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! 

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.

Taking the Jump in Creationtide

 

As usual we are marking Creation Tide through September and the first weekend in October. We've decided to encourage the actions suggested by takethejump.org in the notices each week, not least because many of them also involve actions that save money as well as carbon emissions and it feels more optimistic to be taking actions that will positively make the world fairer than just because the cost of living crisis is forcing us into them! For this week I mentioned the value of a plant based diet since the UN reckon that livestock accounts for 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions. This is hard to believe until you realise that, of the total mass of mammals on this planet, 60% is livestock, 36% humans and only 4% wild animals.  The JUMP's suggestions and justifications are here. Elsewhere I've seen a suggestion of the equivalent of three chicken breasts a week as a maximum appropriate.

Of course meat and dairy aren't the only high emissions foods - chocolate can be awful if rainforests have been cut down to grow the cocoa, which is why it's essential to look for the Rainforest Alliance or Fairtrade symbols. Deciding what is appropriate is made more complicated by the fact that the same products grown in different ways can have different impacts. I've always been encouraged to read that beef from cattle that graze in organic pasture land is better than that from crowded sheds. Unfortunately George Monbiot has observed that some 26% of land is grazed in this way and that if this land was allowed to grow wild it would actually be very much better both for the climate and biodiversity - not everyone has been persuaded, as these comments show. All in all it seems beef ought still to be a very rare luxury.

Luckily being vegetarian or vegan has never been easier with an amazing array of alternatives available in supermarkets so it's a great deal easier to do it healthily. Some of the alternatives aren't always that much cheaper than the meat of course, but with the right recipe books it can be very economical - my favourite vegetarian recipe book is one I've had since I was a student: Cheap and Easy by Rose Elliot.

Last Sunday I was also able to recruit a good team to start looking after the courtyard garden and added some more plants which have been wonderfully well-watered by the rains at last in the days since.

Creation Season 2021

This year we are following the official Season of Creation more closely - just the Sundays from 1st September until the Feast of St Francis on 4th October - and using resources from the ecumenical website. The first Sunday was the last of our open air services which we've held monthly over the summer, so we could enjoy the beautiful flowers in the courtyard this year.

Yesterday, the third Sunday in the season, Jeremy encouraged us all in his sermon to read the latest IPCC report, or at least one of the summaries of it. He included a few of their graphs of the range of possibilities we now face, emphasising the crucial importance decisions to be made at COP26.

Various congregation members were involved last month in supporting the YCCN pilgrimage residency at Reading, either joining the pilgrims on the routes into and out of Reading or taking part in events including a climate workshop with Reading University scientists and services of welcome and departure. Below are some of the photos Richard McKenzie took for us at the Minster Climate Service with which the residency ended (the weather soon cleared up and the walk to Twyford afterwards was gorgeous).

Meanwhile, over the summer exciting developments have been happening in the courtyard we share with the school:

The sound of the turtle dove is heard again in our land

As I'm planning our first EcoChurch meeting of the year I realise I forgot to mention that our church's year began with a sermon About a Tree and on Christmas Day our vicar's 'morning talk' began with the sound of the turtle dove and with Isabella Tree's book Wilding as a source of hope in our land - you can read it all here.

Environment Sunday update

Last Sunday was Environment Sunday and the theme of our Worship Together was 'feast'. Afterwards we had a vegan lunch (chickpea, apricot and cashew nut tagine from a Schumacher College recipe book) and the donations people gave will all be going to The World Land Trust as part of Green Christian's campaign to find 100 churches to spend £100 each on protecting rainforest (we're hoping it'll be a bit more than £100).
Since my last blog quite a few of the church enjoyed the Christian Aid walk the country sponsored event, as usual. Plus our new youth group, Elements, had a speaker who had attended Friends of the Earth's Community Campaigning course and he shared his school's campaign to reduce plastics. Also, Bridget has wonderfully volunteered to ensure a compost bin in the kitchen is emptied in the middle of each week, so now we can make sure all the coffee grounds etc aren't going in the bin.

Walk the Country

As usual there was a large contingent from St John's on Christian Aid's Walk the Country near Henley this year - these included the Pathfinders group which I was with. It was, as ever, a glorious day (although it did mean missing the royal wedding).

Greenbelt - The Common Good

Just back from Greenbelt 2017 - I know at least 12 other St John's members were there since we bumped into each other but among the 11,000 on site this weekend there were probably others. It was a glorious weekend - apparently the hottest August bank holiday on record which made it beautiful but was also a stark reminder of our increasingly extreme weather. The environment was high on the agenda with Christian Aid's Big Shift campaign - my family plus godsons very much enjoyed their Escape the Vault (although if I'd been on my own I think I'd still be in there). As usual Green Christian and Operation Noah were among the stall holders as well as Hope for the Future who help people and churches lobby their MPs on climate change. Moreover, Natalie Bennett was in no fewer than five sessions and the Most Revd Dr Winston Halapua, archbishop of Aotearea, New Zealand and Polynesia made seven appearances (I am now hugely appreciating his beautiful and intriguing book  Waves of God's Embrace).

