Eco Church journey for Ponsonby Baptist
Contributed by Penny Cliffin, Peter Jeffries, and Shanti Mathias.
Why did Ponsonby Baptist decide to become an Eco Church?
We’ve engaged in ideas of holistic justice for many years as a church and, while doing strategic planning with the congregation, we started to realise that environmental justice and creation care are a big part of this.
After attending The Justice Conference run by Tearfund in 2022 and hearing an Eco Church presentation by Kristel van Houte, we formed a Creation Care group to help champion and focus our creation care efforts as a church. Anyone who was interested was invited to be part of the creation care group. Initially we met once a month after church on a Sunday. The group agreed that the Eco Church framework and resources as an ideal vehicle to move us along a process to better focus on these issues. We became an Eco Church in April 2023.
What areas or practices have you focused on so far in your eco-journey?
As part of our Creation Care group meetings, we used the A Rocha Self-Assessment Worksheet to evaluate where we were at as a church and decide what areas we wanted to focus on. We found it a useful tool because it shows how much there is to consider and reminds you that even if your soft plastics recycling is perfect there’s so much more you can do as a group!
We shared reflections and research on topics such as sustainable agriculture, recycling and the sustainable development goals, and prayed together. Praying has been a cornerstone of our group. Now that we’re in a bit of a rhythm and there’s less to report on, our meeting frequency has decreased, but the ideas of Eco Church have been better integrated into our services, and we’re having creation care conversations as a wider church.
We have focussed on our waste management system (recycling), education about creation care, emphasising the creation care season in our church worship service calendar, and getting involved in advocacy for environmental issues. We sought to understand our emissions profile, and as we detail later, this led to changing our energy sources, improving bike parking facilities, and getting involved in local tree planting and restoration initiatives.
Recently you piloted Eco Church's 360 Carbon Calculator. Tell us about that process.
We used the 360 Carbon Calculator to identify our main areas of emission, and what we could do to reduce our carbon footprint.
The calculator considers six areas: energy, waste, water, food, travel and general expenditure (eg. admin, insurance, accounting). Most of the data was reasonably easy to gather, although some was a challenge. For instance, calculating how many biscuits were eaten at a typical morning tea was okay, but how many meat vs vegetarian dishes we had at a typical church lunch took a bit more work. Transport to church was hard to calculate because people don’t always use the same kind of transport, so, as with any emissions calculating, there was some educated guesswork! The multipliers for the general expenditure items were difficult for us to understand, so we asked for more detail to interrogate this in a bit more depth.
It took about a month to complete the carbon calculator process. Three of our creation care team were involved (including Jody, our minister), plus our treasurer. We divided up the sections to suit our church roles and knowledge and then discussed things we weren’t sure about.
We found the carbon calculator a good tool to reflect prayerfully about our sources of carbon emissions - while acknowledging that reducing emissions must accompany bigger picture change, like working together as a group to submit on council plans and speak up for climate action.
What were your findings from the Carbon Calculator?
Our emissions were calculated as 23 tonnes of carbon per annum. Our three biggest factors were: transport, energy, and general expenditure.
People get to church by bike and bus and walking, but most of all by car -- something difficult to change when our congregation is spread out across the city!
We were surprised by the general expenditure calculation. It did make us think about whether we should review the companies we use for accounting and insurance etc. and ask them about their carbon footprint, to reduce the carbon emissions made from this aspect of our activities.
How has the church responded to the results from the Carbon Calculator?
We presented the results of the Carbon Calculator in a church service and prepared and hung climate issue posters in the hall. The posters attracted a lot of interest, and we had many questions about the Carbon Calculator results.
One thing we’ve noticed is that talking about our carbon emissions and reporting back on planting days has encouraged more conversations about caring for, and appreciation for, creation. For instance, a family shared some photos from a trip to the Tiritiri Matangi sanctuary island and another congregant has shown everyone videos of his amazing encounter with a kiwi in the wild on Rakiura (Stewart Island). It’s hard to track the impact of this but we’re encouraged that, as a church, we have a space to talk about our connection to God in creation.
Our church is onboard with making changes to reduce our carbon footprint, supporting funding allocations and making donations towards the projects suggested. Yet some are afraid of change, and we’re slowly walking through that.
What actions will your church take in response to the results?
We’ve got people involved in small but significant energy changes, like replacing gas heaters with more efficient electric ones. We put in new bike parking facilities, to hopefully encourage those within biking distance to give it a go!
In order to offset the emissions we hadn’t yet reduced, we promoted and attended A Rocha planting days and did planting around our church after a service. Last year (2023) we planted 233 plants, to make sure we were carbon neutral!
Members of our Creation Care group enjoyed connecting with other Eco Church members at A Rocha planting days at Oakley Creek, Matuku Link, and Unsworth Reserve. The planting around our church was very well received and supported. Individuals pledged cash for purchasing the plants and bark, and almost everyone came out after the service to help - some of the oldies, families with children and the youth group all got stuck in alongside each other. Climate action and especially emissions calculators can feel quite abstract, so the collective activity of having dirt on our fingers and new leaves growing outside our church building is a reminder that progress is slow but progress is progress. As an urban church it’s so easy to feel separated from the whenua and the taiao so it’s wonderful to let church happen outside of our four walls.
What’s next for Ponsonby’s journey with creation care?
We are deeply motivated by the need for care of our environment. When we see unprecedented heatwaves, species under threat, and government legislation which seems to prioritise profit over nature, it’s easy to feel helpless and hopeless. Yet we hold onto the hope that we have in God, the sustainer of all precious life on earth. Advocacy is important for us. We’ve done some submissions on council plans and attended climate protests as a church. We’d like to keep considering how we can join and support collective action for the earth.
In response to the carbon calculator results, there are some congregation members who are interested in alternative forms of transport, so we need to figure out how to support them. And we’ll start some conversations about dairy and meat consumption, which is a significant contributor to our carbon footprint and therefore global warming.
All this takes time and not everything can happen at once, but the fact that there is so much to do is a good motivator to keep going.
What advice would you give to other churches considering calculating their emissions?
We found that it took a group of people to find and enter all the information required for the carbon calculator. We recommend getting a team together that includes people with a good understanding of how the church operates, including the finance reports for church spending. Then you can allocate sections of the calculator to different people, and the task does not seem so big! Collaborate on difficult sections and seek extra help. Persevere because the results are really insightful, even if some sections are approximated.
We surveyed the congregation to gather the transport and food information.
We are very happy to talk with and help other churches interested in using the 360 Carbon Calculator, as are any A Rocha staff.
Ponsonby Baptist Church was one of the churches featured in this TVNZ 1News segment on Eco Church: