Churches encouraging parishioners to go green is not new. Evangelicals were the first to blaze the trail and were followed by other Christian denominations, said Sheree Ruhl, assistant education coordinator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
"The evangelicals are really at the forefront and have embraced creation care as the call of the Christian," she said.
Ruhl, a Presbyterian, has been preaching to churches for a couple of years about forming customized covenants for their congregations to follow to reduce their carbon footprints. In 2006, she started working for the interfaith Chesapeake Covenant Congregations, which is trying to get churches in the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed to reduce pollution. Now she speaks to churches on her own and will speak at St. Anne's on Sunday about the church forming its own covenant.
The Episcopal Church formed its environmental network in the early 1990s to encourage an environmental ministry among its parishes and other faiths. Churches have banded together regionally to work on projects. Some have replaced bulbs with CFLs while others have installed solar panels.
The solar panel idea took hold of Wickizer, a former physicist, when he arrived at the church about a year and a half ago and encouraged congregants to form an environmental ministry. He said historians might have a problem with putting them on the roof of the church - founded as the first church in the Colonial capital more than 300 years ago - so he is considering putting panels on the parish house two blocks away.
The $100,000 solar panel project will have to take its place behind a more pressing problem: Seven of the eight halogen lights on the exterior of the steeple are out. To fix it, the church has to hire a steeplejack to rappel down the side of the church to replace them.
To save energy and provide a safer way to fix future problems, the church wants to install light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, on the inside of the steeple. The light would be funneled through fiber optic cables that would be fed through openings in the room. Not only would the lights save energy - more than CFLs - but they could be replaced from the inside, Wickizer said. He estimates the project could cost $20,000.
The church also wants to replace the interior lights with LEDs. The only problem is that the lights tend to emit a bluish hue, which some parishioners don't like, Wickizer said. A few of the 1,200 parishioners objected when he placed blue paper recycling bins inside the church. The bins stayed, but Wickizer anticipates a harder sell with the lighting.
"It's part of the slow change," Wickizer said.
Chapman said replacing the light bulbs in the church steeple is a simple way to show people that even small changes can make a big difference over time.
"It makes people more aware of what they can do as individuals," she said. "We're making an impact locally and globally."
