footprint

How much does our worship of the Creator cost Creation...
And what are we going to do about it?
A project commenced through the Scots Church ecofaith.org ministry, with the assistance of ecoconscious funded by Uniting Foundation
As of March 2008 this site is not being further developed, but should still be useful.
It may become part of my ministry to do more work on it in the future, but if you would like to take it on, let me know!

 

 

ecological footprint analysis combined congregations project: results

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!

Here are some sample results from quite different congregations. The result from the spreadsheet (yellow squares below) was converted into a shaded box using the ruler in GoogleEarth . Images were taken from approx 2km elevation, but have been scaled differently on this web page and so are not directly comparable. The point of the project was not direct comparison of congregations anyway, since they are all so different, but monitoring the improvements within each one.
The results presented here are mostly to give you an idea of how you might graphically present your congregation's results.

 

Ecofaith worshipping community (the orange dot)
The small footprint is largely due to the lack of a building, though due to poor Sunday public transport, many attenders drive.

Annual equivalent

 

0.45 global hectares

 

4459.4 square metres

 

or every year per worshipper: 297 sqm

 

 




See more detail on Scots Church Adelaide (the orange rectangle)

annual equivalent

 

9.13 global hectares

 

91337.2 square metres

 

or every year per worshipper: 2029 sqm

 

 

 

pt adel footprint


Port Adelaide Uniting Church

Annual equivalent

 

11.06 global hectares

 

110598 square metres

 

or every year per worshipper: 2457 sqm