Church given high praise for eco effort

A CHURCH in Christchurch has been honoured by a national charity for its environmental efforts.

The Baptist Church in Bargates was awarded an Eco Church Bronze Award from Christian environmental charity A Rocha UK.

Meg Brockway, who leads the church’s creation care team, said: “We are thrilled to achieve this first step on the eco church award scheme.

“As a church we firmly believe God has created this world for us, and as Christians, it’s one of our responsibilities to look after it.

“Things have gone wrong with that, but He wants us to restore that and move forward.”

Some of the measures they have implemented include replacing single-use plastic coffee cups with a compostable variety, the use of Fair Trade products and produce wherever possible, using environmentally friendly cleaning products and the installation of two cycle stands to encourage the congregation to ride.

The church also recently held its first green fair which highlighted organisations and companies which are taking steps towards greener living.

Meg added: “We have also managed to ‘twin’ all our toilets in the church with latrines in developing countries under the Toilet Twinning scheme.

“This Bournemouth-based project, which is a part of the Tearfund charity, raises money for long-term water and sanitation programmes overseas where the some of the poorest people in the world are dying through inadequate hygiene.

“We are now a bronze eco church and we’re really taking steps to make it silver. This will be more challenging for us as we’ll need to go a lot further in some of our aims, but I feel this is so important.”

For more details visit christchurchbaptist.org.uk/creation-care or facebook.com/cbccreationcare