The Green Team

Make Your Mark - Green Day!

Saint Mark has changed its light bulbs and programmed our thermostats. We recycle our worship folders. Now it's time to do what we do best - serve our community! In an effort to make a difference in the fight against climate change and increasing utilities costs, the Saint Mark Green Team is sponsoring a Make Your Mark - Green Day to help two local family shelters improve their environmental stewardship and energy efficiency. On Saturday, July 26, volunteers will visit shelters in the Grant Park and LaVista areas to replace light bulbs, install weather stripping, water heater blankets, thermostats and light fixtures. The only skills required are the desire to help and the willingness to serve - although if you are an electrician or know how to properly change a light fixture, we'll be sure to keep you busy!

In order to better coordinate our efforts with the shelters, we ask you to contact us to let us know you would like to participate. Contact us, greenteam@stmarkumc.org, 404.873.2636. Due to shelter logistics, we ask that participants be no younger than 12, and anyone younger than 16 be accompanied by a caregiver. We will meet at the shelters at 8:30am and be finished no later than 12:30 pm. Maybe you'll pick up a new skill or meet a new friend! Please join us to do what Saint Mark does so well – serve our community.

In November 2006 the Green Team replaced more than 100 incandescent bulbs around our church with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). As a result of this change, we expect to save over $2,000 in our energy bills and prevent approximately 40,000 pounds of C02 from being released. To calculate the potential savings resulting from changes in your own home, visit www.environmentaldefense.org.  There are many ways you can make a real difference in the health of our environment. Start now.

The Saint Mark Green Team provides you with weekly tips for energy savings, water conservation, transportation alternatives, environmental activities for kids, smart consumer choices, and even ways to just simplify your life! Click here for the Green Team Tip of The Week.

On Earth Day Sunday, April 20, 2008, Presian Burroughs, Saint Mark Member and Interim Associate Director of Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, gave this Prayer of Confession during morning worship:

Creator God, You who are Holy Trinity, by your spoken Word you created all that is seen and unseen. That Word is Jesus Christ, through whom and for whom you created this and all worlds.

We thank you for making creation astounding with complexity and variety and for calling it very good.

We praise you for entrusting us with so great a responsibility, that of caring for creation.

We acknowledge our dependence on your world- The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat.

We confess our polluting influence we so often have on your world– the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we farm.

Open our eyes, O gracious Creator, to see the destruction we cause by our careless consumption.

Open our ears, O merciful God, to hear the groaning of all creation and the cries of those without voice.

Open our hearts, O compassionate Lover, to feel remorse for our unfaithful care of your creation.

And so, enable us to change our ways. Give us a vision of faithful living on this great globe. Empower us to make both the simple and complex changes you desire for us. Amen.

Learn the truth about global warming and what the faith community, Saint Mark, and YOU can do to respond! Click here to learn more about An Inconvenient Truth.

Click here to visit Interfaith Power & Light.