EcoPreacher Cohort
November 2022 - November 2023
Once a month from 1:00 - 2:15 pm Eastern • Online
Registration is closed.
As our climate-changed and changing world continues to demand courage, imagination, and resourcefulness, congregations and their leaders have a unique opportunity to offer voices of truth and possibility. With their skills and community connections, preachers are in a special position to offer spiritual guidance in the quest for understanding and resilience in a world in need of environmental healing and wholeness.
With the desire to support, educate, and engage preachers in the integration of climate consciousness into their preaching, The BTS Center has partnered with Creation Justice Ministries, a Christian eco-justice organization with a long history of religiously grounded environmental advocacy. Together, we are pleased to offer this year-long cohort of learning, companionship, and exploration.
This cohort will offer monthly meetings to help preachers understand climate change and other environmental justice issues more deeply as spiritual crises that requires creative, faith-rooted action. Our intention for this cohort is:
- To create a covenanted space for preachers to learn, reflect together, and offer support to one another as they regularly preach in a climate-changed world
- To create a diverse, respectful, identity-forming ecumenical group that welcomes preachers from lectionary-grounded, non-lectionary-focused, and identity-based communities
- To offer opportunities for participants to take risks in exploring ecological and eco-justice themes in their preaching, in a safe, mutually-supportive, non-judgmental space
- To increase engagement with eco-preaching resources including the EcoPreacher 1-2-3 resources being offered through the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development
Facilitated by Rev. Nicole Diroff of The BTS Center and Avery Davis Lamb of Creation Justice Ministries, with collaborators Rev. Dr. Leah Schade and Dr. Rebecca Kneale Gould, this cohort will offer an expansive opportunity for connection, creativity, and grounded responses to climate change through the art of preaching.
Research note: EcoPreacher Cohort members will take part in periodic individual and congregational surveys. Select members will also be invited to take part in research-focused interviews and focus group conversations. These surveys and conversations will assess the ways in which participation in the EcoPreacher Cohort is making a tangible difference in the work and lives of its participants and will inform future cohorts as well as influence developments in homiletics and theological education more broadly.
Dates:
- November 17, 2022
- December 15, 2022
- January 19, 2023
- February 16, 2023
- March 16, 2023
- April 20, 2023
- May 18, 2023
- June 15, 2023
- July 20, 2023
- August 17, 2023
- September 21, 2023
- October 19, 2023
- November 16, 2023
About our Facilitators:
About our Collaborators:
About the Co-Hosts:
Creation Justice Ministries
Creation Justice Ministries’ mission is to educate, equip and mobilize communions and denominations, congregations, and individuals to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation. Creation Justice Ministries’ membership includes Baptist, Historically Black, Orthodox, Peace, and mainline Protestant traditions. With a particular concern for people who are most vulnerable and marginalized, Creation Justice Ministries provides collaborative opportunities to build ecumenical community, guides people of faith and faith communities towards eco-justice transformations, and raises a collective witness in the public arena echoing Christ's call for just relationships among all of creation.
The BTS Center
With roots dating back to 1814, The BTS Center is a private 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. Guided by the vision of human hearts renewed, justice established, and creation restored, The BTS Center offers theologically grounded programs of continuing education and spiritual formation, including workshops and retreats, learning cohorts, public conversations, and projects of applied research, all focused around spiritual leadership in a climate-changed world.
Event Partner
