St James' and St Peter's Churches - Our Eco Church

Eco Church
This spring, St James Church registered for Eco Church. Eco Church is an award scheme for churches in England and Wales who want to demonstrate that they care for God’s Earth. To earn an Eco Church Award each church completes an online survey collecting points in five key areas of church life. These are: Worship and Teaching, Management of Church Buildings, Management of Church Land, Community and Global Engagement and Lifestyle. When enough points are gained in each category the church can then submit their survey and apply for a bronze, silver or gold Eco Church award.
We are very proud to say that St James has already been awarded an Eco Church Bronze Award.
Some of the things we have done which have helped to earn our award include: regularly praying for God’s creation, looking into ways we can improve our church building to reduce energy use, looking after the wildlife in our churchyard, twinning one of our toilets to enable a new toilet to be built in a part of the world that has no access to proper sanitation, and promoting the use of eco-friendly, Fair Trade and plastic-free products to our congregation.
Encouraged by our Bronze Award we now hope to address some of the more challenging aspects of the survey and work towards Silver!

Please note that this page replicates information found at this St James' webpage.

Ideas for protecting God's Creation

At this year’s Harvest Thanksgiving Café Church service, held in the TCC, we looked at our relationship with the food we eat. We explored the idea that although most of us are no longer involved in growing and harvesting our food, we can and should, however, take responsibility for ensuring that what we consume and how we buy our food and other everyday items does not harm the environment, so we have now set up a special board in St James Church where we can share our own ideas for reducing plastic waste and supporting environmentally friendly food production.

We hope that this will get us all thinking, and talking amongst ourselves and encourage us to be more aware of how our actions may impact on God’s creation. We may feel that buying one unwrapped cucumber isn’t contributing a lot, but if we all undertake to change the little things, collectively we CAN make an impact!

Why not share your own ideas by commenting on our Facebook page? https://www.facebook.com/StJamesAlveston/photos/a.340050246044630/1942098719173100/?type=3&theater