One distinctive of the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition is an emphasis on community. Mennonites are typically a communal people who value strong ties to a local body of believers and who view faith as a journey undertaken together, not merely a personal spiritual quest. The Anabaptist tradition carries with it an emphasis on discipleship and accountability to a body of believers. In past years, whether or not you joined the army, bought a car or wore mini-skirts were considered matters of group discernment, not just individual decisions. While this attention to “right behavior” has been a mixed blessing, it is a powerful heritage to draw upon as we confront the many environmental challenges of the 21st century.

The problems we face are too complex and too all-pervasive to be solved by random acts of greenness on the part of a few environmentally-friendly individuals. We must think corporately and bring our congregations, our workplaces and the other institutions we are a part of along with us. 

Hence, this web site is organized according to the communities we belong to and work within: households, congregations, denominational agencies, schools, workplaces and the broader community.

The figures presented below are based on the membership of the Mennonite Church USA and the Mennonite Church Canada. Whether you belong to these denominations or not, they illustrate that if we focus on the social groupings we are already a part of, change is within our reach.

About Mennonite Households:

About 59,000 households are affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA. If each household bought 10 pounds of organic fair trade coffee this year, they would transfer over $860,000 into the hands of small farmers making a living wage through fair trade. *

MC Canada includes 24,000 youth. If each of those youth cut their screen time by 1 kilowatt hour per week (this might be 4-5 hours, depending on the type of television and computer involved) they could save enough electricity to power 4 homes year-round.

* http://www.equalexchange.coop/fair-trade; based on $1.46/lb. as the current minimum price for organic Fair Trade coffee.

About Mennonite Congregations:

MC USA includes 953 congregations. If each congregation chose one of the 1,009 U.S. species currently listed as endangered* and advocated on its behalf, every endangered plant and animal, vertebrate and invertebrate in the United States would have a defender—except the clams. Fifty-six congregations would have to double up if we wanted to cover the clams.

MC Canada includes 225 congregations. If each congregation held one worship service each year, focusing on God as creator and the care of creation, there could be one service daily from January to September, or an average of four per Sunday, year-round.

* U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Summary of Listed Species Listed Populations and Recovery Plans as of  Sat, 07 Feb 2009 http://ecos.fws.gov/tess_public/TESSBoxscore

About Mennonite Agencies

The MC USA web site lists over 500 organizations affiliated with the Mennonite Church. These include conference headquarters, mission and service agencies, camps, retirement homes, peace centers, publishing houses and agencies of many other types.

If each Mennonite agency replaced ten incandescent light bulbs with high efficiency florescent light bulbs this year, they would save a total of 2.25 million kilowatt hours, and keep over 3 million pounds of CO2 out of the air. That’s the equivalent of keeping 300 cars off the road for a year. Each organization would also have $650 to spend on something else.*
* www.energystar.gov/ia/business/bulk_purchasing/bpsavings_calc/ CalculatorCFLs.xls -

About Workplaces and Communities:

Each of the 18 major watersheds defined by The U.S. Geological Survey contains at least a few Mennonite churches. If one person from each of the 59,000 households mentioned above spent one day this year cleaning up his or her local watershed, they would contribute more hours than a full-time environmental professional would work in 29 years.

About Mennonite Schools:

Canadian Mennonite University, one of 11 Mennonite schools in Canada, won a campus commuter challenge twice during 2007, with 20% of students using bikes or public transportation to get to school during a given week. Imagine the CO2 saved if each of the 11 schools did as well year-round.