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Rubbish rite pulls a crowd
Julia McGuinness looks at three more on the shortlist of the Church Times Green Church Awards
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ST PETER’S, BEXHILL IF YOU are late-night shopping in Bexhill on Friday 23 November, you may see a Christian gathering making its way from shop to shop as part of an act of worship. “Shopping and Pilgrimage” is the next in a series of quarterly alternative-worship services created at St Peter’s in Bexhill, East Sussex, and known as The Hill. The Revd Daniel Smith, Assistant Curate at St Peter’s, and his team developed The Hill to connect with the younger generation, who were under-represented in the church. The first service, held in St Peter’s in March, looked at the use of resources, under the heading “Rubbish”, and 48 people attended. The Hill’s alternative-worship format has included art installations, videos, PowerPoint presentations, guided meditations, new liturgies, music, and practical challenges. Every service is a one-off, and so follows intensive planning by the six-strong core team, and has input from the youth-fellowship group. Creative advertising is also part of it. Mr Smith says: “For the first service, we cut up bits of old newspapers, wrote our website address, the service date and time on them, and stuck them up in stations, cafés, and colleges.” The Hill has attracted several former non-church attenders: “Those who’ve come have been really affected. One woman had a two-hour phone call with one of the team after the first service.” The team has also been surprised at how the older, more traditional worshippers in St Peter’s have engaged with The Hill. Mr Smith observed: “Some of our more ardent green campaigners within the church are not the young but the old.” www.thehill.ccST PETER'S SPIXWORTH Green to the roots |
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IT WAS no scandal that put the Rector of Spixworth on page 19 of The Sun. The Revd Andrew Beane won tabloid attention for dyeing his hair green to promote his church’s Creation Celebration weekend.
“I’m not usually described as wacky,” confessed Mr Beane, “but I promised our local schoolchildren that if enough of them came along, I’d spray my hair.”
It did the trick. St Peter’s Creation Celebration, held over this year’s early May Bank Holiday weekend, attracted 500 visitors — ten times the Norfolk village church’s average Sunday congregation.
Alongside the traditional flower festival, a weekend programme of displays and activities culminated in a creation service and a Festival Songs of Praise. A tent with interactive displays highlighted issues such as recycling and energy-saving, and there was a range of green activities for children: a university team calculating people’s carbon footprints on a laptop; planting zones; pond-dipping and mini-beast hunting; a puppet workshop with recycled materials; and making mini-gardens with sheets of recycled paper.
Ancient woodland around the church became the setting for a children’s nature trail, guided tours, and a bluebell-wood walk.
Mr Beane found people keen to offer support: “The County Council donated a compost bin as a raffle prize, and a representative from the Energy Saving Trust gave advice and free energy-saving light bulbs.”
Since the weekend, the church has set up its own monthly conservation group, and the Rector continues to spread the green message: “I committed myself to giving up my car for a week. It was exhausting, biking around the villages and to and from the crem., but it’s opened up lots of opportunities for conversations with people out and about.”
www.spixworthchurch.org.uk
ST ANDREW’S , FULHAM Vegetable traders A WEEK’s supply of the recommended “five-a-day” portions of fruit and vegetables bought at St Andrew’s, Fulham, in London, costs parish customers a fiver. The church-based fruit’n’veg co-operative runs in partnership with the NDC (New Deal for Communities) and the Rural Regeneration Unit. It makes local, fresh produce accessible to those in the community who might not otherwise get it. Every Tuesday morning, the nearby market delivers about £80-£90-worth of fruit and vegetables. Volunteers split this up into bags, each containing about 20 assorted pieces of fruit, vegetables, or salad. The bags cost £2.50 each. The Revd Martin Eastwood, the Priest-in-Charge, started the project. Sorting the produce is the hard work, he says: “We make up 40 bags for about 25 regular customers. As volunteers, we do it all ourselves for no profit. But if the scheme doubled in size, we’d have to start employing someone to help.” Apart from encouraging healthy eating, reducing food miles, and cutting down on unnecessary packaging, the scheme has fostered links between church and community. Half those ordering food, the market traders, and some volunteers are not churchgoers. The parish contains three large, sometimes troubled estates as well as smaller pockets of affluence, and the span of customers for the scheme ranges from those struggling financially to “yummy mummies”. The church now holds a regular coffee morning for people who come to collect their bags. This has provided a good opportunity for Fulham’s NDC-funded community police team to come alongside locals and hear their concerns. The co-operative has now run successfully for a year. “We’ve yet to discover its downside,” says Mr Eastwood. www.standrewsfulham.com |
