Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

As climate change and environmental degradation continue to shape the lives of our communities, our response as people of faith has never been more urgent, and full of possibility. Churches have the unique opportunity—and responsibility—to weave care for God’s creation into worship, mission, and daily life. What does it look like when a congregation takes that call seriously?

Below is a Top Nine list of the benefits of congregational creation care. You can help me with making it an even 10 by emailing your suggestion to [email protected].

1. It's a practical way of living out the Great Commandment, Matthew 22:36-40 - Love God and Your Neighbor by reducing greenhouse gas, ensuring clean water, growing and sharing healthy food, reducing your carbon footprint.
2. We can check the box on living out our baptismal covenant. Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. Another experimental version that was considered by the 2024 General Convention includes “respect for the dignity of the earth” and “strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation.”
3. You can save money and make your treasurer and vestry happy. It might take a year or two, but why not get rid of the turf grass and grow native plants in your churchyard instead of buying and maintaining lawn mowers and buying gas, not to mention inorganic fertilizer. Let’s start a trend in churchyard carbon landscaping.
4. You won’t need to rationalize or have to explain to your kids and grandkids why you do the opposite of what they learn at school. Is it really that hard to reduce, reuse, recycle? Or making sure that food scraps are composted? Or investigating ways to finance solar panels?
5. You can grow your membership and community engagement in breadth and depth. According to the 2022 IPSOS Episcopal Jesus in America Public Poll, almost half of Americans (45%) found being outdoors or in nature to be the most spiritually fulfilling activities followed by prayer (42%) and giving to charity (28%).
6. Caring for creation and the environment can bring communities together to address environmental challenges and foster a sense of shared responsibility. The Communion Forest that came out of the 2022 Lambeth Conference bears similarity to Arbor Day and the Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees campaign. Sounds like common cause to me.
7. Get healthy! Without a doubt, degraded environment, such as pollution and climate change, directly impacts human health, leading to respiratory issues, waterborne diseases, and food shortages, particularly affecting vulnerable populations. If your air is polluted, expect your life to be 2.2 years shorter. I don’t need to Google to find out if not eating enough fresh, nutritious food is going to lead to poor health and a shorter life.
8. You can get a cool certificate and even a sign from a variety of organizations committed to caring for the environment, such as Inter-Faith Power and Light, National Wildlife Federation, Deep Green Faith, and Good News Gardens.
9. Nature can heal us. Did you know that students who looked out at a flowering green roof for 40 seconds midway through a task made significantly fewer mistakes than students who paused for 40 seconds to gaze at a concrete rooftop. (Journal of Environmental Psychology). Or that just spending 30 minutes gardening lowered levels of the stress hormone cortisol. (New York Times).