Eco-Church

How St Andrew’s Psalter Lane is looking up and going green

Finley Hammatt

Discussions around climate change can feel intimidating. Concepts such as degrees of warming, species extinction, carbon emissions, and air quality are often presented without enough context, which makes them hard to grasp.

When the stakes are so high, and each of us individually has so little impact, it can feel very tempting to simply bury our heads in the sand and to try to avoid thinking about climate change. However, there are Christians who - in their unswerving hope and faith in God - have been taking tangible steps to make their churches, congregations and neighbourhoods more environmentally-friendly.

St Andrews Psalter Lane has recently achieved a Silver Eco Church Award from Christian conservation charity A Rocha, in recognition of the steps that they have taken to make their church and community more environmentally responsible. We met up with St Andrews’ Church Warden and Communications Officer Clare Loughridge to find out more about how churches can play a role in combating climate change. 

Clare Loughridge, church warden for St Andrews, tells us that the congregation’s ecological evolution began under the previous vicar, who founded an eco-group within St Andrews about 14 years ago. Since then the movement has grown, propelled by active members of the congregation such as Clare, her mother, and others including the Diocesan Environment Officer Dr Cathy Rhodes. 

“St Andrews Psalter Lane has insulated its windows to reduce heat loss, it switched to using energy-efficient LED lighting, and has created a community vegetable garden to support bees and other local wildlife.”

Operating under the principle that “every little helps”, St Andrews Psalter Lane has made a series of small changes to become more environmentally-friendly. The church has insulated its windows to reduce heat loss, it switched to using energy-efficient LED lighting, and has created a community vegetable garden to support bees and other local wildlife.  Additionally, the church board has recently approved the purchase of solar panels and is investigating installing heat pumps to reduce the church’s reliance on gas.

These are not the only changes: church services at St Andrews Psalter Lane are increasingly centred around ecological themes. “We regularly talk about the creation story,” says Clare, “How God created the Earth and that now it’s ours to look after.” For this reason the church’s monthly family service quite often has a creation theme. Moreover, the eco-group regularly encourages the congregation to be responsible stewards of the earth, promoting lifestyle changes such as reducing reliance on cars, conserving energy, and recycling, among other things.

“Everyone’s really in favour of becoming more environmentally aware,” reports Clare. “There have always been members of the church who were very keen to be green, but we haven’t had any major problems persuading others to support the changes.”

Pray for our politicians

Clare encourages us to pray for our politicians: “Although we can all make the little changes ourselves, it will be policy change that makes a difference in the end.” The Eco Group at St Andrews Psalter Lane has spoken to their local MP about climate change, and actively campaigns for more environmentally-responsible government policies. Clare also asks us to pray for the people, often in the Southern Hemisphere, who are increasingly affected by climate-related disasters which we in the developed world are responsible for. 

2 Chronicles 15:7 reminds us to be strong and not give up, because our work will be rewarded. For Clare Loughridge, this reward is “about the children and the future…if we want our children to have a safe and healthy place to live, we need to act now.”