Climate Emergency Fund

Improving energy efficiency reduces our carbon footprint and is an important part of any church’s stewardship of God’s creation. The Connexion and District are both committed to being carbon neutral by 2030.

It also reduces energy bills, and the cost savings often repay the expenditure over a small number of years. Such expenditure should therefore be regarded as an investment in the future. We are now piloting a Climate Emergency Fund to support one church in each circuit within the District to make such investments.

In consultation with you the District will commission (and pay for) an energy survey of your church and support you to develop an investment plan based on the results.

If the church/circuit can afford it, we strongly advise you to pay for the investments yourself. This way you will get maximum benefit from energy savings immediately. (Grant-funding may be available but we do not have the resources to advise on this at present. If you are successful, please let us know so we can collate the information to help other churches in the future.)

If your church cannot afford it, then the District has allocated funds to make loans. This will be paid back (from money saved on energy bills) over an agreed period allowing the funds to be recycled for similar investments at other churches.

Registering an interest

You can start the process by filling in the short form at this link. We will then forward this to your circuit superintendent for consideration. Once we have confirmation, we will be back in contact with you to arrange for the energy survey. If you have already obtained an energy survey for your church then indicate this when filling in the form and we’ll take this into account.

Whilst waiting for this there are two ways you could use your time to start thinking through the issues that the surveyor will assess more formally (note there is some overlap between these):

  1. Register as an Eco Church and working your way through the section on “Buildings”.
  2. Work through the “Get your building down to net zero” pages on the Connexional website.

(Another useful resource is Environmental Stewardship in Places of Worship – A Guide to Reducing our Carbon Footprint which has recently been produced by the Diocese of Salford (click here).

If you would like to chat over the process in more detail then please contact john.brobbey2@googlemail.com

At this stage the fund is only covering church buildings. We hope to look into advice on manses at a later stage.