Green Health
St Peter’s, Quarrendon, Aylesbury (StPA Community Garden)
ST PETER’s is in a densely urban and fairly deprived part of Aylesbury, and, as such, its community garden is a green oasis. Set up in 2019, the garden focuses on healthy eating and sustainable food-growing, led by a long-time community-development practitioner, Dave Furze.
Mr Furze knew that simply telling people how to eat more nutritiously was second-best to giving them the chance to grow and then cook their own fresh fruit and vegetables. “The thing that I’m about is well-being. It’s shalom which runs as a thread right through scripture,” he said. “That’s not just peace, but wholeness — right relationships, including with the world.”
Because gardening is by definition a long-term enterprise, it has helped to build relationships with the neighbourhood around St Peter’s, whose congregation had previously dwindled to a handful. The local GP surgery prescribes time in the community garden, and the young-offenders probation service regularly brings young adults to learn horticultural skills as they reintegrate into society.
The garden promotes gentle exercise for both bodies and minds, especially among those with dementia and disabilities.
On top of inspiring locals to grow their own healthy, organic food at home, the garden promotes recycling of food waste, challenging everyone to reconnect more broadly with creation care.
“It’s a means of mission and of demonstrating love,” Mr Furze explained. “If you can create these neutral crossing-places, you can make a difference, earn trust, let people see what is different in your life, and help at times of crisis.”
St Paul’s, Camden, north London (St Paul’s Woodland Garden)
ST PAUL’s, in Camden, has a thickly wooded garden, creating a secluded woodland space amid the hubbub of the busy city beyond.
Since 2019, the church, together with local partners, has built up a garden project which enables all ages, from children to the elderly, to come each week to grow, prune, plant, water, and harvest.
Besides the gardening, there is bird-watching, wildlife surveys, cooking, and storytelling workshops, with a special focus on serving both people with mental-health difficulties and those who are socially isolated. Occupational therapists and psychotherapists regularly bring patients into the woodland garden as therapy, getting hands into soil and patiently watching their handiwork grow and flourish.
A community chaplain at St Paul’s, Judy Powell, said that the vision was to welcome all of Camden inside the church’s green oasis, so that its people could flourish amid God’s natural environment. “Growing things in the community garden is almost a metaphor for what we’re trying to do with the insides of people’s lives as well.”
And the midweek eucharist often overflows into the garden outside.
Among this busy activity, the number of wildlife species recorded has surged 150 per cent, thanks to careful planting of more native trees, and bird- and insect-friendly perennials. Bug hotels, compost heaps, and a wild grassland area complete the biodiversity.
Ben Ledden, from the charity Green City Projects, who oversees the garden, said: “We try and teach ourselves about how to broaden biodiversity and be sensitive to the space — but it’s not just the garden, it’s the people. We always say: ‘It wouldn’t be a community garden without all of you.’”
St Mary the Virgin, Lewisham, south London (St Mary’s Therapeutic Garden)
ST MARY’s, in Lewisham, sits next door to a hospital mental-health unit. Patients regularly walk through the churchyard, so it was a natural next step to create a therapeutic garden — a safe and beautiful green space in which patients can reflect and revive.
Now, patients are given social prescriptions to join the church’s weekly gardening club, working in the raised beds to plant and weed, as well as general tidying. Each session ends with a short time of quiet, and patients can add a ribbon to the prayer tree.
Over time, the garden has developed and expanded, and now includes perennial flowerbeds, fruit trees, wildflower meadows, a pond, and beehives. Picnic tables and history trails encourage Lewisham locals — many of whom live in flats without outside space — to enjoy the sanctuary of green in the middle of the city.
Those attending St Mary the Virgin’s weekly gardening club, in Lewisham, south London, have the opportunity to add a ribbon to the prayer tree at the end of each gardening session, as a way of handing over their cares to God
One member of the congregation at St Mary’s, Jane Boggan, recalls how the churchyard used to be a neglected and “horrible place”, crammed with street-drinkers, open drug use, and anti-social behaviour. With help from the council and some grant funding, professional gardeners came to transform the churchyard. “They just designed this absolutely beautiful garden, which is still stunning today,” she said.
The garden “oozes” spirituality and peace, she says, enabling meaningful social connection for the often isolated and vulnerable mental-health patients as they garden, amid birdsong and river noises.
Marion Watson, who leads the meditations for each gardening session, said that she seeks to focus on God’s good creation, and how beneficial it is to everyone’s well-being. “We have gratitude for each other and for our fellowship. Several of these people have started coming to the church, and it’s lovely to see them.”
