Great Ayton Eco Church Silver Award

Great Ayton with Easby Methodist Church was awarded Eco Church Silver status in August 2025.
A Rocha’s Eco Church programme consists of a learning community of churches from all denominations and none. It provides a framework to support churches to take practical action on caring for God’s earth. It includes a toolkit of resources, an online award survey, a quarterly email update, online events, prayer forums and occasional conferences.

The Eco Church survey, with its suite of supporting resources, helps churches to ‘go green’ in all areas of church life.
It is divided into 5 areas of concern:
worship and teaching;
buildings and energy;
land and nature;
community and global engagement;
lifestyle.
The work counts towards a Bronze, Silver or Gold Eco Church award.

As a church, we have been challenged to make changes to take better care of God’s creation. For example, we have looked to encourage butterflies and bees on our land and to provide nesting boxes for birds. In our worship and teaching we have looked at how we can reflect our love of God in our care of His world. In our newsletter, we have included ideas for lifestyle changes. The survey and supporting resources have been invaluable in steering our thoughts and actions.

Another aspect where we have been challenged is to consider how to respond to the Methodist Conference’s 2021 aspirational target to become a net zero Church by 2030. Our church council agreed in 2024 to explore how this could be achieved and following an energy audit we started a range of fund raising and grant applications. Having achieved our target funding by Q1 2025, this summer we were able to commence installing solar panels, battery storage and to replace our ageing gas boiler with 2 air source heat pumps. The solar panels and heat pumps are visible to the wider community and act as a very visible witness of our commitment to care for God’s creation.

We are pleased to say that our church buildings are now net zero, and we give grateful thanks to all those involved in providing support and funding to achieve this.