Applied Research
Our Values and Guidance
Who is this for?
Our research is embedded in our broader work to cultivate and nurture spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world. We want to know what this climate-changed moment is calling out of us, so we start with these assumptions:
1. The climate crisis is a spiritual crisis, and
2. The Christian tradition has a unique role to play in a climate-changed world.
The bedrock of our research is formed by the needs, knowledge, and wisdom of practitioners — congregational clergy, laypersons leading within faith communities, and other spiritual leaders. Our intention is for that wealth to reach far outside the research community and academic audiences.
Not only do practitioners deeply need good research to better engage in their work, but practitioners also have invaluable wisdom that deserves to be cultivated and shared with others. Our participants have a degree of control in setting the agenda, making observations, and offering conclusions.
Then, we take a deep look past what we think – and into what we see.
Sometimes, we build conceptual frameworks — for example, making the case that the climate crisis is a spiritual crisis. A lot of our focus is fixed on asking: “What do we really see here?” This means that we employ rigorous qualitative and quantitative research methods, including intake and exit questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and site visits, for example, to ensure we’re describing what we observe with honesty, clarity, and rigor.
We depict evidence-based day-to-day realities of congregations and their engagement with a climate-changed world. That helps spiritual leaders better understand the contexts in which they are leading. Then, we offer evidence-based pathways for faith communities to take on more transformative engagement with a climate-changed world.
We work closely in collaboration with other scholars and with the guidance of our Research Advisory Committee to ensure our research is collaborative, cross-sector, and cross-cultural.
We do it with rigorous and reverent curiosity.
Rigorous, because we bring the discipline of quantitative and qualitative research to our programs. And reverent, because we’re tending a sacred ecology of wisdom grown from the ministry of everyday practitioners. That is a gift to all who seek to be spiritual leaders in a climate-changed world.
In our research, there is room for change, surprise, and co-creation. We take care to shape our research in ways that allow us to be proven wrong, to change the framing of our questions, and to let new ways of understanding emerge from the leaders and communities with whom we work.