Congratulations to St Andrew’s Church, Laverstock, as they celebrate both an Eco Church Silver award and Animal-Friendly Church award this week.
Nestled in a beautiful churchyard leading down to the River Bourne, St Andrews is visited by many animals both wild and tame, with companion animals being frequent visitors to their services and providing the encouragement they needed to become such an eco-friendly space.
Upon visiting the churchyard, it’s easy to see the hard work pay off. A multitude of different bat boxes, bird boxes, bug hotels, hedgehog houses and drinking bowls for furry friends are positioned around the picturesque grounds. The eco-tools provide a haven for often-overlooked indigenous wildlife, and an incredible opportunity for observing and being amongst creation.
Caring for God’s creation is one of the Church of England’s five marks of mission, but for the team at St Andrew’s, it’s also been linked closely with outreach.
Hannah Baker, a member of the PCC, said: “Becoming an ‘Animal-Friendly Church’ has created a range of new opportunities for us. Caring for animals is important – in its own right – as a response to God’s call to care for and value creation. However, we also recognised that being animal friendly was an outreach opportunity for those in our community who did not see the church as relevant to them. We particularly felt that our church grounds and the animal-friendly work we are doing there might be valued by the wider community and therefore should be shared and accessible to the whole village, not just members of our church.”
St Andrew’s also created the Facebook Group, ‘Wild About Laverstock’, in an attempt to boost this outreach even further. On the page, the whole community is invited to share photos of local wildlife, ideas about how to care for it, and any wild questions people have about the local area.
The church itself brought an automatic trail camera to provide regular updates to the page and has since captured footage of hedgehogs, foxes, cats, rats, wood pigeons, robins and other visiting critters that has well and truly sparked off the conversation in the village. Now with over 100 members on the page, St Andrew’s has held two face-to-face events in the church focusing on local endangered species. The first being a talk on bats, with the second being on hedgehogs.
To find out more about becoming an Eco Church, you can find the A Rocha website here.
Or, if to find out more about the Animal-Friendly Church initiative, you can visit the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals here.