Training and Education
Shinfield St Mary’s C of E Junior School, Berkshire
“TEACHING children about the food they eat takes on a whole new meaning when they grow it themselves.” So says the team at Shinfield St Mary’s C of E Junior School.
Over recent years, they have transformed the five acres of land in the school into a mini-farm. It features dozens of raised beds, greenhouses, a chicken coop, an artificial wildlife stream, and an aquaponics bio-dome where the pupils can farm fish and vegetables together.
The children are taught environmentally friendly no-digging gardening methods, and plant trees and willow to use as natural materials in the farm. All the food grown is also donated to local foodbanks.
Two eco deputies carry out maintenance and tree care in the community tree nursery at Shinfield St Mary’s C of E Junior School, Berkshire
The school was already at net zero emissions. Thanks to its extensive tree-planting (the current total now exceeds 5000) and gardening project, it is now a carbon sink, improving the environment and boosting wildlife and biodiversity.
The gardening and farming has also had positive knock-on effects for the school: the pupils are eating more healthily, have better attention in class, and enjoy higher academic performance.
Most importantly, the staff at St Mary’s say that they are inspiring the children to embark on a lifetime of living lightly on the earth, and treasuring God’s creation. “We are equipping the younger generation to be making a difference at home, and into the future, by giving them the tools and education to be sustainable citizens.”
Worcester Cathedral
WORCESTER CATHEDRAL declared a climate emergency in 2021, and out of this grew their “Living Gently on The Earth” programme.
Funded by a lottery grant, the project has focused on training and educating Worcestershire in care of creation, carbon literacy, climate justice, and environmentally friendly diets, among other things. A highlight was hosting an eco hustings at the cathedral, featuring all the main parliamentary candidates, before this year’s General Election. The cathedral has qualified for A Rocha’s Silver Eco-Church award.
One of the cathedral’s lay canons, Staffan Engström, said that the focus was on equipping people to pursue their particular environmental passion. “There are those who want to come to meetings, and there are those prepared to actually do some stuff, and we encourage that germ, that seed to grow.”
Workshops and fairs at the cathedral have raised awareness of greener and healthier diets, appreciation of the natural world, and the theology and science behind why everyone must act on the climate crisis.
“It’s not a one-answer-fits-all,” Mr Engström said. “Some are very interested in carbon footprints; another group want to connect with the spirituality of it all; and a third is interested in peregrine falcons and caring for hedgehogs.”
The key to all the action is using the cathedral’s profile locally to force environmental concerns up everyone’s agenda, from politicians to tourists.
The next phase, Mr Engström said, would be to cement the idea of eco-spirituality as core to Christian faith, not just an optional extra; a piece of theological work that had to begin with the Chapter and spread out from there.
St Albans Board of Education
PROMPTED by the UK-hosted COP26 climate conference and the Church of England’s own net zero target of 2030 (set by the General Synod in 2020), the Diocesan Board of Education in St Albans diocese launched Heart for the Earth resources.
Heart for the Earth is a two-year project encouraging the 137 church schools and 26,000 pupils in St Albans to become carbon neutral. It aims to engage “heads, hearts, and hands” on a journey towards care for creation.
The initiative project comprises resources for collective worship — which explore the biblical and theological grounding for environmentalism — plus support for developing an eco-curriculum and eco-charter for schools to pursue net zero emissions themselves.
The Heart for the Earth team said that they recognised that, where some saw exciting opportunities to transform our impact on the planet, others were gripped with hopelessness and climate anxiety. “We must find ways to support and sustain each other through journeys of eco-anxiety, and have decided to include positive climate stories and the view that, whoever we are, in whatever circumstance, we can each play a valued part in treasuring the earth.”
The project has brought together staff from various diocesan teams, so that experts in land and buildings can collaborate with those working on religious education and spiritual development. Partnerships have been formed with external groups, including Anglian Water and the RSPB, to try to root the theological learning in practical, everyday acts that every school and pupil can take.
“Heart for the Earth will lay the foundation for future innovative work within the schools team and the Diocesan Board of Finance, but, most importantly, it has the capacity to influence a generation of children and young people,” the team said.
Green Champion
Joanna Laynesmith and Rosemary Croft
BESIDES co-leading the eco group at St John’s, Reading, Joanna Laynesmith and Rosemary Croft have many other strings to their bows — including working with the advocacy group Global Justice Now and running Reading Area Green Christians.
