Care for Creation (“C4C”) Committee: Annual Report for 2007
Submitted by Malcolm Maclure, Chair, February 2008
An initial organizational meeting in late 2006 was attended by about 20 people (including Victoria MP, Denise Savoie). We broke into small groups to discuss actions within St. John’s, between St. John’s and other churches, and advocacy in the larger society.
The first event in 2007 was an evening talk and slide show on February 12th on the “Inconvenient Truth” held in the First Metropolitan Church, jointly sponsored by St John’s. Donations at the door totalled over $700 and were to be split between both churches or spent on another joint initiative. The Care-for-Creation Committee had not been formed at that time, so was not involved in tracking where that money went.
A series of evening discussions were held in the lounge during Lent on spiritual, social justice and physical steps of caring for creation at St. John’s. One of the guest speakers, Martin Golder, an architect who has participated in renovations of other churches and is up to date on environmental innovations in architecture, inspected St. John’s and offered advice, the main being to start by insulating the ceiling of the Parish House.
Jamie Lawson brought to the attention of the property committee the possibility of building energy efficiency technologies into the church’s consultations on repairing or replacing the roofs on our buildings. Information was obtained from the church in New Westminster that added a solar panel.
Earth Day, Sunday April 22, was marked by an anonymous survey of the congregation on their attitudes to care for Creation initiatives. There was overwhelming support. One question was: “Do you agree that talk of climate change detracts from spirituality at St. John’s?” Out of 48 responses handed in, only 4 (8%) said they agreed and 14 (29%) were neutral. Interestingly, most of these same people agree or strongly agree that climate change is a problem. One person said they spent so much time on climate change activities during the week, they preferred to have some distance from it at church.
The C4C Committee began meeting at coffee hour on the first Sunday of each month. Malcolm Maclure chaired and took minutes.
Fran Ashwell made a lovely poster of Planet Earth that was displayed at the side entrance to the church. Bill Ashwell added monthly inspiring quotations. Elizabeth Hyde assembled a summary of bus times for attending the 10 am service. A map of showing the distribution of parishioner addresses was created to help with carpooling.
At the November service blessing the animals, a leaflet insert on the Abundance of Creation was handed out, plus a list of steps that can be taken to reduce carbon footprints. In December, plans were laid for a “Journeying Together” Sunday, but Advent proved too busy. This evolved into “Seed Sowing Sunday” in February 2008.
The C4C Committee was formed after Peggy Wilmot’s Environmental Justice Camp and the Lenten lecture series. We applaud Peggy and Reverend Munn for those initiatives.
