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.
