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BY KAYLA SPEARS
UMCONNECTION STAFF

Green. It hasn’t been just the name of a color for a long time. Green has become so much more than a description of grass, emeralds or shamrocks. Green now defines a collective action taken by millions of people to get everyone caring for Planet Earth.

The BWC Mission Center has recently taken efforts to become green. Starting in 2011 we will become better stewards and become better examples for those looking to us for guidance. We are taking the long, hard road to become green and sticking to it. Being green is about more than just recycling; it’s about the way we handle our day to day activities as a corporation and as a community of faith.

Adam Werbach, environmental activist, stated in a speech in the spring of 2008, that green is about the environment and his new movement, Blue, is about the people.

The Baltimore-Washington Conference believes very strongly that its environmental movement needs to include people. More than just green, we’re insisting on blue.

Werbach worked with Wal-Mart and advised their employees to adopt a PSP or a personal sustainability practice. It is a lovely and meaningful cross between a resolution and paying it forward. Your PSP can be something as simple as vowing to recycle. Or like one female worker, once she had tackled recycling, decided to lose weight and in turn control her type 2 diabetes, so that she could sustain her family, and they themselves could go off and be good stewards.

Think about what would happen if everyone actually did one small thing. As children of God and leaders of the church we can make that happen.

That is the purpose of the conference’s new Green Church Immersion series – to educate based on God’s teachings; to help all understand that we need to love and take care of this world the way God would want us to.

Churches, like Bethany UMC in Ellicott City, have taken that first step by creating an Environmental Stewardship Ministry.

“Our church did not participate in a county recycling program for years after it was available. It was simply a matter of contacting the county recycling office and having a representative deliver the containers and instructions. The program has been a huge success. Trash and garbage going into the landfill is now less than one-third what it was,” Jim Gracie wrote in his Green Church devotional.

Green is about much more than recycling. Whether you believe that global warming is a myth or not, we must all understand that, regardless of politics, this earth and the environment in which we live are not in the same shape they once were. We owe it to ourselves to fix what is wrong and set an example of good stewardship.

To make being a green or blue church easier, the conference is providing the materials in the Green Church Immersion series free of charge on its website. The Immersion series provides six sermon guidelines and worship aids and six weeks of daily devotionals. The materials were written by environmental activists in area churches as a companion guide to Rebekah Simon-Peter’s Green Church books.

If you haven’t already, it’s time to make a start. Preaching your position is good but things won’t change until action is taken.

Kayla Spears, a BWC communications associate, is helping to lead environmental stewardship efforts at the conference Mission Center in Fulton.