We believe we are called in Genesis to care for God's creation. You can read more about the ELCA's social statement on creation care here. At Mt Zion this takes the form of several projects designed to reduce our carbon footprint and improve the world around us.
In 2024 we constructed a 40 kW array of solar panels on the flat roof of our Education Wing. It is designed to supply about one-third of our electricity over the course of a year, reducing our dependency on fossil fuel-based electricity and reducing our electricity bills.
More info: Solar Edge monitoring website
Our pollinator garden beautifies our west lawn while also providing a variety of native wildflowers that are excellent food sources for bees and butterflies. Our plants include milkweed, bee balm, butterfly weed, phlox, lily, sage, prairie sunflower, coneflower, geranium, agastache, anise hyssop, Joe Pye weed, dill, coreopsis, fennel, rudbeckia, and shasta daisy.
More info: www.themonarchtrail.org
Our vegetable garden nearby gives these pollinators more opportunities to find food, and in turn they pollinate our vegetables, which we donate to the clients of our Tosa Cares food pantry. Our plants include corn, wax beans, spaghetti squash, potatoes, and various kinds of tomatoes. There are also several flowers, such as sunflowers, calendula, and sage, which not only make this garden prettier, but also attract the pollinators that will help it grow.
Our next big project is to install a subsurface stormwater storage system under our main parking lot. The preliminary design shown here will capture all the rainwater that falls onto the impervious surfaces of our building and main parking lot (with the help of a bioswale in the northeast corner), sequestering it in an underground chamber until it can percolate slowly into the soil. This helps avoid overloading MMSD's water treatment system (surges of stormwater runoff periodically result in releasing untreated sewage into our rivers and Lake Michigan), so we will be doing our part to improve the water quality for everyone!
More info: green infrastructure
This project will be paid for entirely by a grant from MMSD via the Fresh Coast Green Community program and designed by Greenprint Partners. Detailed design of the subsurface system will occur in 2025, the project will be bid to construction subcontractors in early 2026, and construction will be completed by the end of 2026.
We have been making improvements to the energy efficiency of our building over the past few years, resulting in Mt Zion being named a 2024 Energy Star building! Major improvements came from:
- upgrading to LED light bulbs and fixtures
- installing glass block windows in the Fellowship Hall
- switching to programmable thermostats
- weather-stripping windows and skylights
Our Energy Star rating is 85, which means we use less energy (natural gas and electricity) than 85% of churches of a similar size in a similar climate. This reduces our carbon footprint, which helps the environment (making us good stewards of God's creation), but it also saves money on our utility bills (making us good stewards of our finances)!
More info: Energy Star program for buildings
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