Background

In the spring of 2006, The Mission Outreach Committee brought two motions to the floor of Montreal Presbytery:  one was passed by General Council to call upon the Harper Government to respect Canada’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.  The other was adopted by the Montreal Presbytery to encourage its churches and ministry sites to do whatever we can as a church community to improve our own environmental practices within our church institutions and reduce our own green house gas emissions.  The Mission Outreach Committee took on the mandate of providing churches and ministry sites with guidelines, tools and reflective material to help churches with this endeavour.

Although many of us have taken measures as individuals to reduce our energy consumption and improve our environmental practices, unfortunately in Quebec approximately 80% of recyclable material is still thrown in landfills.  The major culprits are institutions who regard recycling practices as costly, time-consuming and inconvenient.  These institutions include schools, businesses, hotels, community organizations, and of course, churches. 

As a church community, we have an opportunity to do things differently by practicing good stewardship of the Earth’s resources and by setting new standards and models for church groups and hopefully other of our society’s institutions. This web-site provides opportunities for exchange and for exploration of various resources to get involved in these initiatives. 

What you can do...

Saint Columba House and Montreal City Mission, two Montreal-based United Church community ministries, have put together the following material that we hope you will read, adapt to your churches/ministries and work with.  We also hope that you will contribute to The Green Church Project in a number of ways:

Send us your stories:  Have you done an environmental or energy assessment?  How did it go?  What problems did you encounter?  Do you have another assessment tool to propose?  Did you set goals and\or have you met them?  Your experience will inform and inspire the efforts of others.  See the section on stories and send yours to: Contact Us, or post it on the forum (soon).  

Send us your reflections:  Have you written or would you wish to write a theological reflection on the church and environmental issues?  Could your reflections help inspire others to raise these issues within their churches?  Would you wish to submit a theological reflection for this website?

Involve your youth:  Do you have ideas as to how your youth group could participate in this initiative?  Do you have projects or initiatives in which the youth of your church/ministry are involved?  Could you direct them to this site and ask them to send their suggestions or stories or give us a call if they wish to be involved in the Green Church Project?

For more information about the Green Church Project contact:
Patricia Murphy,
Saint Columba House,
2365 Grand Trunk Street,
Montreal, Quebec. 
H3K 1M8.  Tel:  (514) 932-6202

Our goal
The Mission Outreach Committee aims to develop resources for churches to use, as they assess and improve their environmental practices through: reevaluate, reducing, reusing, recycling, restructuring, redistribute, and refusing.

Our resources