Green Church in the Green State

All Souls Interfaith Gathering, founded in 1999, prides itself on being one of the greenest churches in the Green State. Their new sanctuary is a model of ecological correctness: locally harvested wood, bamboo flooring, compact fluorescent lights and a furnace that will heat using grass, corn and wood pellets.

I’d like to think we’re cutting edge, said the Rev. Mary Abele. She heads a congregation of 70 that is growing every week. “I suspect some come now because of our environmental practices.”

The new sanctuary’s west-facing windows capture one of the most stunning views you’ll ever see–rolling farm land, Lake Champlain and the snow-capped Adirondack Mountains beyond.

When the building opened, Abele told the Burlington Free Press that the views are “inspiration to help us understand who we are in connection to the environment and the divine.” It’s a theme that runs through everything ASIG does.

“The building needed to blend with the surrounding site rather than stand out. (We needed to) play the building down, make it inviting, make it calm, play on the beauty of the site and surroundings, let the building be the shelter from which one can appreciate the whole,” said Marty Sienkiewycz of SAS Architects in Burlington, VT., who designed the project with congregation members.

At ASIG, the earth is woven into every service. “There’s a connection between the environmental and the spiritual,” said Laurie Caswell Burke, ASIG’s environmental coordinator.

God’s Hand in the Storm

On February 5, 2008 tornadoes hit Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. Students and professors at this Southern Baptist institution pondered God’s hand in the storm. What does it say about the nature of God that the campus was devasted by tornadoes; and that no lives were lost, despite $40 million in damage?

Greg Thornbury, dean of the school of Christian studies, wants to explore in class discussions God’s opague and sometimes baffling motives. As students returned to campus to identify their smashed and overturned cars, they wondered how anyone managed to survive, and they wrestled with the role God played.

“Basically, I know God kept everyone safe,” said one 18-year-old student, “I don’t know why God let it happen–but I really believe he was testing every student here.”

But Thornbury warned that guessing the mind of God is a tricky proposition. God’s motive for destroying the school, he said, “is probably in the realm of things that belong to the Lord…But what we can say is, look at the solidarity here. Why do we have people from the whole country rallying around this cause? I think that says something about what God has revealed to us.”

Thornbury said that the true lesson–that people should respond to suffering with love and compassion–was already manifesting itself on campus.