And by media here I mean books, magazines, newspapers … in other words printed material.

I’ve long been a quiet evangelist for the green movement – not that I am an out and out recycling nutjob or constantly turning off lights, etc but I do try and remind folks where it’s blindingly obvious that we all can help to save our planet.

One of the ways I’ve been trying to drive the Church in this is by moving to what I’m terming as online publishing. Take last Sunday morning for example … I walked in and was greeted with a smile, a hug and no less than six individual bits of paper. Each had a valid reason for its existence but equally each could have been condensed down to a couple of lines and put on one piece. After the service I lost count of how many of these bundles of six were left languishing on their seats forgotten by their owners.

Is there an answer? I think so but the onus to drive it has to come from our leaders as they are the ones getting the designer(s) to generate this content.

First and foremost we need to look into exactly what is being handed out and why. Does it need to be printed out? If so, does it need to be handed out to every member or is it meant for external distribution? If for members (and I ought to clarify that I also mean attenders here as well) then do we need the huge glossy flyer for what essentially boils down to a date, time and type of service?

For regular content, such as a newsletter or magazine can we not get these (on the whole) delivered by electronic means? In our Church we are fortunate that most of the members are internet enabled and have personal email addresses. For those that don’t we can still run off the odd dozen copies or so.

I’m sure I don’t need to teach any whom read this to suck eggs but I’m raising this today to remind myself to address the issue with my church leaders and to challenge the tech community to suggest alternatives when the guaranteed “but what about’s” start coming at us.

So what do you do in your Church to reduce your carbon footprint?