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At local churches, bells toll for environment

By Cate Lecuyer
staff writer
Published: November 21, 2008

BEVERLY — Church bells over the weekend and next week will ring 350 times all across Beverly and the world — and it has nothing to do with services.

Rather, it's an international, interfaith effort to raise awareness about the environmental state of our planet.

"We've been given the planet by God to care for, and we haven't done a very good job," said the Rev. Manny Faria at St. Peter Episcopal Church on Ocean Street.

After the Sunday service, 35 children from the parish will each ring the steeple bell 10 times, from about 11:30 a.m. to noon. The Second Congregational Church on Cabot Street will also ring its bells 350 times tomorrow, tolling 50 times every half-hour, from 9:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.

The magic 350 number is, according to the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, "the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that our planet can sustain without causing cataclysmic and irreversible damage to life as we know it."

We're currently at 385 parts per million and climbing. The global effort is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 350 before the planet warms to the point of irreversible destruction, according to the campaign.

"God's creation is dying, and if we don't do something about it, people are going to suffer," said the Rt. Rev. Bud Cederholm, bishop suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. "We're going to partner with government and partner with industries to make a difference."

Cederholm helped organize the bell-ringing campaign among Episcopal churches, which are heavily involved with the movement, but it stretches across denominations. Chimes will sound from churches of Unitarian and Methodist, Catholic and Protestant denominations, as well as from synagogues and mosques.

"It's really an interfaith movement that has begun," Cederholm said.

The movement also extends beyond religion and is part of a global grassroots campaign to combat climate change by organizing events around the number 350 — from demonstrations by schoolchildren in India, to a local art contest in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

In terms of the bell-ringing effort, the goal is to get 350 churches to chime anytime between this Sunday, which is the Feast of Christ the King, and next Sunday, which is the first Sunday of Advent.

But only a handful of churches that are participating have registered on www.350.org, and some have started early. The Tabernacle Congregational Church in Salem rang its bells on Nov. 2.

The movement is gathering steam, and when church bells "start ringing like crazy," Faria said he hopes people will take the time to reflect on the last eight years during which the U.S. government did little to take on global warming.

"Hopefully, people are going to hear these bells and stop and think," he said. "What better way for a wake-up call than to ring bells?"

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