Update on Mayflower's Carbon Neutral Work

It's Christmas Day and about time I gave an update on what's been going on with Mayflower UCC's goal to become carbon neutral.  This month Mayflower has been undergoing physical building updates that will reduce the church building's carbon footprint by up to 35% by the end of January!  The updates include lighting motion sensors, a new controls system for our heating and cooling, ventilation upgrades, a new rooftop unit, the sealing of leaks in the building envelop, and other more minor updates.  The light motion sensors are by far the most visible part of this phase of our goal to become carbon neutral, but the sealing of the building envelop has also created noticeable thermal comfort throughout the building as well as a reduction in energy use!  The day after we had a blower door test completed, which helps identify air leaks in the building, and the leaks sealed we could already tell the building was warmer and needed to turn down the heat!

In the works are a system of 200 solar panels on the church roof and the purchase of renewable energy or carbon offsets to make up for the portion of energy we are not able to reduce or produce ourselves. By 2014 Mayflower will have reduced it's carbon footprint by up to 60%!

There are a number of details behind this work, but in general here are the steps we have take so far:
1) Have an energy audit of the church building completed
2) Create a plan to reach carbon neutral by 2030 with the help of a professional energy systems organization
3) Connect with resources around the Twin Cities and within our own congregation which can help us reach our goal (including a successful Capital Appeal)
4) Get bids for construction work, sign contracts, and share the good news of our energy reduction progress!

If you are interested in going carbon neutral at church, home, or work, I encourage you to begin with a full-scale energy audit which includes a blower door test and detailed information on what you can do to reduce your energy usage and produce your own renewable energy or get tapped into renewable energy resources.

5 Carbon Neutral Activities for the Christmas Season

1) Bike in the snow.. bikes are the modern day sleigh ride.

(Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson)

2)  Make no-bake cookies... your taste buds will thank you! Your waist may not.

3) Play a Christmas Medley Bell Solo... no problem, right?

 (Konrad Deeg)

4) Knit a Prayer Shawl... it is the gift that keeps giving.

5) Go sledding... and embrace your inner child.

Our church buildings are part of the problem...

Last weekend the Minnesota Conference of the United Church of Christ voted to adopt the Resolution for Carbon Neutral Church Buildings. This resolution calls for congregations within the Minnesota Conferences to put on their carbon neutral glasses whenever doing building maintenance or renovation in their churches or new construction of church buildings. There are many reasons why churches, businesses, and homes should go carbon neutral. The simplest reason being because the building sector consumes almost 50% of all energy produced in the U.S. and over 75% of all electricity produced. Those facts alone make the building sector the number one priority if we want to tackle the problem of climate change... and those are just two of the many facts.

However, beyond the scientific facts, going carbon neutral is a matter of faith. As people of the Christian faith, we believe that it was with great wisdom that God created the earth and called it very good! And that when God looked at that very good creation and God looked at humanity, God said to humanity, "you see this very good creation? Till and care for it." And we entered into a covenant with God and God's creation. The prophet Isaiah goes on to tells us that broken covenant with God will look like "an earth [that] lies polluted under its inhabitants" (Isa 11:6-9). Well, I hate to say it, but the earth is looking pretty polluted beneath us. It's time for churches to claim our part in that, help clean things up, and renew our covenant with God by decreasing the dirty carbon footprint our homes, business, AND church buildings are leaving on creation.

Hey World! Let's All GO GREEN!

Things have been busy at Mayflower!  At the end of January, Mayflower's Earthwise Action Core Team, a group of dedicated Mayflower members who are passionate about helping Mayflower church become a more green church, and the architecture firm doing an energy audit for Mayflower hosted a congregational forum to hear what was important to Mayflower members.  Mayflower is a church that values being a catalyst for justice (in fact, it's part of their mission statement), so it wasn't too much of a surprise when members starting saying that it was important for the green work to be VISIBLE!  If there were mountains to shout from in Minneapolis, I think they would be trying to figure out a way to shout from the top of one "Hey World!  Let's All Go Green!"  There aren't any significant mountains that I know of, so instead what came out of the forum was the clear message that whatever Mayflower does, it has to be something that can be seen, something other churches can do too, and it has to be made into a movement. 

Why?  Because what we do today, affects our children, our children's children, and our children's children's children, and so on.  It affects God's creation for many generations and it is past time to show the whole world that Christian's are more than just talk when it comes to loving God and our neighbor (which includes the neighboring generations which will follow us)!

Love God. Love Creation. Love Enough to Make Change.

Six months ago I left my family, friends, and loved ones and moved halfway across the country to begin my first call at Mayflower UCC in Minnesota.  Why?  Because the position of being a Lilly Resident Pastor was too good to pass up, because I was fresh out of seminary and needed a job, because I wanted to experience a new part of the country?  Yes and no.  Those all played into my decision, but ultimately I was drawn to Mayflower UCC because they were taking environmental stewardship seriously.  All of the practical reasons for accepting the call to Mayflower paled next to the fact that they were a congregation that really saw that loving God means you have to love God’s creation too.

In the hands of a Master Creator we were molded… and so was the rest of creation.  As a 20-something, I’m over the arrogant, human-centric religion that has dominated Christianity’s past.  I’m also over the soft tree-hugging approach to God’s creation that only talks about loving the whole world, but doesn’t put that love in action.  The truth is God’s creation is in trouble.  We’ve known it for decades.  If we love God, why are there so few churches, synagogues, mosques, meeting houses, temples, congregations doing anything about it?

Well, over the next year and a half I’ll be sharing the story of one church that is doing something about it.  I don’t know how the story will unfold, but I’ll share it nonetheless with the prayer that other churches, synagogues, mosques, meeting houses, temples, and/or congregations will join us on this journey to becoming carbon neutral.