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!