Eco Tips Booklet
We have put together a collection of all the tips published on our bulletins over the years which you can view and download here.
Eco Church Lifestyle Audit 2025
Care for creation has been a fundamental part of God’s plan for us and at St. Thomas’ we have demonstrated our commitment to care for the environment by joining the Eco Church accreditation scheme, as detailed below. We are ‘Going for Gold’ and are committed to undertaking an annual lifestyle audit to review our personal approach to creation care. Our Autumn 2025 audit has now closed and we have collated the results which you can find here. We intend to issue the survey again in six months to measure improvements in our lifestyle.
If you want to make changes to your Eco credentials, some resources to help you can be found here:
Carbon Footprint Calculator
Travel
Fairtrade Food
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Ethical Finances
Thank you for getting involved! The Eco Team
We are an Eco Church!
St. Thomas’ were delighted to have been awarded with the A Rocha Bronze Eco Award and the A Rocha Silver Eco Award in 2022 and you can see our plaques inside the church.. Eco Church is A Rocha’s UK award scheme for churches who want to show that the Gospel is good news for God’s earth. Their aim is to inspire individuals and families, equip churches and church leaders, build partnerships and manage land for nature and people.
The scheme is divided into five separate sections: Worship and teaching; Management of church buildings; Management of church land; Community and global engagement; and Lifestyle. Thus in all areas of church life we are encouraged to evaluate our practice in helping to sustain the environment and reduce our carbon footprint.
- We have had some quick wins; using recyled or donated cupboards and settees
- Some incidental wins: installing a smart screen has meant a huge reduction in the use of paper for service sheets
- Some IT wins: using email and Whatsapp messages has reduced our use of paper
- Some hard-won wins: digging out our wildflower bed in the churchyard
- Some fortunate wins: a donation to place benches in the churchyard to encourage a quiet space to contemplate nature
Latest news
St. Thomas’ is now ‘Going for Gold’ and joining with other churches in the diocese who are working hard to achieve this goal. God’s creation will be a focus for our ‘Fun Lunches’ held over the summer and the September Parish Away day in Frandley. As we work towards the Gold award there is a renewed and deeper emphasis on working with our wider neighbours and partners. St. Thomas’ has ambitious plans to undertake an internal re-ordering to improve our facilities for church activities and our community. We are looking to replace a 25-year-old gas boiler with a more efficient hydrogen ready gas boiler and supplement this with an air source heat pump; we will also investigate the possibility of solar panels to power the heat pump.
Visitors to the church may have noticed the Ladybird trail in church, a hunt that encourages little ones to look at all the main features inside the church. There has been a plethora of ladybirds during the recent hot weather – a swarm apparently disturbed one of the cricket test matches at Lords. Ladybirds are in fact beetles; they offer numerous benefits through their role as natural pest control agents. They are voracious predators of aphids, green fly and other soft-bodied insects, helping to protect gardens, crops, and other plants from pests. Additionally, some ladybird species contribute to pollination, and they are an important part of the food chain for various animals.
The origin of their name goes back many hundred years when the Virgin Mary was depicted in art wearing a red cloak, the spots were seen as representing her seven joys and sorrows. The name has since been shortened from ‘Our Lady bird’ to ‘Ladybird’. Farmers would pray to the Virgin Mary asking for bountiful harvests. There are lots of superstitions about the number of spots on a ladybird but generally the number indicates the species type. Our bell ringers have reported that large numbers hibernate in our church tower over winter!
The number of butterflies and moths has declined over recent decades. Eco churches have been encouraged to help in tracking their numbers between Friday 18th July and Sunday 10th August. Choose a place to spot butterflies and moths, watch for 15 minutes and record what you see. This is a lovely venture for a sunny day and children can easily get involved in the record keeping. Follow this link for full details or google the Big Butterfly Count 2025.
If you would like to take a more active role in supporting our ‘Going for Gold’ please contact our Eco representative Sheila Barton through the website contact form.
St. Thomas’ is a Fairtrade church, which means that we try as far as possible to use fairly traded items such as tea, coffee and sugar. We encourage the use of Fairtrade items in all church events There is now a much wider range of products available and we encourage our church members to ask for Fairtrade items when shopping, as availability is led by customer demand. Using Fairtrade items makes a real difference to the lives of many in the developing world.
We are working toward the Gold Award which means renewed and deeper emphasis on working with our wider neighbours and partners. St. Thomas’ also has ambitious plans to undertake an internal re-ordering to improve our facilities for church activities and our community. We are looking to replace a 25-year-old gas boiler with a more efficient hydrogen-ready gas boiler and supplement this with an air source heat pump; we will also investigate the possibility of solar panels to power the heat pump.
As a Church we are working with ‘Wild about Stockton Heath’ (WASH)) to turn our graveyard into a haven for wild life and diversity. WASH has joined with us on several ‘Love your Burial Ground’ weeks over the years. On this year’s we were joined by the Brownies. Using the iNaturalist app our bug hunt recorded 96 observations of fauna and flora with 80 bug species in total in our overgrown churchyard – yes, we did ‘No Mow May’!
Young people from the Walton Lea Partnership have been coming to our open church sessions on a Tuesday morning since early spring. This was an initiative welcomed by all parties as the young people were looking for a ’safe’ place to volunteer and as a church we were seeking to extend our community outreach by encouraging a group to take a major responsibility for planting up our community vegetable plot and gardens in the churchyard.
We have noticed how each individual has blossomed, with their confidence to engage with church members and the general public increasing. There was even an opportunity to brush up on language and presentation skills by participating in the filming of our activities by Chester Diocese. The group have clearly embraced learning about planting and cultivating plants and the benefits to all have been reciprocal. We are thrilled that we can continue this partnership into the future.
You can read the article on the Diocesan website and find the video here.