A guest post by Doug Daley, Greening Initiatives Lead & Don Atkinson, Past Chair (St. Paul’s United Church, Orillia).

When Rev. Ted Reeve joined St. Paul’s United Church in 2014 as our new minister, the congregation was looking for opportunities to increase the use of the 150-year-old building. 

With input from Rev. Bill Phipps, a very close collaborator of Rev. Reeve’s on numerous initiatives, a vision to “turn ourselves inside out for the benefit of the community” as the friends described it, was adopted.

Within our faith communities we all help out; that’s the ‘community’ in faith community. Some people take care of the building — often the most thankless job, because if they do a good job, no one notices anything. These dedicated people care about the building, but unfortunately don’t always understand how their building works, which is completely normal. In highschool, we were not taught how to maintain our homes let alone maintain and operate large, oftentimes massive places of worship. For example, the huge decorative ceiling grilles in many places of worship are, from my experience, 95% of the time open to the attic. One church I worked with had four 8-foot diameter ceiling vents and the congregation couldn’t worship in the space in the summer because the heat coming off the roof drove them out! How would people know this? They wouldn’t, since we don’t have anything comparable in our homes. So to the building maintenance teams reading this, don’t be hard on yourselves.

In partnership with EnviroMuslims and with generous funding from Olive Tree Foundation, Faith & the Common Good has launched Greening Canadian Mosques, the first program of its kind giving Canadian mosques the tools and resources they need to embed sustainable practices and policies within their facilities.