In the same way that many churches have signed up to being Fairtrade, your church may also have jumped on the eco bandwagon (in a positive kind of way).
Does your church have an environmental policy? If it does, it probably states you should use environmentally friendly building materials (wherever listed building status allows) when converting or constructing sections of your building.
Novacem (WIRED UK 07/11 p36) has come up with a rather ingenious cement that eats Carbon Dioxide so we can all build carbon neutral spaces in which to work, live and play.
Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, Founder of Novacem explains “It’s low molecular weight means that, over the process, every tonne of cement absorbs 100kg more CO2 than it emits”.
This material could go a long way to helping produce sustainable church buildings in the future but I got to thinking about the fact that ‘the church’ is really the people, and if that’s the case, how can we, the congregation, reduce our CO2 emissions?
If you or your church are interested in helping create a sustainable world for future generations then the eco-congregation website has loads of great resources. They also run an award system for meeting a bunch of criteria that, to be honest, we should all be working towards anyway if we take seriously our duty to God’s world.
As an aside, I love the story about Jesus telling people near Jerusalem that he is like the foundation stone – I’m guessing he’d be a carbon neutral foundation stone in our age.
