Every week all around the world, Christians and others gather to worship the God whom they call "Creator" amongst other things.

But this worship inflict an environmental cost on Creation. The construction and maintenance of a building, the power used to run the building, the fuel used to get to the building, the snacks eaten in the building, and so on.

So although the building itself might only occupy a tiny part of creation, everything that goes into maintaining it and getting us to it contributes to a much larger actual "footprint"

This project sought to measure the actual footprint of gathering to worship God in various churches, and to make the resources we produced available to any worshipping community which wanted them. Which is hopefully you!

This page contains resources which will help your worshipping community measure the ecological footprint associated with your worship, and to explain why that is important!
They were produced as part of a pilot project run with a small number of Uniting Church congregations in South Australia in 2007.

Here are some examples of measuring and graphically representing the Sunday worship footprints.

If everyone in the world was to live like the average resident of Adelaide (or Australia), AND if we left no productive land for wild creatures, we would need FOUR planet earths.

Anyone got a few Earths to spare?

Resources created as part of this project

Calculating your church's(or other place of worship) worship footprint.
You have two options. You can download the excel spreadsheets (below), or you can use the online version of the EPA calculators. The "events" one is closest to what you will need. Get instructions for using the online events calculator here.

The advantage of downloading the excel spreadsheets is that they are able to pick the best of each calculator and combine them into a single result, and you can graph the results however it suits you. The advantage of the online ones is that the calculations are being constantly refined (the excel spreadsheets are no longer supported). The bit really missing in the online events calculator is detailed questions about paper use (which the office calculator has).

download version 3 (23 Aug 07, with a minor bugfix Oct08) of the worship service footprint calculator (choose 'save' not 'run', and save it into the folder in which you already have the Victorian Environment Protection Authority calculators)

If you don't have those calculators (called schools_EF.xls and office_ef.xls, then you will also need to download this zip file which contains them.

"The Earth is the Lord's, but we need more than one" A one page reflection on Ps 24 and the ecological footprint (word format or pdf ) Freely distributable.

An article about the footprinting concept and pilot, for congregational bulletins, news sheets etc. To cut and paste as is useful.

A Bible Study on the same theme appears in the August edition of TEAR's magazine, TARGET, and is now available from their web site.

Two other versions of the theological illustrations

Poster Templates
The best idea is probably to hand draw large posters which can be put on a wall and filled in each week or month. Otherwise, these might help...
general
electricity
paper

Some other graph templates (excel): By Tiffany Schultz
Part A (breakdown of electricity, water use, travel etc)
Part B (overall footprint, Sunday Service and Individual)

External resources: Theological

A recent document, "Common belief" available from the Climate Institute of Australia, spells out the response of various Australian Religious communities to climate change. The Uniting Church contribution is a draft of what was to become a much fuller response, "for the sake of the planet," which can be downloaded here.

External resources: Practical

The Global Footprinting Network has plenty of background information and maps to illustrate adn explain the footprint concept (here)
A short 3 minute video by Assoc. Prof George Ganf on the global footprint, climate change and population.

You can order information packs about the ecological footprint concept from the SA Government Sustainability and Climate Change Division (8204 2999). (You can now download the information packs here)

You can get a fantastic DVD which explains the concept, or download a compressed version online, from the Victorian Government here.

Some useful online footprint calculators to demonstrate the concept to congregations are:

Ecofoot (www.ecofoot.org) which features personal calculators from around the world.

The Australian one is nearly identical to the personal calculator from the Environmental Protection Agency of the Victorian Government.  It also has a range of more details calculators for households, events, businesses and so on.  They are turning all their calculators into online versions at the moment.

A fun calculator (set up as a game show), which is far from accurate but gets the concept across in a fun way for people who know nothing about it is at http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/education/ecologic/bigfoot/mid/

An overseas one with a focus on carbon dioxide emissions, but also a live update of how many planets your lifestyle needs is http://www.bestfootforward.com/footprintlife.htm

You might want to let your congregations know about other churches tackling the auditing process:

Shrinking the footprint program (basic energy auditing ideas)
http://www.shrinkingthefootprint.cofe.anglican.org/index.php

Eco congregations in the UK program
http://www.ecocongregation.org.uk/