Choose Life!
Deut. 30.19-20 This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Choose Life is a new congregational environmental project within our Earth be Glad programme. Sometimes environmentalists make us compare our lifestyles to each other, make us feel guilty, and notice one another's hypocrisy: an ecology of judgement. This initiative, in keeping with the ethos of 'earth be glad', isn't like that. It is about acting prophetically together as a Christian community to 'choose life': an ecology of grace.
Choose Life involves monitoring and improving the environmental impact of our communal life, starting with our buildings. We will measure the energy use of our church building, and the average use per person in all our own houses, as a congregation. Members enter their meter readings either through a web interface (how to use the web interface) or using a paper form.
By measuring the average, every individual act of insulating a window, filling the kettle carefully, ensuring the heating is off when we go out, or even getting a solar panel and generating your own, will contribute to reducing it. It doesn't matter if, individually, you use more or less than the average for whatever reason.
Choose Life is a way of moving from a green tip here and a pledge there, to a much more informed and sustained environmental engagement. It will get even more interesting after a year, because clearly the amount of energy we use fluctuates with the seasons. But we hope that before St John's is 200 years old, in 2018, we will have become a truly sustainable community, taking account of our travel and food and purchases and waste as well - to choose life for our children and grandchildren so that they can worship here for the next two hundred years.
Earth be Glad >> Choose Life