For the Common Good

Today Hamish shared in church copies of his latest briefing paper - a summary of Herman Daly and B Cobb Jnr's For the Common Good: Redirecting the economy towards community, the environment and a sustainable future. It is not yet up on his Engaging the Powers website but anyone interested will find papers on similar themes here.

After a particularly tough week I very much appreciated Gary's sermon on moments of mountain-top wonder - plenty of food for thought about our experience of God through Creation. I've not read The Solace of  Fierce Landscapes, although it rang a bell when he said it, and I'm thinking this 'explanation of apophatic mysticism' might prove good Lent reading.

Creation Stories in Godly Play

It's the second week of Creation Tide, beautifully reflected in the little bit of the main service I was present for. In Godly Play today we covered Genesis 1 and 2 - the first Creation Story is a standard Godly Play story that I've told often before (Creation presented as a great gift with seven images placed along a cloth) but this time there was more in the box: the second Creation Story. (Like the Abraham stories I used 3D figures for this - rather than the 2D for non-historical stories - but it helped make a contrast that at least one of the children was enthusiastic about). I asked them to wonder why we have two stories and what we gain from each. It was also a great excuse to use up some more of the rather large amount of clay we had left over from last week - their models included a veloceraptor with its nest and a couple of pokemon.

Season of Creation 2016

Today, on the first Sunday of Creation tide, we were invited to remember God creating us out of clay, with our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah. When the meditation instructed us to break apart the pots we had made it felt a bit of a shock, but these were the eventual creations.

Over coffee afterwards many of us signed Traidcraft's Justice Matters petition. If you missed that, you can sign up online.

Walk the Country for Christian Aid

Last Saturday was the annual Christian Aid sponsored walk near Henley and I'm proud to say St John and St Stephen's provided the largest single church contingent. Our Pathfinders group were among them and raised £250 between them (I don't know the whole total yet).

EcoChurch - a new journey

On Sunday 1st May St John and St Stephen's started a new green journey. As usual on the first Sunday of the month we enjoyed a delicious church lunch together (raising funds for Christian Aid this month). While we were waiting we took our cups of fairtrade tea and coffee and sat round in groups to answer the EcoChurch survey. Of the adults staying for the meal (just over 40 I think) almost all those who weren't cooking were able to contribute their opinions and thoughts. I'd printed off the survey so each group only needed to fill out one section. The immediate consequence was a small working party emerged to do some tidying up in our tiny garden patch.

Back at home I entered in the answers online and found that right now we don't qualify as an EcoChurch - despite having gold standard worship our buildings and lifestyle are only just bronze and our community & global didn't even rate that (which was quite a surprise - I'd expected us to be worse on lifestyle). Consequently a group of us met up last Monday to start a new plan of action. First step is responding to the Wildlife Trusts' 30 Days Wild which I'll be advertising in church tomorrow.

Christian Aid walk

It was the perfect morning for the Christian Aid sponsored walk today. There was a smaller crowd from St John's than usual I think but Simon and Judy were helping with the running and there were at least four car loads of walkers, two of whom met at the finish, above. 

I've been forgetting to add stuff, as usual, but last Sunday I wrote a Godly Play script for the children inspired by John 1 and Ascension so there was lots of emphasis on Creator and Created - a good excuse for very inventive craft activities afterwards.

The week before we encouraged congregation members to do more walking and less driving by handing out Beat the Street cards and inviting them to join the St John's school team. The week before that was another EcoCongregation planning meeting.

Harvest Festival

There was a lovely harvest display of gifts ready to be sent to Readifood awaiting us as we walked into church this morning, grateful that the sunshine had returned for those of us walking or cycling down.

We've continued with prayers and blessings appropriate to Creation Time and some great harvest/creation hymns over the last two Sundays - "For the beauty of the earth" and "Lord of beauty, thine the splendour" last week and rousingly traditional "We plough the fields" and "Come you thankful people come" plus "God made the heavens and earth" this week for Harvest Festival itself. (In previous years there has been some contention over the appropriateness of a 'modernised' version of "We plough" which emphasises the destruction caused to the planet by humankind - it's been suggested that children should not be asked to sing a hymn confessing to environmental sins over which they have no control. I think that is still in debate, but we had the uncontentious version this year).

Because this was the first Sunday of the month it was largely led by the Children's Praise Plus team who explained what happened in the children's group last week - a slide show and props about people working together with God in co-creation leading up to some tasty baking. Children had written the prayers too. I just happen to have the one that was meant to be praying for people working to protect creation because my youngest wrote it:

Dear God, please protect the world, the rain forests and all the endangered animals. Please help us to stop deforesting rain forests and can you make it easier for those trying to stop this happening. Amen

Our first Sunday of the month lunches have begun again and Liz had cooked up a wonderful vegan chilli (from a National Trust recipe). We were lucky enough for many of us to be able to sit out in the courtyard - hard to imagine now as the rain pours down.

The Harvest edition of our NEWT magazine is out and includes a couple of photos and brief account of the climate march, as well as some lovely Greenbelt photos.