Eco Church Silver
Clockwise from top left: Flower Arrangers use locally sourced flowers and foliage from gardens; reusing compostable cups throughout the Lifepath day; fantastic churchyard fungi; underfloor insulation beneath the new nave floor.
Did you see the Meadow Browns?
This June, as Lifepath filled the Priory and the churchyard with hundreds of happy, busy children and volunteers, hurrying between activities, there wasn’t much time to notice a paradox. Something simultaneously both totally ordinary and totally extraordinary.
Meadow Browns.
A pair of Meadow Brown butterflies flitted lazily through the grasses of the new wildflower area, just feet from the traffic, busy-ness and commerce of Church Street. The great-great-great…grand-butterflies of those that skipped in the meadows on the site when the Priory was founded as a Benedictine House in 1085, by Aldwyn, as the Lifepath children learnt.
They’re not rare butterflies, nor are they particularly flashy colour-wise (unless you’re into shades of brown). But in a wet year when the butterfly population struggled nationwide, they tell a tale of regeneration. When was the last time you saw a butterfly in Church Street?
It goes to show what a huge difference a tiny change can make. In this case, it was Priory’s Environment Group, working with Malvern Hills District Council who manage the churchyard, to leave an area of the churchyard unmown during the summer months. Flowers, fungi and grasses blossomed and the insects and invertebrates moved back in.
Encouragement and action by the amazing Priory Environment Group has just just secured the Priory the Silver Eco-Church Award. They’ve taken a holistic approach, looking at every aspect of Priory life from an eco-perspective - from a Lunch Box talk (on Temwa, a charity working in Malawi), the sustainable flowers policy for the Flower Arrangers, the Environment Group page on this site, involving the congregation in a lifestyle survey (with over 200 responses), an Environment Day Service, litter picking, and not forgetting input to the new Nave Floor Project, where deep insulation was laid below the new underfloor heating pipes, which will be powered in the not-too-distant-future by a state-of-the-art air source heat pump.
And that’s just a taster of the huge number of eco-achievements, driven by the Environment Group, that the Priory’s made to gain the Silver Award.
The Silver Eco-Church Award is part of A Rocha UK’s Eco Church programme, which gives a framework to help churches take practical action to care for God’s earth. The Priory Environment Group were able to demonstrate that the required standard had been reached in five areas - worship and teaching, land, buildings, community and global engagement, and lifestyle.
Each Eco-Church level builds on the previous one, so having achieved Bronze and Silver, there’s no time to rest on Priory laurels, but to go for Gold!
What can you do, today, to care for God’s Creation?
