Report from Maureen Rowan, Eco Congregation Coordinator
We celebrated the Endeavour Award at our Season of Creation Service in a building site. The worship area is cordoned off at the church, but in the surrounding rooms and spaces, we have scaffolding, builders’ materials and warnings not to enter. It is all for a good environmental purpose, to provide insulation, double-glazed windows and waterproofing for leaking flat roofs. The church itself is a listed 1877 granite building and requires a separate project for upgrading.
Endeavour is a central theme. This is the current phase of a 20 year programme begun in 2011. The first phase was to replace old oil-fired boilers with efficient gas boilers and install a building management system to control individual room heating on a flexible schedule. The next phase in 2015 was to do urgent repairs to tie down a large roof, reset the top block layer of the parapet and upgrade the fire alarm system. The work on the current phase began in June 2024 after extensive preparations and discussions.
A recent development was the success of our application for funding from the Community Climate Fund for further energy-efficiency measures. All of this will not bring us to Net Zero, however. That would require a heat pump and other ancillary works, for which budgets have not yet been prepared.
Finding the funds to eliminate the use of fossil fuels at Centenary may take until the next generation of members of our church. That was why the Endeavour Award was unveiled at Children’s Time during the Season of Creation service. We hope the young members of the congregation, like the boy pictured here with the kind permission of his mother, will continue the ‘Endeavour’. We also pay tribute to the ‘ageless’ members whose work has got us this far. We expect the current building works to be complete in November and, if our Energy Auditor’s predictions work out, we will be cutting our emissions by 50% for the winter.