St Mary's church joins the A Rocha Ecochurch project
By Sophy Barnes, St Mary's Church
August 2026
Last September at St Mary's we held our first 'Eco Sunday' service when we officially signed up to the Ecochurch project and made the following commitment: ‘We recognise and teach that creation care and action to address the climate and nature crises are integral to Christian faith, life and worship. We are committed to respond to this by participating in the A Rocha UK Eco Church award scheme.’
Eco Church is a learning community which provides a framework to support each church and its leadership to take practical action on caring for God’s earth, through the Eco Church survey. The survey covers five key areas of church life: Worship and teaching, buildings and energy, land and nature, community and global engagement and lifestyle.
We've learnt through the year that we have been good at some of these areas for a while, but we need to improve on others.
Most recently it's been wonderful to drastically reduce our carbon footprint with the installation of a new electric radiant infrared heating system. This should be up and running to improve our warmth and comfort through the winter months. It's a win-win situation.
Another busy project over the last couple of years has been to improve biodiversity in our churchyard.
We reached an agreement with Amber Valley Borough Council, who are legally responsible for the maintenance of the churchyard, to take over the management of one corner near the Bier house.
We have been creating a wildlife meadow here, introducing Yellow Rattle to reduce the vigour of grasses and to encourage meadow wildflowers by mowing only once a year in late summer.
We've added a log pile built by Crich Scouts, a bee bank, and have also started composting all suitable waste. This includes teabags and coffee grounds from our refreshments after services, spent church flower displays, grass clippings, and the carboard pizza boxes from last year's family Messy Harvest service.
We also remember that as responsible Christians we each have an individual responsibility to take action in our daily lives so that we tread lightly on the world and bring about positive change in caring for our beautiful Earth.
This autumn we are encouraging our congregation to take part in a survey which looks at our lifestyles and how they have an impact on the world through the choices we make and our use of money and resources.
At this year's Eco Sunday service we were joined by members of St Peter's Belper who have achieved the highest-level Gold Ecochurch Award. They shared their Ecochurch journey with us, which was interesting, encouraging, and helpful.
We have been delighted to be joined by members of Transition Crich at churchyard work mornings and especially this year to work with TC on the installation of swift boxes. We look forward to working alongside TC for many years to come.
We are now nearly ready to submit our first application for an award- we will let you know how we get on!
Our next project together is the screening of the People's Emergency Briefing on September 26th. I hope you will join us.
