HELM Audit
By | Jun 12, 2007
Although our audit is a bit of a blunt instrument, what we are looking for is a baseline and movement value rather than absolute accuracy.
A couple of interesting results, I found an unwrapped hot water cylinder in an un-insulated storage room, next to an outside wall, under slat windows that don’t seal, on a concrete floor, running hot water taps in a bathrooms used probably a couple of times a month.
Looking more closely than usual is a good idea.
Ordered fair trade coffee to replace our usual for Sunday after the services. This is where the spade strikes the soil. It doubled the price. Questions are being asked – raising bigger issues… Although it is easier just to make changes yourself, the idea of being a church means that we need to be moving together. Doesn’t it?
In this case the hot water cylinder should offset the coffee, but it won’t always work like that. We want to be sustainable – but at what cost?
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UVGrimace
June 12th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Have you got the research plan, and the audit tool/ methodology, and is it available to others? This would be very interesting to start exploring in our church.
I can see how very quickly we might use up our good will quotient in the process, but I can live with that.
Have you ever noticed how no-one wants to mention the elephant in the room? The elephant is free market capitalism, and people look like they’ve swallowed a lemon whenever I suggest that we are reaping the environmental rewards of worshipping at the wrong altar.
Jesus did comment upon entering Jerusalem that should His people be silent, the very rocks would cry out, and methinks that is exactly what is happening.
Ant
June 13th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Actually, Grimace, I don’t think that elephant is going unmentioned. But, of course, it isn’t getting engaged with at a policy nor business level, as a general rule.
Yet climate change has the power to provoke some change here…and I think that it will do just that as communities do more local organising and emphasise the need to live more simply.
I also think (without wanting to split hairs) we need to be clear what we are talking about – most implementations of capitalism in the world are highly regulated, and not as free as others would like. A better understanting of the theology of the principalities and powers by the church would equip us well to engage these times.
I think resistance, as Stringfellow once said, is the only way to live humanly. And resistance means affirming the ‘good life’ and nurturing it in resistance to the onslaught of the power of death, and not just pointing our finger at death’s icy grip upon our lives and saying ’see, look how bad it is’.
Emma Kuperus
March 4th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Trying to plan an audit for our church. Have you got a copy of the questions you used / issues you looked at?
Cheers,
Emma.