Ms Croft became concerned about climate justice when she was younger and living in Bangladesh, which has seen devastating flooding.
Ms Laynesmith grew up in the English countryside. As a student, she began going to church, and began to see caring for creation as a social-justice issue, connecting her passion for the environment with Jesus’s calls to love your neighbour.
Rosemary Croft
The pair have led St John’s to a Gold Eco-Church award. In addition, they have raised awareness of environmental concerns through a quarterly magazine (which has included interviews with Sir David Attenborough, councillors, and parliamentary candidates on climate perspectives). They have also led Lent prayer vigils outside Parliament, helped to develop a wildflower and vegetable garden at St John’s, and helped to promote carbon reduction among the congregation.
Ms Laynesmith said that, when she began this journey, there remained a residue of climate-change denial, but she is heartened today at how united the congregation and wider community are today.
Through sermons, she tried to tie together “the incarnation being God loving the whole created world, and becoming part of it — which is what makes Christianity unique as a faith, and is the driving force for why we should appreciate the entire world”.
Ms Croft said that there remained much to do. “Far too many Christians accept the cause of climate justice but then continue with holidays to California, putting up pictures of steak dinners on the church Facebook page.
“We can’t do everything, and God doesn’t call us to do everything, but he does call us to do little things. And if everybody did little things, that would make a big change.”
Jean Carletta
JEAN CARLETTA had been working as an academic researcher, focusing on how people use technology. But, she says, “I got bored — there was no relation to the real world.” So she took a year off and began trying to think how to apply her technical skills to real-world problems faced by churches in Edinburgh, where she lived.
One particular Episcopal church was struggling with heating. It had huge gas bills, and yet it remained “absolutely freezing” on a Sunday morning — so cold, in fact, that the nursery in the building had to close regularly, as the temperature dipped below the minimum allowed by law.
Her journey of wrestling with ancient boilers and dubious thermostats to fix the church’s heating in time gave birth to the HeatHack programme.
Jean Carletta
HeatHack leads a church congregation through a step-by-step project to assess their energy usage and needs, and begin the transformation to a net-zero future. It supplies lay people with just enough technical knowledge to have informed conversations with professionals and funders, and is structured around interactive small-group sessions designed to draw out the church’s needs, and how decisions can be made through games and problem-solving.
“That’s the unique thing — to put those two together. So, it looks like games, but actually you end up with a plan of a sort that the main Scottish retrofit funder recognises,” Dr Carletta explained.
Even before producing long-term plans for major retrofitting, many churches benefit immediately by realising that simple tweaks to their heating controls can produce large savings, in both money and emissions.
“I rejoice when I find a church that has heating controls fit for purpose, but it doesn’t happen often,” Dr Carletta said.
While she is obviously motivated by care for the environment, at heart she said that she is a people person. “Churches provide so many valuable services to their local communities — I want them to be there, and comfortable, for many years to come.”
Helen Bradstock
WHEN the community centre in the Isle of Wight village of St Helens was awarded a grant last year for developing a community fridge, Helen Bradstock was the obvious person to be given the task of leading the food-waste project.
The long-time co-ordinator of the local church’s Eco Group, Ms Bradstock regularly organises talks on environmental issues, wildlife surveys of the churchyard, and creation-focused monthly worship. She has also worked with the village school to plant trees and set up bird boxes.
Helen Bradstock
The new community fridge project means that she oversees a team of 20 volunteers who collect surplus food every day from two local supermarkets, which is then redistributed to villagers to reduce food waste.
“I believe that God’s love for us is most often experienced through the natural world and through the communities in which we live,” Ms Bradstock said. One way to “love God back” — and her “driving motivation” — was to direct her efforts towards projects that benefited both the environment and the community.
Almost six tons of food has now been saved from landfill, thanks to Ms Bradstock’s leadership of the community fridge — equivalent to saving more than 12 tons of CO2.
Once set up, the work continued. Ms Bradstock registered the volunteers for environmental-health training, sourced a free freezer to expand the community fridge’s storage capacity, and worked to educate the village more broadly about food waste.
Climate anxiety was a real concern for some in St Helens, and being involved with Ms Bradstock and the project has helped to show that there are practical steps anyone can take, she said. “The project is a great way to promote community collaboration around the common goal of reducing food waste.
“I know from feedback that I’ve received that the volunteers feel good about being part of the project, and that it is appreciated by everyone who uses it.”
