Environment Committee
Searching for a ministry?
Select the Ministry Leader Directory from the Quicklinks menu at the top right of any page on our website, and you’ll get an alphabetical listing of all the ministry groups at St. C’s.
The Environment Committee works to provide opportunities for caring for God’s holy creation: to preserve, protect, restore, enjoy and heal the planet; to live ecologically, sanely and simply, both as individuals and as a church; and to gain awareness of global and local environmental issues.
In contrast to many traditional outreach groups, the Environment Committee’s target population is primarily the parish of St. Columba’s itself, whose needs we meet through Adult Forum speakers, an electronic newsletter and a variety of activities that enable parishioners to learn about and take part in the preservation of God’s creation. At times, our committee’s activities focus specifically on individuals or neighborhoods outside our parish, as when we joined with Rebuilding Together to install solar panels on a home on Kansas Avenue NW, or when we cleaned up Soapstone Creek, a tributary of Rock Creek east of Connecticut Avenue. The committee’s offer of alternative gifts to parishioners at Advent, which are opportunities to fund environmental projects in developing countries, extends our committee’s target population to developing countries, whose natural environments are often degraded and undergoing increasing stress from climate change and other environmental threats.
Caring for God’s creation is a biblical injunction, finding expression, for instance, in God’s request to Adam and Eve that they tend the Garden of Eden, and in Noah’s preservation of the animals during the flood. In the face of unprecedented global environmental decline, ranging from climate change to land degradation to biodiversity loss to increasing scarcity of water, churches have in recent years taken a leading role in addressing such problems. The paralysis and inaction of governments worldwide has added to the importance of the faith community’s leadership on environmental issues.
St. Columba’s is uniquely well situated in the Nation’s Capital, with leading government officials, journalists and environmental non-profit leaders among its congregation, to undertake environmental conservation. Not only does such conservation serve a symbolic and educational role for the parish and for its surrounding community, but St. Columba’s patron saint, according to legend, was a lover of nature and animals, whose example we should follow.
Last but not least, as a church in a developed country with a fairly affluent congregation, it is incumbent on St. Columba’s to do all it can to lighten its environmental footprint, since populations in poorer countries stand to suffer the most from climate change and other threats that historically have originated in the industrialized world. For example, the greenhouse gas emissions of Washington alone exceed those of most developing and middle-income nations. In this context, caring for God’s creation has a moral dimension: “Love thy neighbor.”
Ten to 15 parishioners participate as a core group in the Environment Committee on an ongoing basis throughout the year, while more than 300 other parishioners follow the Environment Committee’s activities via an electronic newsletter. The core group of volunteers helps create and execute conservation activities, including stream cleanup and solar panel installation. Several members contribute their journalistic and environmental science training by writing an electronic newsletter for the parish and by teaching Sunday School on environmental themes. Other parishioners who are engineers and renewable energy entrepreneurs have helped install solar panels on a Rebuilding Together home, while retired Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) professionals help raise funds for environmental causes worldwide. Another retired EPA professional is exploring an energy audit for the parish, while a parishioner who is a professional energy auditor took part in an examination of St. C’s physical plant in the spring, delivering a preliminary oral report on the energy efficiency of the church.
Click the following link for more information:
Back to Local Service and Outreach
Photo: Courtesy of Jeanne McCann
