Canberra Baptist Church Wears Scarf For Climate
Friday June 18 2021. Canberra Baptist Church in Kingston will be draped in a huge scarf this weekend to highlight Australia's changing climate and the need for climate action.
The scarf will cover the entire church building from 12pm Saturday until #ShowYourStripes Day, Monday 21 June.
Members of the church are sewing together 100m worth of second-hand bed sheets to create a giant scarf to wrap around the church building to draw attention to the giant issue of climate change.
Reverend Belinda Groves says her team thought it was a crazy idea to put a scarf around a church.
"But it's crazier to stand by and do nothing while our climate gets more extreme," she said.
"It's a pretty big scarf - that's an understatement - but we think there needs to be some big changes to climate policy.
"We care about what's happening to our climate. We wanted to make a scarf - our whole church wanted to make a scarf - that showed how much we care."
The scarf is part of Common Grace's Knit for Climate Action initiative, inviting Christians from across Australia to knit a scarf with 101 stripes.
Each stripe represents a year from 1919 - 2019, with different colours indicating the average global temperature for that year.
Monday is #ShowYourStripes day, where knitters will meet with our parliamentarians in Canberra to gift the scarves and ask for urgent action be taken for climate change.
Common Grace CEO Brooke Prentis said Knit for Climate Action provided an opportunity to send a gracious but strong message to our federal leaders that people want to see urgent action now on climate change.
"I have been humbled by the time, effort, and individual stories of Common Grace supporters and knitters in creating more than 300 scarves, and still counting," Ms Prentis said.
"This represents thousands of hours of knitting and over 13,000 metres of wool."
On Monday 21 June, another creative instillation calling for climate action will be displayed at the Common Grace #ShowYourStripes Day event on the front lawns of Parliament House.
A sculpture of the world's longest knitting needles and boulder-sized balls of wool, made by artist Keith Chidzey (
