Western culture would have us believe that humans are separate from nature — that we stand alone in dominion over all other creatures. This belief in our exceptionalism lies at the root of the climate crisis. The BTS Center chooses instead to foreground the sacred kinship of all creation. We are all part of a great web of being in which interdependence and reciprocity must inform our theological understandings, our spiritual practice, and our life in community. In this spirit, we offer programs that deepen our understanding of humanity as part of nature, and that seek to strengthen our relationships with one another and with all of creation.

Our mission begins with “catalyzing spiritual imagination,” and we craft our programs and other offerings with imagination in mind and heart. As UK scholar Rob Hopkins notes, we are living in a time of imaginative decline at the very point in history when we need to be at our most imaginative. We know that a failure of spiritual imagination has caused us to be complicit in the extractive, dominant systems which have brought so much destruction. In imagination lie the possibilities for dismantling these systems of death and finding our way into life-giving, justice-oriented ways of being — and so we center imagination as an essential practice in all of our programming as a way of expanding who we seek to be in this climate-changed world.

Drawing on the work of Debra Rienstra, author of Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth, The BTS Center embraces the cultivation of spaces — both physical and spiritual — where we can fortify our resilience and connect with community, spaces that can hold us in the midst of uncertainty. The biological concept of refugia — places of shelter that endure in times of crisis — offers a model for our shared life in a climate-changed world. Like pockets of flora and fauna that endure wildfires, droughts, and even volcanic eruptions, we can nurture our own spiritual refugia as pockets where life endures, and from which life can regenerate, even as climate change alters so much of how we have understood our world.

In a world preoccupied with the individual — individual liberty, individual prosperity, individual salvation, and even individual carbon footprint and individual climate action — The BTS Center aims to nurture deepening commitment to the common good. In times of distress and fear, communities have the choice to turn toward one another or to turn against one another. We strive to create spaces for deep reflection and formation that invite people to turn toward one another, to find strength and resilience in community, and to promote collective flourishing. As the climate crisis accelerates, we believe faith communities, rooted in the wisdom of our sacred texts, our spiritual lineages, and our theologies, have a unique role to play in advancing this positive vision for just and joyful common life in a climate-changed world. Through our many programs, we aim to nurture values of justice, compassion, equity, and hospitality, in ways that promote the common good.