Letting Go of Paper and Cultivating Trees - Our Church Lenten Practice
For Lent, as a church we are letting go of paper and cultivating the stewardship of saving trees and printing costs.
How? By using the hymnals when possible rather than printing out all the songs in the bulletin. And by printing the service music once and using it weekly as an insert.
Every week we print 80 bulletins unless the savior is born or resurrected; we print extra in honor of those events. For Lent, in preparation for the latter, we printed the service music in a separate packet and are re-using it every week, and we are not printing out every hymn. Not only is this more sustainable, but it has also saved a considerable amount of money for the Church as we pay per page printed.
We’re going to save about 2,240 pages – give or take a few. This is a Lenten practice we hope to bring to the rest of the year. Let us know what you think!
The Vestry of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd is committed to our mission “To know Christ and to make Christ known.” As the lay leaders of this community of faith, it is important that we invite our parishioners to pursue a healthy spiritual life through responsible stewardship based on biblical principles.
Do your eyes glaze over a bit when it comes to the annual Fall finance campaign? Do you shift a bit in your seat? Do you NOT want to be the person asking for money?
If you answered yes, you are in good company.
Then, not having any realistic plan for how it could be done, I committed an outrageous act of faith: I started giving the tithe.
Rev. Linda
The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it [. . .] Psalm 24: 1 – 3.