Green your Church

 Starting and Sustaining an Earth Care Team at Your Church 

Do you want your church to be better at caring for God's creation? PEC has been listening to your needs and prepared a Guide to Starting a Church Earth Care Team. Whether you are interested in starting an earth care team for your church or re-energizing an existing team, this guide is for you. Starting an earth care team at your church is just the beginning. Keeping it going is the real challenge. The Guide has five goals to help you start an Earth Care Team and sustain it at your church:

• Form a Congregational Earth Care Team. This is actually not as big as it sounds. It is a pre-meeting step - before your first Earth Care Team meeting - for a few people to decide on what the team’s purpose should be and to recruit others.  
• Meet as a Congregational Earth Care Team. In your first meeting, describe your purpose, develop a mission statement, set a goal(s), and decide on a name to help you communicate with others and recruit them to join your team.
• Schedule Activities and Events. When deciding on an activity or event, be sure to identify and delegate tasks so that one person isn’t responsible for doing everything. Not only does this lessen the load but it involves members so there is more support for what you are doing.
• Evaluate your efforts. Periodically review your successes and challenges to identify your strengths and weaknesses and make plans to do better.
• Publicize your accomplishments. Use church, presbytery and local communication channels to report on what your team has done so others will understand what your team does and may be motivated to join. 

Each of the goals comes with at least six suggested activities to help earth care teams come up with their own ideas. Most of them can easily be done virtually during a pandemic. Also included in the guide is a short list of resources that provide additional information. 

Go to the PEC Church Earth Care Teams webpage to download the Guide. You can also view the video of PEC’s Greening Your Church webinar and PowerPoint presentation. Two churches, one large and one small, that presented on the webinar provided handouts that are available on the Church Earth Care Teams webpage. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please email pec@presbyearthcare.org.