reBuild

Christianity Today is an evangelical magazine whose theology I can't always embrace, but I do read it because it speaks to and for a large constituency. I was pleasantly surprised by a recent article  called An Architect for the Green-Friendly Masses. I found it encouraging on a number of fronts. This is an excerpt from the article:

San Francisco boasts a ban on plastic grocery bags and a high-end public transportation system. Its policies—including its "green" citywide building code—are more aggressive than most on environmental concern. This is what attracted architect Jill Kurtz, 31, to the city; she thought it was "the epicenter" of the sustainability movement. She discovered, though, that "San Francisco is not leaps and bounds ahead of many other big cities. There are still a lot of people here who are just figuring sustainability out, or . . . still wanting to do 'business as usual.' "

 

Kurtz, a Christian, also noticed that many SF companies "made sustainability unaffordable, especially to clients who are just starting to explore what it means to be better stewards of energy." Having graduated from architecture school only a few years earlier, Jill decided she wanted address the class issue. She and a friend launched their own firm, reBuild, "to make sustainability accessible for people who couldn't afford high-end consulting," Kurtz says...

More recently, reBuild extended its services to churches, when it partnered with Bay Area Chinese Bible Church in 2011 and 2012 to construct a new worship center. "Our church design team really values sustainability," says Pastor Steve Quen. "We wanted to showcase our belief in creation care to our community and church members." Kurtz says she found Quen's team "refreshing" to work with, since she had previously encountered churches that were apathetic about creation care.

 

Kurtz and her colleagues helped the church design a Sunday school curriculum that teaches kids about creation care and cheered on Quen in designing a sermon series on stewardship. "It was cool to see how sustainability was not just applied in the building project but [also] was infiltrating operations as well," she says.

 

 

 

What an encouraging story on every front. Thoughts?