Get started!

The Eco Church survey is a self-assessment tool to assess your church’s progress and guide you to take further action as you work towards a Bronze, Silver or Gold Eco Church award. To get started, simply register your church on the online platform and start a survey! Once you’ve started a survey, you can log in at any time and update your survey to see your progress. 

Try not to be daunted by the prospect of ‘doing’ Eco Church, the first step is to get started - you may be surprised how much you are already doing! The questions in each category will act as a prompt to take further steps. Remember, the overall objective of  Eco Church is to help your church engage with caring for the earth as a key part of our Christian faith in response to the climate and nature crisis. Getting started with Eco Church offers some helpful tips to consider as you begin your Eco Church journey.

A framework for action

The survey takes you through five key areas of church life:

• Worship and teaching
• Buildings and energy
• Land and nature
• Community and global engagement
• Lifestyle

The survey accommodates churches in very different settings, with pathways for churches with large to small buildings or no buildings at all. Similarly, there are different pathways for churches with land, to little or no land at all. 

The survey framework is the same for all three award levels - Bronze, Silver, and Gold. 

Explore our Eco Church Survey summary page for overviews of all five categories and to view the survey questions in both English and Welsh. This page also includes printer friendly versions of the survey. Plus, there are loads of Eco Church resources to help you as you seek to embed care for creation within your worshipping community.

Making progress

As you complete the online survey, the progress bar will show you how close you are to reaching an award level. In order to gain an award, you need to reach an award level in all five categories.  You may discover you’re already close to achieving an award! If not, don’t worry – the idea is to complete further actions to get closer. You can use the survey questions as a prompt for action and to plan your next steps. Return to the survey at any time to update and review your progress.

Applying for an Eco Church Award

Once all the categories on your survey indicate that you have reached an award level, you can apply via the platform. Your church leader will need to sign off your church’s application to confirm your survey responses. See our help guide for submitting your survey for an award application.

Going for gold

Applying for a gold award involves some extra steps beyond the Eco Church survey. This is so that we can learn more about your activities and achievements and understand how Eco Church is embedded in your worshipping community. 

Please refer to the supporting guidance: Applying for a Gold Eco Church Award.

To apply for a gold Eco Church award, you will need to:

• Have reached gold in all categories on the online survey
• Complete the supporting evidence Pro Forma
• Have submitted all supporting documents (detailed in the Applying for a Gold Eco Church Award guidance) via the online Platform.

Please note, the pro forma is a Google document set as ‘view only.’ You will need to save a copy to your own drive to be able to edit it, or download the file as a Microsoft Word document.

Celebrate!

Celebrating your award is an important part of the process. Once your award has been confirmed, each member of your church team will receive a confirmation email. This contains instructions to access your certificate and web badge for celebrating your award, as well as how to make a donation as part of your award application. It will also tell you how you can share your Eco Church story to inspire others, and suggest some next steps. We encourage you to share the news of your Eco Church award in your church and wider community! 

You can also order a handmade Eco Church award plaque to display in your church. Order directly from the Grassmarket Community Project here.