Action on a Shoestring
Christ Church, Over Wyresdale, Abbeystead, Lancashire
PARTNERS in Environment (PIE) is a youth group with a difference. Set up five years ago at Christ Church, near Abbeystead, it brings those of secondary-school age together, not in the village hall around a games console or table football, but to volunteer outdoors on environmental projects.
They have rebuilt leaky dams, planted sedge in a lowland bog, laid hedges, pushed back invasive Himalayan balsam, built nesting boxes, planted trees, and installed mallard tubes, among other things. All of this has been in collaboration with community groups including the Canal and Rivers Trust, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, and others.
One of the youth leaders, Rob Foster, conceded that some of the young people’s enthusiasm had dwindled over time, but the “hard-core” dozen members really enjoyed getting out into nature and making a difference.
“They seem to like being able to see what they have done — something physical rather than just looking at a screen or playing a game.” Every session ends with a reading, or quiet prayer time to connect their efforts with Christian faith. PIE is also helping to improve the young people’s social skills and give them work experience.
Besides trying to tempt new young people just entering secondary school to get involved, Mr Foster said that he hoped to team up more with other churches near by to expand the scheme.
The key to PIE’s success is centring on food: almost every session with the young people ends with them cooking something over an open fire. “The kids love that: it really brings everyone together,” he said. “And having time over lunch for a bit of thought and reflection, and then a reading at the end, makes it a really good day for them.”
St Matthew’s, Walsall
THE churchyard at St Matthew’s, Walsall, used to be a dirty and overlooked space, filled with broken, glass needles, excrement, litter, and graffiti. Over five years, and led entirely by volunteers, it has been transformed into a haven for bumblebees, praised by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust as one of the “most-promising churchyard projects” in the country.
The launch of the Bumblebee Conservation project, supported by the Walsall Rotary Club, at St Matthew’s, Walsall, in June 2023. From left: John Edlin, the volunteer building manager at St Matthew’s; Ros Clewes, gardening lead volunteer; Roy Foster, Andrea Burn-Beech, and Richard Hughes, co-presidents of the Walsall Rotary Club; the Rev Jim Trood, Rector of St Matthew’s
Bushes have been removed and foliage cut back to let in light; rubble has been cleared, and extensive weeding has taken place. In their place have come wildflower meadows, plants, grassy patches, and undisturbed areas for nesting bees.
Over time, as the space has been transformed and vandalism and anti-social behaviour have fizzled out, the local community has been able to appreciate the church’s green space. Now, passers-by stop regularly to enjoy the churchyard. The congregation is thanked for its efforts, and received donations of plants and other garden supplies.
More focused efforts on composting and educating those who visit graves has ensured that almost no non-biodegradable plastic is left behind any more. Now, the vision is spreading: the Rotary Club has also come on board as a central partner in the project, and volunteers inspired by the bumblebee haven have taken up action across the Church Hill Conservation Area, well beyond the confines of the churchyard.
St Mary’s CE Academy, Sheffield
MOST of the children attending St Mary’s, a small primary school in Sheffield, live in flats or small houses in a poor urban environment. They have all grown up aware of the climate crisis, but with limited outlets to try and do anything about it.
One of the school’s teachers, Sylvie Roux, decided to establish an Eco Council of eight pupils to lead the school’s efforts to be good stewards of God’s creation.
The aim was to inspire action without unnecessarily alarming the children, Ms Roux said. “So the whole premise is we’re trying to give them a message of hope, and teach them that little actions can make a difference.”
Children at St Mary’s C of E Academy, Sheffield, with some of the bounty from the school garden
Among the first steps the council embarked on was galvanising the school body to collect plastic bags for recycling. They have now gathered more than 10,000, and have moved on to other school waste, aiming to hit a target of one tonne recycled by 2030.
Next, the council focused on travel to school, trying to get their peers to walk, cycle, or scoot each day rather than rely on cars.
Finally, they began to build a school garden, transforming a neglected space — using second-hand and upcycled planters — into a bounty of homegrown fruit and vegetables.
Ms Roux said that the children’s enthusiasm was starting to rub off on parents, who now ask her at the school gate what else they could be collecting to recycle, or where to plant trees next.
Now, the plan is to hand over steering the council to the children themselves, so that they can generate new ideas. “I’ve got enough children on board now to take them forward,” Ms Roux said. “And so that’s really the next step for them: to manage it themselves.”
The winners of all seven categories will be announced at the Church Times Green Church Awards ceremony at St John’s, Waterloo, on 26 September.