With roots dating back to 1814, The BTS Center is a private operating foundation in Portland, Maine, building on the legacy of the former Bangor Theological Seminary. Today The BTS Center seeks to catalyze spiritual imagination, with enduring wisdom, for transformative faith leadership by offering theologically grounded programs of spiritual and vocational formation, including workshops and retreats, learning communities, book studies, public conversations, and projects of applied research, all with an intention to cultivate and nurture spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world.
OUR MISSION:
To catalyze spiritual imagination
with enduring wisdom
for transformative faith leadership
OUR VISION:
Human hearts renewed,
justice established,
and creation restored
As the devastating effects of climate change continue to accelerate, The BTS Center recognizes that faith leaders and spiritual communities have a crucial role to play in challenging systems of separation, domination, extraction, and consumption, and nurturing a world that embodies values of justice, compassion, equity, hospitality, and mutual care.
We acknowledge that Christianity, as practiced particularly in white Western contexts, has been complicit in perpetuating damaging worldviews which have contributed to climate chaos. We also know that faith communities — particularly small ones — can help in shaping new and expanded worldviews, practicing life-giving cultural traditions, and engaging in rituals of lament to process grief and loss.
As trusted moral voices, faith leaders have tremendous opportunity to engage in the work of meaning-making and justice-seeking, and they need support, community, and resources to respond faithfully to the call of God and creation in a climate-changed world. The BTS Center seeks to provide programs of spiritual and vocational formation to equip leaders and communities with the resources needed for loving, hopeful, ecologically grounded service in a time of cultural and planetary upheaval.
We approach our work with a posture of “rigorous and reverent curiosity,” continually asking big questions, surfacing stories, collecting data, making meaning, and sharing our findings, while inviting our participants to undertake “small experiments with radical intent.”
We believe there is a divine urgency, a sacred calling, to this work of cultivating and nurturing spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world. We invite you to join us.
What does BTS stand for, anyway? No, we’re not associated with the K-Pop band, although we understand their music and social witness are really popular with young people around the world. We are the successor organization to the former Bangor Theological Seminary, an institution of higher education founded in 1814 that for two centuries carried out its mission to provide theological education and vocational formation for pastors who went on to serve churches around New England and beyond. While we don’t call ourselves “The Bangor Theological Seminary Center,” and while we are no longer an institution of higher education, we do seek to honor these significant roots, which run more than 200 years deep, in everything we do. So while BTS is not an acronym in the truest sense, we do intend our name to convey our deep respect, gratitude, and admiration for our predecessor organization and the many ancestors who stewarded this organization for more than 200 years, as well as our deeply held sense that our work today is an faithful extension of the Seminary’s work. We hope we’re honoring the Seminary’s legacy faithfully, while nurturing spiritual leadership that responds faithfully to the most critical and urgent issues of our day.
Would you believe me if I told you we were the forerunners a great spiritual renewal? What if I said this renewal would change our global culture at the end of this century? That it will see the emergence of a new mysticism in contrast to technology and a strong social conscience of sustainability and justice. We are at the very beginning of this movement. We will not all live to see its first moments of birth, but we will have the joy of knowing that we were the shoulders on which others stood to make it a reality. History will show that what we did today to lift up an open-minded spirituality, welcoming to all people, made a difference. Our choice to stand together, to advocate for justice, and to heal this planet will be recognized as the breakthrough. Because we did not give up, they excelled. Would you believe me if I told you that?
The BTS Center
97 India Street
Portland, Maine 04101
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