The church has a long history of celebrating harvest and occasionally using worship songs celebrating God’s creation. Since starting on the Ecochurch journey environmental issues have featured more in services including a Climate Sunday service in September 2021 linked to COP 26.
COP 26 - the UN Climate Conference
In the run up to the conference held in Glasgow last year the church held a Climate Sunday service, prayed for the leaders attending, set up a prayer room using material from Tearfund to raise awareness of the effects of climate change on different communities and encourage prayer for affected populations.
We also wrote to as many individual world leaders as possible urging them to agree an approach, which would address the climate issues by reducing carbon dioxide in the air to 1990's levels. In the end we wrote to 118 of 232 leaders identified including a variety of people such as Prince Charles and the Pope and had replies from 14. Unfortunately, most of the replies were along the lines of "We take climate change seriously." which is good but there was no commitment to doing anything concrete. The most hopeful reply was from Justin Welby, who has since formed a climate alliance with other religious groups and initiated a campaign to make the church of England carbon neutral by 2030. We don't pretend that our writing to him affected any of this in any way, but it certainly won't have hurt.
COP 15- the UN Biodiversity Conference
The week before this conference, one of our members outlined the importance of protecting biodiversity during a service and asked for prayers that the delegates would reach agreement and their governments would abide by promises made.