed returned. Eggs were spotted on 26th April.

And by 1 May she was ensconced on the nest and I haven't managed to see how many eggs there are. Nikki has provided duck food and a water container for her.

Meanwhile, we've been enjoying some really lovely flower displays in church since committing to source all our flowers locally where possible and avoid floral foam:

We've put up a new bee hotel as the old one was not well used and we decided it was probably in too shady a place (but there were a couple of blocked holes, so I didn't like to move it). This has been a good talking point as well as being put to use very swiftly. So I've signed us up for the Big Bee Hotel Experiment.

The wildflower patch has a great variety in it, albeit not all that colourful yet. I added some of the seed bombs left over from a recent Forest Church session, and some of the children buried a few in pots around the courtyard, so we're looking forward to seeing what comes of those.

And I was chuffed to find froghoppers have been by, creating cuckoo spit (apologies for the blurry image).

Meanwhile the main border has been drawing lots of bees and dragonflies.

And the marigolds I planted too late last year started flowering very early this year and are still going. Since taking this photo, I've been able to inter-plant them with tomato plants, courtesy of Reading's Carmelite community.

This number of bikes is pretty common on Sunday mornings and there were even more for the APCM.

Finally Christian Aid week has been very busy - members of our congregation were up early at the station on several mornings collecting from commuters; 

there was the sponsored walk through glorious countryside at Bix (organised by Richard and Rosemary) and three of the younger members of the congregation have committed to walking 70K in May. Our church lunch this month was in aid of Christian Aid too.

Environment Sunday

Today was both Trinity Sunday and Environment Sunday and our focus was on the former, but we were outside in the glorious sunshine and the sermon slot talk - which involved a scavenger hunt and much flag waving - made frequent reference to God as Creator as well as to our blue planet. So it felt very apt for Environment Sunday nonetheless. The EcoChurch team had invited Tricia Marcouse of Reading Climate Action Network to give us a talk over coffee - for those who missed it or couldn't hear well, my notes on the talk are at the bottom of this post.

Afterwards we enjoyed a delicious lunch which (with a few tiny fishy exceptions) was vegetarian - a range of quiches, tarts and pizzas with salads plus puddings galore. The proceeds from the lunch will be going to Ripple Effect (previously Send A Cow) to "twin" our garden with one in rural Kenya. 

Throughout lunch we took it in turns to check on Jemima - the crazy duck who has decided to nest in our courtyard even though she won't be able to get her ducklings to water from there. Nikki, who keeps ducks, has ordered us some appropriate food and a proper water container for her to drink from while she's nesting (she's had to make do with a plant tray of water and bird seeds since I found her on Wednesday) and we're probably going to have to install a temporary pond.

As we were cycling home, I made a last minute decision to cycle left instead of right to join the Wildlife and Conservation group of the Friends of Reading Old Cemetery - they meet on the first Sunday of the month at 2pm, and to be honest my introvert brain is usually so fried after a church lunch that I've been putting off going since I found out about them last year. Realising it was 1.55, and knowing they'd advertised a Love Your Burial Ground week event, this felt like the moment to fight off the urge to slide into the hammock with an icecream at home and find out what was going on. It was not the biodiversity survey I had been expecting, but a working party building up habitat piles from the many fallen branches (I was very poorly dressed for the job), but it was such a lovely couple of hours. Wonderfully friendly people, tea provided half way through, plenty of scope for quietly getting on with the job or chatting to others as suited - we were working in the shade and kept catching sight of speckled wood butterflies in the dappled sunshine. Three of us were new and were given a tour of the cemetery part way through (caught sight of lots of holly blue butterflies there, as well as damsel flies, and the telltale remains of a sparrowhawk meal) - just a tiny glimpse of its fascinating history. I can see that finding out more about it could get quite addictive and am looking forward to going back soon.

Notes from Reading CAN talk:

Tricia began by explaining that Reading Climate Action Network consists of the same people as Reading Climate Change Partnership – ranging across many sectors of Reading including the hospital, council and university. While some of the sector leads, eg transport, do so as part of their paid work, others, such as herself heading up nature, are volunteers. Their budget is very small.

She began with an introduction to draughtbusters who help people in fuel poverty, referred to them from various routes. If we know of anyone in this situation, she recommends referring them either to the Council’s Winter Watch programme or the Citizens Advice Bureau. They are also keen to train up more volunteers if anyone is interested – she assured us it is “remarkably not complicated” and suggested we could host a workshop in our community to advise local people what can be done. They are trying to link up with housing associations to train them, but so far have only been linked with one in Oxfordshire, and they have started 8 other groups doing the same work.

Then she moved on to talk about protecting and promoting biodiversity in Reading. There are lots of little voluntary groups around town looking after plots of land belonging to council to increase biodiversity and carbon storage along with its existing use (our nearest is probably Newtown Community Garden).

They are also trying to future proof Reading for a future hotter climate – more shade will be needed in public open spaces so we need to plant now for the future. One plot they have worked on is Shinfield Road Recreation Ground. She showed us posters from this of children’s designs for nature projects for home and school. So far all the trees  they planted there are ok, but a portable BBQ had melted the plastic seats chosen to avoid them rotting. She recommended cycling over to Clayfield Copse where the bank of wildflowers they have planted looks magnificent.

In Reading at present there are a lot of problems with people trying to have tree preservation orders overturned. We really need legislation that in principle you cannot cut down trees.But good things are being achievedShe mentioned that the biggest single thing we can do is have a wildlife pond in our garden and she is happy to help provide suitable plants since they multiply easily yet cost a fortune in the garden centres.

She concluded by urging us to join the climate festival events, this starts with the Water Fest where she will have stall where there will be the opportunity to handle slow worms.

In the questions afterwards, as well as making suggestions for dealing with the duck nesting in our courtyard, she mentioned events for children happening at Holy Brook Nook in the triangle between the railway lines in Coley.