Churches Helping People not Pollute

Walking home from the meeting with Tony Klein I got 2 new ideas for how to relate sustainability with church.

So it's a sin to pollute, no? I think we'd all agree on that. On the way to the meeting I was thinking about polluting in the context of the Lord's Prayer, "lead us not into temptation". We've got a pile of people who would really like to not pollute (sin), but they don't know how to. I think it is fair to say that one of the functions of the church to support people in their quest to live rightly.

Tony Klein was saying that a bill he's working on right now is to improve the weatherization of housing in Vermont. There's something like 60,000 homes which qualify for state aid to increase the efficiency of their houses, and the aid program only covers 1,500 houses per year (that means it would take roughly 40 years to cover all of them). But I'm sure there are people, good hearted people, who would help out their neighbors in this regard if they knew what to do.

So as an extension of the church, you could have a Weatherization Team, which would get invited in someone's house to improve the heat retention and insulation of that home. The Weatherization Team would need to be trained in what to do. Or we could do smaller things - cover windows with plastic, etc. I'm not sure what all is involved or how involved a volunteer team could be, but it's an idea.

Other ideas could be - if we expect people to not use plastic grocery bags, we could host a grocery bag making party where we make them out of used fabrics or whatever.... possibly?

Basically the idea is to have the church host/support events or teams that enable people to not sin so much (of course i mean polluting here).

More ideas are coming I'm sure... i can see the wheels turning behind your eyes :) What are you thinking?