What we’re about

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.

Curious about our organizational name?

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.

Celebrating Convocation 2024 and Looking Forward to Convocation 2025!

Early plans are coming together for Convocation 2025 — the 120th annual! 

First spring, then summer, and in time, fall will draw us back together, in person and online, for another inspiring Convocation gathering for learning, respite, and community. We hope you'll want to be part of it.

While we are still in the planning stages, we'll have much more to share with you soon — including dates, venue information, and exciting news about our program and leaders!

In the meantime, we invite you to view this Convocation 2024 highlights reel video. For those of you who were there, we hope it sparks joyful memories! And for everyone, we hope it will inspire you to join us when we meet again in the fall!