Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12: 30-31.
In response to these commandments, and many other instructions in the Bible, we believe it’s essential to do what we can to look after God’s beautiful creation and to look after all of our global neighbours and all creatures that live in and on the Earth.
To help our response we have signed up to the Eco Church award and are working towards the Bronze award.
JPIT (the organisation that helps the Methodist Church work for peace and justice) calls on us to transform our lifestyles through studying, praying and acting on environmental issues.
What Can We DO?
There are many places that we can read about ideas of what we can do to help tackle environmental issues such as the human-induced climate crisis and biodiversity loss, some recommendations from Christian organisations are:
As part of the Eco Church Bronze award we encourage our church community to consider:
- walking or cycling to events, when you can, or using public transport rather than a car to reduce carbon emissions from unnecessary car use
- completing a personal carbon footprint audit, to see what you are doing well and where improvements could be made and to indicate how much carbon offsetting you could do (compensating for your emissions by funding an equivalent carbon dioxide saving elsewhere)
- reducing your energy consumption, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that impact on climate change, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss
- limiting waste by following the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle, to conserve (not exploit) natural resources, landfill space and energy
- choosing Fairtrade and/or ethically sourced goods when shopping, to reduce exploitation of and harm to people and the Earth’s resources
- using food at home that is “LOAF” – locally produced (to support our communities), organic ( to take care of the Earth), animal friendly (to stop cruelty) and fairly traded (to support social justice)
- investing your personal savings ethically, to ensure your money is going to organisations who share your values
- completing a personal environmental lifestyle audit around the areas of worship and prayer, home, garden, community & global engagement, travel, food and possessions, to see what you are doing well and where improvements could be made
Let us pray
Some prayers from Hope in God’s Future by JPIT (2020)
A prayer of approach and adoration
Wonderful God,
Sometimes, as we immerse ourselves outdoors, an intoxicating sense of your
presence steals upon our spirits.
Myriad colours dance in a sunlit garden or park, and our hearts sing.
The joyful chorus of birdsong sweetly fills and strangely deafens our ears.
Awesome snow-capped mountains and tumultuous waterfalls speak to us of
your eternal timelessness.
Scurrying, flitting insects and the amazing variety of grasses absorb us on a
lazy summer day.
In six days you created the world, and then on the seventh, you stopped
and paused to delight in your Creation, seeing its goodness and seeing our
goodness, so that you trusted us to be caretakers with you.
You call us in this kairos moment to pause with you, to take time, to drink in
deeply the wonderful gift of Creation.
Help us not to continue to carelessly spoil it in thoughtless, rushing lifestyles.
May we deeply see, hear, smell, touch, taste and cherish the fragile interconnected garden of the earth – your gift to us.
Amen.
A prayer of confession
Gracious God,
We confess that we have been slow to recognise how carelessly we have
treated your precious gift of Creation.
Our addictive lifestyles have encouraged us to take, use and cast aside.
We have plundered finite resources,
With little thought for poorer communities and future generations.
We acknowledge our guilt and ask you to change our hearts.
May we glimpse the possibilities of a new, shared, wholesome and more just
way of living.
May we know your forgiveness, and act upon it,
So that we may receive your fullness of life,
And know lasting contentment.
[Pause]
In the name of Christ, who did not abandon us in our limited, myopic lives, we
ask to hear your words of forgiveness; to receive the gift of your Spirit to blow
through us, spring cleaning our hearts and lives.
Amen.
A prayer of commitment
God, who provides what we need for life in all its fullness,
We thank you for the gift of energy;
Providing warmth, light, access to multimedia communications.
May we be mindful of how we use this life-enhancing gift.
Help us stop our careless squandering of it,
Aware of the big impact on climate change for poorer communities and future
generations.
God create in us a new heart and renewed lives.
We thank you for the gift of transport;
Swift travel to diverse places.
May we be mindful of how we use this life-enriching gift,
Which can also complicate and busy our lives.
May we be disciplined about its frivolous and unnecessary use,
Aware of the big impact on climate change for poorer communities and future
generations.
God create in us a new heart and renewed lives.
We thank you for the gift of diverse possessions, which bring enjoyment and
status.
Make us mindful to distinguish between passing wants, and true needs.
To humbly recycle, re-use and reduce land-polluting waste.
To see that true wealth does not rest in ‘things’.
God create in us a new heart and renewed lives.
We thank you for creating us as inter-connected creatures.
Make us mindful of the deep privilege of this.
To honour our bodies by living a healthy lifestyle;
To honour our relationships to know the fullness of loving, laughing, suffering
alongside others;
To honour the precious, finite resources of earth, that we might have life
without depriving others of what is needful for their fullness of life.
God create in us a new heart and renewed lives.
Amen.
Shirehampton Methodist Church 