Fuel-saving features at Trinity English Lutheran Church in downtown Fort Wayne include a geothermal heating and cooling system. It is the first church to win an Energy Patriot Award from U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.
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It’s got a geothermal heating and cooling system under the parking lot and solar panels up on the roof.
What’s next – a windmill on top of the steeple?
No, that’s not in the wind – at least “not yet,” says the Rev. Fred Hasecke, pastor of Trinity English Lutheran Church.
But that doesn’t mean members of this downtown Fort Wayne landmark aren’t serious about going green.
Last month, when Trinity dedicated its new $5 million addition, the congregation joined the ranks of religious groups who have incorporated Earth-friendly features into their houses of worship.
“As far as green aspects, at this point, we’re probably about as far along as you can go,” Hasecke says.
Experts say green churches, temples and mosques are still rare in Indiana. But federal energy officials are hoping to change that.
If more religious flocks would occupy greener pastures, they say, it would not only benefit the environment, it could also save the congregations money.
According to the federal Department of Energy, America’s 300,000 houses of worship spend more than $2 billion a year buying energy. If congregations cut their buildings’ energy use by 10 percent, the congregations could save nearly $200 million a year or use that money for mission or charity work.
Meanwhile, the congregations would free up 5.4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity for other uses without added expense or pollution. Greenhouse gases would be reduced by the equivalent of pulling more than 400,000 vehicles off the road.
Jerry Lawson, manager of the Energy Star for Congregations program tailored to the needs of religious groups, says savings can be easily achieved.
Congregations with existing buildings typically can save nearly a third of their energy costs with no- or low-cost maintenance tweaks or targeted investments in green technology, he says; even greater savings could be achieved by building green features into new buildings.
To those ends, the program has published a comprehensive online guide and new cost-tracking software, Lawson says.
The program also offers free, Web-based seminars for congregational leaders and energy professionals available by e-mail to answer technical questions when religious groups are evaluating energy costs, green proposals or return-on-investment calculations.
An annual awards program rewards congregations that achieve substantial savings. Forty awards have been given nationwide since 1999, most recently in September. The first award for new buildings is in the works, Lawson says.
An Indiana congregation has never won one of the awards, and only 20 Indiana congregations are among the 1,500 nationally affiliated with Energy Star. Maplewood Mennonite Church is the lone affiliated congregation in the Fort Wayne area.
Lawson says he is at a loss to explain why, especially because the area has a reputation for being religious.
“We’re talking the heartland there and strong religious values, but not every denomination has yet taken this on. Scripturally, they might be in a different mode; it might not have been talked about in the pulpit yet,” he says.
“This (green movement in churches) is still very much a developing phenomenon. It’s been only in the last three years that it’s really taken off.”
Still, some megachurches involved in Energy Star have saved millions of dollars on heating and cooling costs, while some smaller congregations have savings that amount to thousands, Lawson says.
Costs a hurdle
Ron Dick, founding principal of Fort Wayne’s Design Collaborative, says few area congregations building new churches have even asked about going green.
His architectural firm has designed more than a dozen churches in recent years and has green projects for businesses and non-profits in the works.
“I think the heart of that is that churches have a hard enough time raising the original capital (for a new building), and … you’ve got to invest on the front end a little bit more for (green) things like geothermal systems,” he says.
“You get a payback, but the churches we usually work with, it’s a hurdle for most of them.”
Church managers, Dick says, tend to see operating costs as a more minor part of their budgets than owners of buildings that get hard use 24 hours a day, every day. But that is changing as congregations have more activities, he says.
“With churches, we try to implement small (green) pieces wherever we can, but we have not been successful in registering a true green project from start to finish,” Dick says.
Architect Steve Park of Markle, owner of Basic Elements Design, a green-integrated architectural firm, says he thinks green church projects will pick up when the area’s construction economy does.
“There’s still a lack of knowledge or understanding about what green is, but it’s becoming a bigger issue when people are doing projects,” Park says. “There are always questions now about green. Two or three years ago, I was promoting going green, and I’d bring it up and get that deer-in-the-headlights look.”
Park currently has no church projects on his agenda. Design Collaborative, however, is working on two projects with some green elements.
One is an expansion and remodel of St. John’s Lutheran Church at Cook and Oday roads that will incorporate a white, low-slope roof for energy efficiency, says Jeremy Hatfield, a Design Collaborative associate.
A new building for St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Angola has some green features, including better insulation and insulated windows, he adds.
Some aspects of worship spaces make green design a challenge, Park says. For example, sanctuaries typically have used energy-gobbling high ceilings and large window areas to create an aura of the sacred, he says.
But sanctuaries can be designed to have that look and feel without large expanses of exterior wall vulnerable to transfers of heated or cooled air, he says.
Many green aspects are readily adaptable to houses of worship, Parks says. Those would include programmable thermostats and lighting, geothermal heating and cooling, solar-power generation and the use of sustainable building materials such as natural fibers and fast-growing woods such as bamboo.
Heating key
Martin says avoiding heating and cooling losses at Trinity were part of the impetus for the new addition on the church’s Washington Boulevard side.
“They have a lot of perimeter walls that weren’t insulated, so now they’re all enclosed and the new walls are very well insulated, as is the roof,” Martin says.
The new space, intended as a central gathering area that will tie together the building’s east wing and west wings, will be heated geothermally.
The system uses three closed vertical loops and three wells that go down to 370 feet for heating and cooling transfers, Martin says.
The wells are under land acquired when the former St. Paul’s Catholic Church was torn down, and the mechanical equipment for the system are hidden in a closet. The project also re-engineered most of the church’s lighting and better regulated its humidity. Its solar array is expected to generate enough electricity for the church.
Because the solar system is not yet working, it’s too soon to know how much money the new features will save, Hasecke says. But, Martin says, “What we were trying to do was to reduce operating costs, or at least hold them in place.”
The project, which also makes the church more accessible to people with disabilities, recently became the first church to win an Energy Patriot Award from U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., Hasecke says.
The pastor says that nearly every faith tradition has teachings on caring for the Earth that going green can tap.
“We wanted to be good stewards of the resources the Lord has given us,” he says. “This addition and the geothermal and solar systems help us do that.”
