Faith fuels churches’ energy plans

PORTLAND – A church initiative to conserve electricity and combat global warming has begun to take hold in Maine.

Congregations interested in preserving the environment – not because it is politically correct, but because they believe their faith calls them to do so – have formed three dozen teams at churches across the state.

“Looking at it from a church perspective, we’ve always claimed a part of our mission is to be stewards of God’s Creation,” said Loren Downey, founder of the EarthCare team at First Parish Congregational Church in Saco.

The Maine Council of Churches and Maine Interfaith Power & Light, a Brunswick-based nonprofit organization licensed to connect electric customers and suppliers, developed the concept to help churches focus on environmental issues, particularly global warming.

While some churches have been trying to do this for years, many have struggled to get the attention of their congregations, said Anne D. Burt of the Maine Council of Churches.

“There would be one – maybe two if you were lucky – people in a congregation for whom this is really a passion,” Burt said. “They see this as really central to their faith. They were feeling isolated and alone.”

Last September, Burt and Christine James, congregational outreach coordinator at Maine Interfaith, brought together 25 congregations at a planning meeting. Each church made a commitment to try two to three new activities over eight months that would shrink their environmental footprints in Maine.

They considered everything from undergoing energy audits and switching to energy-saving light bulbs to simply swapping Styrofoam cups for nondisposable ones at the fellowships held after Sunday services.

The churches, now numbering three dozen, will meet again Sunday at Wiscasset to share their successes and failures and recruit other churches into the fold.

The summer meeting will be followed by another planning session in October at the Living Waters Spiritual Center in Winslow.

So far, a trio of southern Maine EarthCare teams that includes Downey’s church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Saco and Biddeford, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Saco have proved to be the most successful.

Working together, the teams say they have kept 888,771 pounds of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from being released into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of taking 96 cars, or 55 trucks, off the roads.

At the First Parish Congregational Church, Downey organized an April transportation fair that featured hybrid cars, bicycles, free bus rides, and other alternative forms of transportation.