Applied Research
The BTS Center’s Applied Research provides grounded guidance for spiritual leaders who want to meet the unique challenges of our time with intention, not reactivity.
Our constituents are our greatest teachers, so we center the needs, knowledge, and wisdom of practitioners – clergy in congregations, lay leaders, and spiritual leaders in all sorts of settings.
The Latest from Applied Research
Unprepared for Eco-Grief
Study Shows Spiritual Infrastructure Gap in U.S. Mainline Protestant Churches
From Religions (Jul 2025)
Yes, and: Expanding the Ways That American Protestant Congregations Respond to a Climate-Changed World
Research Collaborative Findings
Cultivating Earth-Shaped Leadership: Ecological Imagination in Organizational Life
The questions we’re investigating:
How do spiritual leaders and faith communities understand their vocation in a climate-changed world?
How do these understandings shift over time?
What does transformative faith leadership look like when embodied by spiritual leaders and faith communities in a climate-changed world?
What interventions cultivate these frameworks, postures, and practices in spiritual leaders and faith communities?
What frameworks, postures, and practices contribute to transformative faith leadership in a climate-changed world?
Frameworks: the ways that people make meaning of the world around them, including worldview, theologies, dominant stories
Postures: dispositions or ways of being that describe how leaders interact with the environment around them
Practices: day-to-day habits that leaders integrate consistently into their work and model for others
Our Primary Applied Research Projects
Claiming Your Call
These research projects accompany cohort-based programs engaging teams from New England congregations. They examine how congregational teams understand their vocation in a climate-changed world, and how their sense of vocation shifts over the course of their involvement with these programs. The research includes intake and exit questionnaires, selective field noting of gatherings, and site visits to participating churches.
EcoPreacher Initiative
The Compelling Preaching for a Climate-Changed World research project centers on the EcoPreacher Cohort, a nine-month cohort designed to help preachers hone their craft within the context of a climate-changed world. During the pilot EcoPreacher Cohort, this research resulted in program reports, academic papers, and presentations at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Current EcoPreacher research focuses on the program’s impact among participants and their congregations and also how a congregation’s cultural, ecological, and institutional context informs engagement with climate and care of the Earth.
This research is being conducted by Ben Yosua-Davis, The BTS Center’s Director of Applied Research, and Rev. Dr. Leah Schade, Assistant Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary, in collaboration with a team of research advisors.
Research Collaborative
In 2021-2022, Cultivating Earth-Shaped Leadership gathered eight organizations from Northern New England and Quebec representing many sectors, including education, prison reform, the arts, community gardening and food justice, and social action. They investigated how organizations would act differently today if they embodied an ecological imagination.
This project took the form of a co-learning community nested in an in-depth qualitative research process. We spent a year in mutual exploration.
About Our Research
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.
Principal Researcher
Ben Yosua-Davis serves on The BTS Center staff team as Director of Applied Research, where he shapes the organization’s posture of “rigorous and reverent curiosity,” focused on research that supports and shares the wisdom of on-the-ground practitioners working in a climate-changed world. He is a graduate of Drew Theological Seminary and Colby College.
Previously, he lived in Haverhill, MA, where he co-planted a new church called The Vine, one of the earliest mainline missional church expressions in the country, and hosted a podcast entitled, “Reports From the Spiritual Frontier,” which chronicled the day-to-day lives of leaders innovating new forms of spiritual community.
Ben is a Maine native and now lives on Chebeague Island, Maine with his wife, Melissa, his son Michael, and his daughters, Genevieve and Emeline; where he directs the community chorus and delivers tins of cookies to unsuspecting neighbors.
Research Consultants
Rebecca Kneale Gould, Ph.D.
Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi, Ph.D.
Susanne Moser, Ph.D.
Debra Rienstra, Ph.D.
Rev. Leah D. Schade, Ph.D.
Wayne Luther Thompson, Ph.D.
Amanda Wilson Harper, Ph.D.
