MCCN Solar Guide
Mennonite Creation Care Network has created a how-to booklet for churches on going solar. We are featured in the booklet and listed as solar coaches. As a solar coach, Heather will be a panelist on a solar panel panel (smile emoji) January 27th hosted by MCCN.
MCCN asks for your help in spreading the word.
Please share this solar guide with at least one other church or nonprofit that has never considered renewable energy–or would not have access to this information.
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Anabaptist Disabilities Network
Barrier-Free Grant
helping congregations break down barriers
$350 awarded to TCMF for steps
We have filled out a grant application to help fund a project of building steps up to our upper lawn. The grant was granted for the full amount requested $350, which we estimate to be half the materials cost to put in-laid steps up the embankment. Come spring we will have a workday to complete the project.
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LOOKING AHEAD
- WINTER WILD CHURCH continues second Sundays 3pm Meadow View Farm, home of the Wolfe pack. Bundle up, bring blankets and warm drinks. The fire pit will be going!
- LENT begins Ash Wednesday February 22nd with Easter falling on Sunday April 9th
- IPL's Faith Climate Action week has been announced for April 14-23. The 2023 theme is "Living the Golden Rule: Just Transition to a clean energy economy."
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Meet a TCMF Permaculture Garden plant: Crimson Clover (Trifolium incarnatum)
A nitrogen-fixing ground cover, we planted this underneath the sunflowers in the peace garden. Sunflowers are heavy feeders and so crimson clover was an intentional choice to help build the soil. Unlike other hardy clovers that return each year, this non-aggressive clover will die back over the winter. It's beautiful strawberry-red blooms are attractive to pollinators. As you make garden plans over the winter months, consider using cover crops in 2023. Our seed came from American Meadows, a Vermont company worth checking out.
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Quarterly Update
SOLAR GENERATION
@ TCMF
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SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMEBER
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This Quarter
Generated: 3,065 kWh
Used: 884 kWh
Donated: 2,181 kWh
Estimated Value to BBC: $503
Estimated Value to TCMF: $168
Total Value for Quarter: $671
Grand Total
Generated: 71,816 kWh
Used: 29,233 kWh (27,444 kWh from Solar, 1,789 kWh from the grid)
Donated: 44,372 kWh
Estimated Value to BBC: $10,698
Estimated Value to TCMF: $5,097
Total Value: $15,795
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MEMBER SPOTLIGHT - Omar Zook
(photos taken by Omar)
Q: What is something you love about creation?
A: I have always loved the woods and hiking, the past several years I have been fascinated with colored mushrooms realizing that they all grow from decaying material. Every year one can see different shapes and colors of these amazing mushrooms. I am sending you a few but I have many.
We also love fall foliage and spend some time each year driving some back roads to enjoy this amazing part of nature. Janice always said fall was her favorite season of the year but she has been a little less enthused about it in recent years because it reminds her of what season comes next!
Q: What is something you do to care for creation?
A: As far as what I do to help nature, I compost and I take special care of my milk weed plants for the monarch’s and we grow some of our own food in the garden.
 
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KIDS CARE CORNER
Can you create a creation care Haiku?
Did you know? Haikus are Japanese poetry. There are 3 lines. The first and third lines both have 5 syllables. The middle line has 7 syllables. The lines do not usually rhyme. Haikus are so short that they are often about simple, easily known things such as animals or seasons. Explore writing a haiku or two. Share it with our church friends on the listserve this winter or during a sunday service.
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Free Online Film Screening: Inhabitants
Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 12:00 AM – Thu, Dec 29, 2022, 11:30 PM EST
Inhabitants follows five Native American Tribes across deserts, coastlines, forests, and prairies as they restore their traditional land management practices. For millennia Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain traditional land management practices. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. As the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America's original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.
Free and open to all. Register for the free film link here. Donations are welcome and go to support our local arts community. Make donations at https://pentanglearts.org/get-involved/donations/
Hosted by Sustainable Woodstock and Pentangle Arts. Made possible by our underwriters VERMONT COMMUNITY FOUNDATION and MASCOMA BANK and sponsors Ellaway Group, The Unicorn, Yankee Bookshop, and Mark Knott DDS.
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DO JUST ONE THING
Let heaven and Nature
SING!
Poetry and music are beautiful and biblical ways of praising our creator God. As we embrace the winter months, find warmth, comfort, joy, peace, hope and love in praising God through writing and reading poetry, listening to music and singing. Notice how often creation is the subject matter of songs and poetry. Our church library and local libraries are great places to find books of poetry and music. Here is a Christmas poem from WENDELL BERRY from his 1987 Sabbath poems
“REMEMBERING THAT IT HAPPENED ONCE…”
Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.
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TCMF Creation Care Committee
Laura Beidler
Navy Graber
Steve McCloskey
Heather Wolfe
This is a voluntary team for those interested in helping to guide our church's involvement in creation care. We will plan to meet quarterly and connect informally between meetings on an as needed basis. Ideas from all are welcome on how we can intentionally as a congregation and as individuals care for creation as a way of living out our love of God and love of neighbors.
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A NOTE FROM STEVE
The winter solstice (December 21) marks the point on the calendar when there is the least amount of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere. It is appropriately called “the darkest day of the year”. However, it is also the point on the calendar at which the darkness will begin to recede and light will increase. (Some Christians have called December 21 “John the Baptist Day” because of this increase of light, evoking the words of John 3:30, “He must increase and I must decrease”). Various religions honor light with celebrations in this dark and relatively cold time of the year with a celebration of light. Whether or not Jesus was born on December 25, it is appropriate that we, as Christians, can use this occasion of the natural increase of daylight to celebrate Christ's coming into the darkness.
While the Gospel of John does not have a Nativity story, John 1:9 speaks of the event of Christ's Incarnation in this way: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world”. With this in mind, among the facets of Christmas that warrant celebration is the notion of light becoming incarnate (in human flesh) and living among us. The revelatory nature of light—and its ability to expose what would otherwise be concealed–is worth paying attention to.
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The Gospel of John uses legal language in which the religious authorities place Jesus under judgment (John 7:24), yet Jesus who “did not come to judge the world” (John 3:17) still in his mere being reveals the truth about the motives of those who would seek to kill him.
I see in this celebration of “light coming into the world” an opportunity for us to live in the light; for new truths about us to be revealed. The holiday season brings out busyness, conflicts with family (as we often gather with relatives), sense of obligation (sending Christmas cards, decorating homes, etc). In all of these seasonal expectations, we have an opportunity to live in the light and observe our own motives and patterns. The revelation that comes out of these moments can illuminate more of our lives that would otherwise be hidden–and even if it’s difficult to embrace aspects of ourselves (or our motives) we can find them on display in the season of light. This Advent, may we welcome the illuminative power of light as an opportunity for revelation and self-awareness in light of the incarnation of the One who is full of "grace and truth" (cf. John 1:18).
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CONTACT US
Have ideas, stories, resources you'd like to share related to creation care?
Contact Heather Wolfe,
Taftsville Chapel's creation care liaison
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