Navigating Climate Spiritual Care
Navigating Climate Spiritual Care
A Learning Community
November 2025 – April 2026
Program fee: $200
Scholarships are available. Prior participants are eligible for a reduced registration.
2025 application deadline: November 3
Please contact alison@thebtscenter.org with any questions about the 2026-2027 community.
We are living in times of intersecting calamities, with the climate crisis adding increased instability, uncertainty, and suffering to systemic injustices including racism, inadequate healthcare, poverty, disenfranchisement, homelessness, war, the oppression of LGBTQIA+ communities — and more. No longer can those of us who offer spiritual care avoid the impacts of the climate crisis and these intersectional issues in our own settings, whether we work in health care, community chaplaincy, university settings, or within spiritual communities.
Spiritual care in this time of climate change — with so many social, emotional, and spiritual consequences resulting from such instability — is both deeply necessary and, in many ways, uncharted territory.
The BTS Center is pleased to offer this learning community, originally developed in an asynchronous format by our friends Jessica Morthorpe and Blair Nelsen, and offered by our partner Waterspirit. We will engage the materials from the Climate Pastoral Care course together as a learning community, guided by three hosts and facilitators, meeting twice each month, to deepen our understanding of the physical, emotional, mental health, and spiritual impacts of the climate crisis, and to explore how to address these impacts through the practice of spiritual care.
In this learning community, participants will explore a range of resources for addressing the climate crisis within their chosen vocations. Together we will navigate this landscape by drawing on already-established spiritual care skills and wisdom that we bring to this work as practitioners, and which can reassure us of our preparedness for the challenge.
Topics for discussion will include:
- climate anxiety and grief
- race-conscious spiritual care
- care to peoples of the land
- natural disaster and climate migrants
- ministry to climate activists and climate-anxious people
- spiritual care to children
- contextualizing self-care and self-differentiation
- complicated hope
Participants will engage in discussion in both small groups and in the larger, cross-sector group, thereby developing a network of peers for ongoing support and consultation. Our hosts, Rev. Alison Cornish, Nicholas Collura, and Rev. Ash Temin — each of them deeply experienced in spiritual care settings — will guide participants through discussions and practices based on online materials within the Waterspirit course.
Time commitment: Meetings will run for 90 minutes twice monthly, and participants can expect to spend an equivalent amount of time engaging with online materials on non-gathering weeks
Learning Community Schedule
Mondays, 4 – 5:30pm (Eastern)
Please be sure to account for time zones!
November 10, 2025
November 24, 2025
December 8, 2025
January 12, 2026
January 26, 2026
February 9, 2026
February 23, 2026
March 9, 2026
March 23, 2026
April 6, 2026
You can complete the interest form below and we will contact you when registration opens for the next Navigating Climate Spiritual Care Community.
Meet Our Hosts
Rev. Alison Cornish
Nicholas Collura
Rev. Ash Temin
Meet Our Partner
Waterspirit is a spiritual ecology nonprofit that informs, inspires, and empowers people of all beliefs to deepen their consciousness of the sacredness of water and the interdependence of all Earth’s systems.
In Waterspirit, a reverence for water includes a commitment to preserve and protect this source and sustainer of life. Programs, learning, reflection, and ritual lead to action on behalf of water. Find out how you can get involved.
