This easy-to-use 74-page guide is intended for property managers, green team members, and other decision-makers in faith communities who wish get to know how their buildings work and reduce the amount of energy they use in their buildings. It covers how to ‘tune-up’ your building through regular maintenance actions, details a wide range of retrofits that can help you save energy and money, offers insights to lighting, heating and cooling systems, and concludes with a 20-page DIY energy audit.

Due to the guide's size, we have divided it into the following sections for your convenience:

Introduction (34 kb pdf)

This describes a single session workshop for introducing the Greening Sacred Spaces program to your faith community. In this workshop, participants focus on aspects of daily life, such as food, home, place of worship to explore how they may make small and significant changes and apply their spirituality in practical ways to reduce energy consumption and help care for creation. The goals of the session include:

Faith & the Common Good derived the Green Rule poster from the classic Golden Rule found in major faith traditions. The Green Rule paraphrases the Golden Rule by saying: "Do unto the Earth as you would have it do unto you." Each Green Rule was chosen from the great texts of the world’s major religions and spiritual philosophies. The texts all acknowledge the natural world as an essential phenomenon through which we may better come to know the divine and our oneness with it.

Click the poster to the left to view a larger image.

The Green Rule Study Guide offers suggestions for how you can use the poster as an imaginative and practical tool to teach youth and adult members of your faith community and school system about the sacredness of creation in their own faith, while taking into consideration the similar beliefs of other faith traditions.

This beautiful full-colour poster comes from our original theme of Renewing the Sacred Balance, and is suitable for advertising presentations and workshops.

Steps to Greening is intended to give you and your faith community a quick overview of what is possible as you plan to green your sacred spaces and a ‘path’ to follow.

A brief overview of some options by which your faith community can finance energy audits, and proceed with retrofits. There are many types of potential funding for your project, provided by many different sources. Which ones you use will depend on your needs, your financial situation, and your eligibility.

Download Financing Options for Greening Your Sacred Space (263 kb pdf)

We offer many GSS case studies describing what various GSS faith communities have done to green their worship spaces, each one showing concrete details and statistics on savings. These case studies provide not just examples of what has been done but also inspiration to help your faith community get started.

Download "Greening in Faith Communities: Ten Community Profiles" (851k pdf)

The Energy Action Planner (EAP) is a 4-page booklet designed to be an easy way for individual members of any faith community to make changes in their own households to reduce their energy use and walk more lightly on the Earth. The EAP has two key objectives:

This planner walks you through an easy two-week plan of energy-reducing activities to get you started. It then gives you more options to “go the distance” to continue your energy savings beyond two weeks.

This Introductory double-sided foldout glossy sheet describes the GSS program and the services that Faith & the Common Good offers to assist faith communities in the greening, health-giving path towards eco-sustainability.