Church in Yardley, PA Works to Lower Impact on Environment
Read about the green projects that Woodside Presbyterian Church has put on in the past year. This church, located in Yardley, Pennsylvania, has been working tirelessly since March 2010 to become a greener congregation. This Church Earth Care Story was submitted by Susan Sciarratta, a member of Woodland.
In March 2010, Woodside Presbyterian Church conducted an in-house baseline energy audit throughout the building and has implemented nearly all of the recommendations contained therein. Some highlights included staff education, extra recycling bins, programming the thermostats, putting a plastic strip curtain at the kitchen door, installing LED bulbs in the exit signs, and replacing old light fixtures with more energy efficient ones. Our local electric provider, PECO, has an incentive program by which we were able to get about $1000 back in rebates for some of these projects as well.
During summer 2010, one of our growth groups studied the book “Our Father’s World,” by Edward Brown. It was a great book and yielded a lot of fruitful discussion. Subsequently, the group put together a devotional guide in Spring 2011 which was used to supplement our sermon series on Creation Care in April 2011. We also compiled a list of other creation care projects that we continue to work on.
Also in January 2011 the church filed a formal complaint with the PA Public Utilities Commission concerning our water provider, PA American Water Company, for unfair and potentially illegal practices related to service charges for our fire sprinkler system service line. After long protracted negotiations, we unfortunately withdrew the complaint as did another church in our area. However in the process we got the attention of several trade groups, our State Representative, the Office of Consumer Advocate, a local attorney, and other churches in the area.