EcoChurch — Open Heaven Church

Open Heaven Caring for Creation

The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. - Psalm 24:1

At Open Heaven we care about God’s earth and recognise our responsibility to partner with God to care for creation.

We recognise that creation currently faces multiple environmental crises which are being caused by human activity. Climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution and waste.

All of these crises are impacting on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people the most. We cannot ‘love our neighbour’ without also caring for the global home we share.

We also want to celebrate and enjoy God’s good creation as a community.

We hold Eco Church Bronze Award

In 2022 we achieved Eco Church Bronze Award. This is a national award, given by the charity ARocha.

We did a number of things to achieve this, including inviting Ruth Valerio to be a guest speaker at our Gatherings, putting up various wildlife boxes in our churchyard and encouraging people in our community to walk or cycle to our meetings. Around 10 members of our community have been involved in lobbying our local MP at a weekly climate vigil outside their office.

We’re working towards Eco Church Silver Award

Here are some examples of what we’re been doing:

We carried out a survey to find out what areas of creation care Open Heaveners are interested in and how members of our community would like to be involved in our work on creation care.
In 2024 we measured our carbon footprint as a church. In 2025 we will use this information to inform how we best go about reducing our carbon emissions.
We are trying to install solar panels on St Peter’s Centre. Various steps are needed to make this happen and, as of January 2025, we are submitting various applications to the local council.
We have held children’s clothes swaps at two of our Messy Church events and a ladies’ clothes swap at Steel in the Wind (our women’s ministry). This helps avoid clothes going to waste.
We held a creation care course during Lent 2023.
We are a Fairtrade Church. We serve Fairtrade coffee, tea and sugar at gatherings and in October 2023, our OH2 Autumn festival included speakers from two organisations working with Fairtrade producers. We celebrate Fairtrade Fortnight. In December 2024, we hosted a stall at one of our gatherings selling Fairtrade items suitable for Christmas.

We grow food in raised beds on land rented by our partner Baca, next door to St Peters. We have grown rhubarb, tomatoes, butternut squash, pumpkins, yellow courgettes, potatoes and beans. The produce has been used by Baca’s young people.
We have compost bins which are being fed with waste from the St Peters kitchen and paper waste from the office. The compost will be used on the vegetable bds at Baca.
We have switched Open Heaven’s savings accounts to a building society and a bank which don’t invest in fossil fuels. They also meet a number of other criteria around human rights and other ethical practices. We are planning to review our current account providers in the future.

Cycling and walking to OH2 gatherings has become so popular that the St Peters cycle racks are often full to bursting on a Sunday morning and we now encourage people to use the cycle racks outside Baca’s building as overflow cycle parking. There’s also lots of cycle parking available at the Student Union for OH1’ers.
The St Peters Prayer Room includes resources to help our church community pray about environmental issues. This includes Green Christian's monthly prayer guide, copies of Jesus Died to Save the Planet (published by LICC) and copies of How to Pray for Climate Change (published by 24/7 Prayer).
As part of Loughborough Churches Partnership events we have taken part in litter picks around Loughborough.
Once set up, our social supermarket will make sure that food that would have otherwise gone to waste is given to those who need good. This will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from wasted food going to landfill.
We organised a meeting for other churches within the Loughborough Churches Partnership who either hold an Eco Church award or are interested in starting their own Eco Church journey. This was an opportunity for churches from across the LCP to share ideas, top tips, successes and challenges with each other. We hope to organise more meetings in 2025.

What can you do?

There are lots of things we can all do in our own lives and communities to care for creation. Below are just a few:

Work out your personal carbon footprint. You can most effectively reduce your carbon emissions if you know what your emissions in different areas of your life are. The WWF Carbon Footprint tool is one of the easiest to use.
Buy chocolate with the Fairtrade logo. The Christian bookshop and Oxfam shop in Loughborough both stock Fairtrade chocolate, as do most supermarkets. Fairtrade works with farmers and workers so they can improve their living standards, invest in their communities and businesses, and protect our shared environment. Find out more.
Switch to an ethical bank account and/or pensions. Many banks and pension funds invest some of their funds in fossil fuels. We can only effectively tackle climate change if we stop burning fossil fuels. Some useful links...

Ethical Consumer
My Mother Tree
Make My Money Matter

Car share to gatherings. We know that cycling and walking doesn’t work for everyone, but could you share a lift with someone else who is coming from the same direction?
Join the OH Gardening Group. This is a great opportunity to help grow veg (and learn how to if you haven’t done it before).
Learn more about the climate crisis and what you can do about it with these resources from Tearfund: www.tearfund.org/campaigns/climate-campaign

If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing as a church or get involved, you can contact the OH Eco Team via the Open Heaven office.