St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

At St. Luke’s, we believe to keep the faith we must keep the earth. 

Whenever you use energy more efficiently, you reduce the demand for gasoline, oil, coal and natural gas.  Less burning of these fossil fuels means lower emissions of carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming. The United States makes up five percent of the world’s population, but we are responsible for twenty-five percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

St. Luke’s formed two comittees in the spring of 2006 with the goal of learning how to become better stewards of the earth as individuals and collectively as a parish. 
The first comittee, St. Luke’s Power Lite, is busy researching ways to use energy more efficiently on-site.  We have looked carefully at all those things, big and small, which require energy to maintain the use of the church.  We calculated the ‘carbon footprint’ of our church grounds and have researched ‘payback’ on items such as an on-demand water heater and compact fluorescents bought in bulk.  Our recommendations are presented to our Vestry, some of which are as simple as taking out the middle of three overhead lights in our gathering hall, still providing abundant light, but reducing light-causing carbon emissions in that room alone by 33%.

The second comittee, “Cool Congregations, Solving Global Warming One Family at a Time,” was begun also at St. Luke’s and was the first covenanting member of Iowa Interfaith Power and Light.  Cool Congregations is a program which can be used by any congregation of any faith interested in helping parishioners put their faith to action by becoming better stewards of the earth.  At the free workshop, congregants are taught to calculate their own family’s  ”carbon footprint”  and are given specific action steps to reduce that footprint.  Six workshops were held throughout Iowa in early 2007, with more to be announced on this website for the fall/winter months. 

It is not important that your entire congregation be interested in ”Cool Congregations” or in forming your own Power-Lite comittee to evaluate the grounds at your house of worship.  At St. Luke’s, we enjoy roughly a 30% participation in the ”Cool Congregations” program and of course, anything recommended by the Power Lite comittee requires approval by our Vestry.  The important thing is that faithful efforts are made by those who are interested.  The Cool Congregations workshops offer plenty of ideas toward keeping people learning and comitted, like adult education hour discussion topics, example surveys, seasonal energy efficienciency fundraisers (like LED holiday lights or Advent Kits featuring compact fluorescent bulbs). 

At St. Luke’s, congregants involved in the Cool Congregations program are making individual family efforts to reduce their carbon footprint by roughly 10%.  Easier to do than expected,  and with our 30 participating families alone, reflects a savings of 63 tons of carbon dioxide in one year….the approximate equivalent of taking 12 cars off Iowa roads!  

If you are interested to learn more, see our church schedule and stop in!  Or sign up for one of our free workshops.  You are welcome regardless of your place on the learning curve….”Cool Congregations” and St. Luke’s Power Lite are all learning too.

(We are also very proud to be the first covenanting member of Iowa Interfaith Power and Light, a non-profit organization putting together people of faith to halt global warming and reduce the impacts of global climate change. Click here or follow the link on the right for more info about this organization and how you can do more to do right by God’s creation.)