What is Eco Church?
What our parish is doing
ARocha Eco Church Programme
In 2024, Clifton Parish joined ARocha Eco Church, and signed up all three of our churches to work towards being greener in our buildings, lands, practices and worship, by following the Eco Church surveys.
What is ARocha Eco Church?
ARocha UK is a Christian charity working to protect and restore the natural world and committed to equipping Christians and churches in the UK to care for the environment. It is part of A Rocha International, a global family of conservation organizations working together to live out God’s calling to care for creation and equip others to do likewise.
ARocha UK’s Eco Church programme is open to churches of all denominations, types and sizes in the UK and over 4,000 churches across the country are currently signed up. The programme provides a framework, through its surveys and linked advice and guidance, to allow churches to work towards being more environmentally-friendly and aware, tracking their progress and celebrating their achievements. The survey monitors and rewards progress in five areas:
· Worship and teaching
· Buildings and energy
· Land and nature
· Community and global engagement
· Lifestyle
In May 2025, Clifton Parish Church was awarded the Bronze Eco Church Award, and is now working its way towards silver! St Mark’s and Clifton Moor Church hope to follow suit during the next few months.
Recent Activity at our Churches
We’ve been doing and planning all sorts of things across our three churches to help us work towards our environmental goals. Examples include:
- Building bug hotels amongst our bushes
- Replacing outdated halogen lighting with energy-efficient LEDs
- Planting wildflowers in beds and borders and around our war memorial
- Encouraging our volunteers who cater for church events to use fairtrade, organic or locally sourced ingredients where possible
- Improving our recycling practices
- Celebrating the annual season of “Creationtide” (1 Sept to 4 Oct) with sermons, public worship, children’s activities and small group resources focussing on different aspects of creation care
- Holding a Parish Green Forum Community event in June 2025, to encourage our local community to swap and recycle gardening equipment and plants, and promote bicycle use and maintenance
Some important changes and developments will take longer, but we’re working towards them! For example, we’re starting to plan for the future in terms of heating our three churches in a more energy-efficient way; and investigating how our procurement practices can be consistently more environmentally friendly.
