Engaging My Congregation
- Start praying regularly for Creation. Green Christian’s monthly Prayer Guide is a great resource for intercessory prayers for individuals and at church services
- Hand out one of Green Christian’s leaflets during a creation care service – e.g. 9-ways – created to stick on a fridge. You can order them here
- Use your LOAF! Have a Food Sunday where you hand out our LOAF leaflet, serve food that is Local, Organic, Animal-friendly or Fairtrade and/or encourage discussion about how to bring our faith into our food choices.
- Get people together to discuss what it means to be peace and justice makers using our easy-to-use resource for churches – Peace, Love and Climate Justice
- Suggest to your home groups, or set up a small group, to use Green Christian’s new Plenty! six week course which can be run both online and in person. This is a great starting point to get people thinking about more than just changing light bulbs.
- Don’t do Eco Church! Put all your effort into setting up meetings, engaging with people, removing obstacles and keeping overall control, so it is others in your church who actually do the work
- Find people to take responsibility for the land owned by the local church, whether it is a large rural churchyard or a town centre church with a flower bed outside the main door, and ensure it is gardened for nature.
- When you make a change, make sure people know about it – i.e. if you as a church only buy free range meat and dairy, or buy renewable energy, make sure there are posters around the building so people know about it
- Get people involved politically. Even if only one or two of you are joining a vigil outside your MP’s office, or a march in London, put it in the newsletter inviting people to come with, say you are representing your church, ask people to pray for you and the effectiveness of the action, talk about it in the church afterwards. See our current campaigns here.
- Get people to support our favourite campaigns
- Provide pastoral support for the climate and ecological emergency. In Green Christian we think the climate and ecological emergency is probably the greatest pastoral challenge the churches have ever faced. Borrowed Time offers safe spaces to explore and share our responses within the context of faith. We have programmes and resources for individuals and groups, and for ministers and others in leadership roles.
- Don’t get disheartened. Our job is to care for creation and encourage others to as well but we can’t control other people!
For more ideas, see also: