From grassroots “green building” projects to international conferences, Episcopalians are seeking ways to integrate their faith with care for the environment. Interest is growing, as are efforts to link members and organizations within the environmental movement with each other and with other faith groups, leaders say.

“There’s definitely a growing interest,” says the Rev. Fletcher Harper, convener of the Episcopal Ecological Network (EpEN), adding, “It’s still very much a movement in its infancy.” The movement is more than environmental activism.

“There’s a theological component as well as an environmental,” says Joyce Wilding, Province IV environmental ministry leader. “It’s not the Sierra Club of the Episcopal Church. It is grounded and rooted in our deep Episcopal tradition.” That’s been true since the beginning, says the Rev. Franklin “Skip” Vilas, founder of EpEN and Partners for Environmental Quality (now GreenFaith) in New Jersey.
“Our commitment does not come out of what you could call traditional environmentalism. It really comes out of a new look at the earth as a gift from God,” he says.

“All of our commitments came out of a spiritual commitment, and we made it very clear to everybody -- both in the churches and also in the environmental community -- that our position would always be in a centrist position. That is, we would try to confer with both the business community as well as the environmental community, because they were all in our congregations.”

The Episcopal Science, Technology and Faith Committee of Executive Council recently released “A Catechism of Creation: An Episcopal Understanding.” Using a question-and-answer format, the catechism addresses the theology of creation, creation and science, and caring for creation.

“To my knowledge, the Episcopal Church is the first church to have anything this comprehensive,” says Wilding, EpEn liaison to the committee. The catechism aimed to address questions such as whether one can be Christian while believing in evolution and how Christians can address current ecological crises, she says.

Describing the catechism as a first step, Wilding predicts it will be used for study groups, in colleges and in ecumenical and perhaps multifaith work. “In order to address the ecological crisis of the earth,” she adds, “we need to have more multifaith dialogue.”

Interfaith efforts

The Episcopal Church participates in multifaith environmental efforts locally, nationally and internationally. A key figure during the 1980s was the Rev. James Morton, former dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, who organized conferences in England and Moscow and whose work led to the formation of the National Religious Partnership on the Environment, Vilas notes.

Vilas co-chairs an interfaith advisory committee to the United Nations that originally formed to prepare for a religious presence at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The Episcopal environmental movement coalesced around that time as well, he says.

In New Jersey, he says, “GreenFaith was really the first statewide interfaith organization on the environment that sought to get a common commitment for the faiths without in any way compromising their own traditions.”GreenFaith focuses on three core values: spirit, stewardship and justice in relationship to the environment, explains Harper, current director.

The first recognizes that “many, many people have very powerful experiences of God in the natural world, and that that’s an important aspect of people’s spiritual lives that doesn’t get engaged actively by most congregations,” he says. “We help people see the connection between those experiences and their own traditions.”

GreenFaith is piloting a religious environmental education program called Splendor. “The purpose of that is really to give people an introduction to how to connect religious faith and practice ... in relationship with the environment.”

Stewardship focuses on our responsibility to care for the gift of God’s creation, Harper says. GreenFaith encourages congregations to conserve water and energy, for example. Episcopal churches in Teaneck, Chester and Wantage, N.J., have installed solar panels. The idea is to “model a much more positive, earth-healing, earth-restoring ethic of consumption.”

In the area of justice, GreenFaith conducts environmental health and justice tours of blighted environmental areas, then helps the communities advocate for better environmental protection. “It’s very well-documented that everybody suffers from environmental degradation, but those who suffer worse disproportionately are usually the poor, the elderly and children,” Harper says.

Focus on energy

GreenFaith is the New Jersey affiliate of the Regeneration Project, an interfaith program to provide a religious response to global warming. Based at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, the program started with Episcopal Power and Light and grew to a national organization with interfaith power and light affiliates in 15 states.

Interest is growing in the Episcopal church and beyond, say organizers. “I think that more and more congregations and parish priests are understanding that we can’t sit on the sidelines and watch creation be destroyed,” says the Rev. Sally Bingham, program co-founder and cathedral environmental minister.

About 800 congregations nationwide participate in various energy-related activities, says program manager Bill Bradlee. Some buy or promote renewable energy. Some replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs, which last longer and use less energy. Michigan’s affiliate offers discounts on the bulbs and other energy-efficient appliances.

Some congregations conduct energy audits, then renovate to conserve energy. After conducting an audit, All Saints Episcopal Church, Brookline, Mass., replaced its boiler and installed programmable thermostats. The church saved $17,000 a year in annual energy costs, 14 percent of which it used to buy renewable energy, Bradlee says.

Bingham recently returned from Australia, where she gave a presentation on the Episcopal Church’s work on climate change at the inaugural meeting of the Anglican Environmental Network. “We have completed an Anglican Communion climate-change statement,” Bingham says. “It calls the entire Anglican Communion to recognize that climate is changing and that human behavior is part of the problem and that we need to put our faith into action and change our ways.”

The statement includes a theological section, outlines the problem with examples from Anglican provinces and proposes ways Anglicans can respond, says Martha Gardner, ECUSA’s official delegate to the meeting and environmental ministries consultant for the Episcopal Church.

Networks and resources

Gardner works out of the church center’s Peace and Justice Ministries Office. She networks with other organizations -- including the National Council of Churches -- and works to provide information about environmental ministries and recruit new people to the church environmental movement.

EpEN also is working hard to identify and link people concerned about environmental issues and to provide basic resources for getting started, Harper says. “The network ... is really trying to become a place where people can communicate about these issues, identify who’s doing what and where and find out where they can get the type of resources that interest them.”

Environmental programs occur at all levels of the church. In parishes, Gardner says, she sees efforts from not using pesticides on church grounds to performing energy audits to creating nature paths to holding animal-blessing liturgies.

In Port Newark, N.J., the Seaman’s Church Institute is renovating its International Seafarers’ Center to meet “green building” standards. That includes encasing the building in an updated thermal and glass covering and replacing the heating and air conditioning plant, says Vilas, trustees board member. The building also is using recycled building materials and will recycle rainwater, according to SCI.

In Province IV, Wilding received a grant to launch a science and religion local society initiative at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. The initiative “has a focus on what we call reflection, education and action,” she says. It hosts monthly speakers and an annual conference.

Other programs within the province have included:

• restoring a neglected wetland in a predominantly low-income African-American community in southeast Raleigh, N.C.;
• creating an Earth Lab and Eco House at the Diocese of Mississippi’s conference, retreat and camp center;
• removing invasive honeysuckle vines that kill indigenous plants and using them to create bases for recyclable Advent wreaths at Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, Tenn.
• holding a Creation Celebration focusing on the Gift of Water that included a boat trip to view wildlife in Sarasota Bay in Florida.

Taking environmental action can be as simple as driving less, not overfertilizing a lawn or improving home insulation, Wilding notes. “You don’t have to wait for a law.” Harper says he believes the religious community is still in the early stages of learning how to address environmental issues as people of faith. But he also believes the process will continue.

“I think the amount of interest will continue to grow, if for no other reason than the secular environmental community ... has become increasingly interested in developing partnerships with the religious community because they realize it’s a constituency that is an important one in this country,” Harper says. The NCC and Sierra Club, for example, cooperated on a campaign on global warming.

“[GreenFaith] got approached last week by the Sierra Club in New Jersey,” he says, “interested in finding an urban environmental initiative that whey could take on together.”