Your church doesn’t exist to just keep the lights on and the boiler running, says Clare Lewis of the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program (ILP). Your congregation gathers each week to worship, for education and fellowship, and to do mission. Careful environmental stewardship can help your church meet more of those important goals, and improve both the comfort and functionality of your building, too.

That’s the goal of the Restoring Creation Loans, a joint venture by the Presbyterian Foundation and the Investment and Loan Program. The program grew out of both organizations asking: how can we help churches be more energy efficient and provide more money for their mission?

This is a stewardship question from two perspectives, Lewis said. “‘How can we better care for God’s creation?’ as well as ‘How can we better steward our resources to use them best for mission and ministry?’”

Since its inception in the summer of 2015, 65 congregations have had loans processed and closed, for a total of more than $10.3 million.

“Those dollars are going directly into helping our churches become energy efficient,” Lewis said. Any savings that churches have on energy means that they have more funds available to do mission and ministry. “You are not in mission and ministry to pay your electric bill – you are in it to do ministry. We like to call it ‘Recycling your savings on energy into your mission budget.’”

Facts and figures

Consider these important facts about churches and religious buildings.

• An average congregation can save $8,000 to $17,500 per year by employing energy efficient products, according to a report released by the National Council of Churches.
• Upgrading your church’s lighting system is one of the easiest places to start when ‘greening’ your building. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that $17 billion could be saved by U.S. building owners and tenants each year with lighting upgrades.
• The EPA estimates that if the United States’ 300,000 religious worship buildings cut their energy use by 25 percent, over 5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions would not be expended into the air – the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road.

Many churches, Lewis explained, spend a significant portion of their yearly budget to ‘keep the old boiler going.’ There are also many church facilities that do not have a way to isolate their heating and cooling from one part of the building to another. So, an area of the building that may only be used once a week, such as a sanctuary, is heated all week long to keep church offices warm during the winter months.

The Restoring Creation Loan is structured to provide the best possible interest rates, a reduced equity requirement of 10 percent instead of the typical 20 percent, and can be structured so that the length of the loan can be matched to the potential return on investment of the energy savings. So, for instance, if a congregation can save $300/month on energy costs from the improvements made, the loan payments can be structured not to exceed that, to not place an additional financial burden on the congregation.

Funding for the loans comes from the Foundation’s church loan funds, and from the Investment and Loan Program’s invested funds. “We quickly realized that when a church makes a change from pretty much any old boiler, there is a savings, there is an impact,” Lewis said. Energy efficiency can range from putting in a new boiler, zonal systems for isolating heating and cooling, or what Lewis refers to as the more ‘sexy’ solar panels.

Replacing lighting, changing thermostats

Westminster Presbyterian Church in Bay City, Michigan, is one of the congregations that received a Restoring Creation Loan. They used the loan to replace older light fixtures with energy-efficient LED lighting and to upgrade thermostats to a zoned system, allowing them to heat and cool specific areas of their church campus.

“We are grateful to the Investment and Loan Program for working with us to practice faithful environmental stewardship as we renovated our church facility,” shared pastor Rev. Matthew Schramm. “We’ve calculated that LED fixtures reduce the maximum energy use from lighting to just 30 percent of the previous total,” he continued.

The church’s new zoned heating controls have enabled them to stop wasting energy by heating parts of the building when they are not in use. “The Restoring Creation Loan is an important part of our project, helping us not just be better stewards of natural resources, but reducing our energy costs and helping us be better stewards financially,” said Schramm.

Westminster’s experience is exactly what the Foundation and Investment and Loan Program want to see. “This is so much more than just having a new air conditioning unit,” shared Clare Lewis about the Restoring Creation Loan program. “When a congregation reduces its carbon footprint it is not just helping that congregation, but it is helping all of us.”

For more information about how your congregation can apply for a Restoring Creation Loan, contact Clare Lewis at 502-569-5865.