Photos of Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church by Lois Kimmelman.
By Lois Kimmelman, LEED AP
Editor’s note: Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church will host an in person double feature for the One Earth Film Fest at 6:30 p.m. Friday, March 10: “The Falconer” + “Mardi & The Whites.” Doors open 45 minutes early to enjoy refreshments, visit with community partners, check in/register, and get best seats. Free registration here.
Located just 20 minutes by bicycle from Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated house in Oak Park, Illinois, Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church is the Village’s epicenter of sustainability initiatives. The 22,500-square-foot church was built in 1900 and remained the same, more or less, until the early 2010’s, when its leaders bit the green bullet. By 2014, they had completed two major energy-saving upgrades to the building.
Dick Alton and Sally Stovall, whose names are engraved in these permeable pavers, also founded One Earth Collective, which was originally named Green Community Connections.
Both upgrades were, ingeniously, hidden from view. The first was the installation of geothermal boreholes, or wells, to take advantage of the Earth’s constant temperature to heat and cool the building. Though the church’s intent was never in doubt, there was limited space to drill wells on the church grounds. After conferring with the Village, the church chose to sink 52 wells 150 feet deep across the street in its parking lot, and connect them to the church via a network of underground pipes. At the same time, the parking lot’s asphalt pavement was replaced by permeable pavers to allow rainwater to seep into the soil below, rather than run off-site into the sewer system.
The second upgrade entailed installing a photovoltaic array of 99 rooftop solar panels to complement the new geothermal system. To avoid the challenges, both aesthetic and physical, of attaching the panels to the century-old church’s slanted roof, the panels were instead placed one by one on the flat roof of the adjacent education building.
Once the photovoltaic and geothermal systems were up and running, the church began to realize big reductions in its energy bills, and its congregation started experiencing more comfort during summer services now that the air around them was “conditioned.” Another payoff: freedom from the grid and from the old, antiquated boiler in the basement.
The butterfly garden honors Sally Stovall, who died from a massive stroke on May 21, 2019.
Since 2014, the church has moved closer to its goal of “net zero” energy status by signing onto a community solar program and encouraging its members to do the same. It has also replaced its old light bulbs with LED’s, put in energy-saving motion sensors to turn bathroom lights on and off, and added two electric car charging stations in the parking lot. A butterfly garden, rain garden, and two new trees top off its efforts to be carbon-free.
Euclid Avenue Church isn’t the only house of worship in Oak Park with so many green features. The famous Wright-designed Unity Temple nearby, for example, also runs on a geothermal heating/cooling system. But Euclid is unique in that it has a Green Action Team and its own Sustainability “Bible” full of green goals and environmentally sound practices, from composting to using nontoxic chemicals. The church periodically holds events like Earth Day dinners and the “Solar-bration” that marked the completion of the solar panel project. Not only that, but this church’s ambitious motto is “Love God, Live Green, Liberate All.”
Read more about historic buildings getting a green makeover on Lois Kimmelman’s website/blog, Historecycle. She promotes restoration and renovation, not demolition.
