Spiritual Ecology for Spiritual Leaders
Sunday, August 27, 2023 • 4:00 pm — Wednesday, August 30, 2023 • 1:00 pm
Centered around The BTS Center at 97 India Street in Portland, Maine
Lodging will be provided at the Waterfront Hampton Inn at 209 Fore Street, Portland, Maine
Full expenses paid + stipend for each participant
15 individuals will be selected for this opportunity. The selection process may include community references and an interview. Decisions will be announced by July 7.
If there was ever a time for spiritual leaders to come together — this is it.
“This is what politics means to me… the earth-wise practice — performed by cordyceps, lichen, tree, gut microbiome, murmuration, human, and stone — of creating the nurturing conditions for the imperceptible to blossom.”
—Bayo Akomolafe
WHO IS ROOTING
Spiritual Ecology for Spiritual Leaders is a four-day gathering in Portland, Maine, for a diverse group of early-career leaders who are working for justice in communal contexts. This will be a time of deliberate engagement with each other, the Earth, and stories of our collective spiritual ecology.
This gathering is offered in partnership between Auburn Seminary and The BTS Center, and it is part of the Emerging Leaders project, a program housed at Auburn that provides pastors, faith leaders, and other spirit-rooted leaders with the prophetic imagination, networks of mentorship, and ongoing peer support they need to lead and minister effectively in the face of rapidly changing contexts today.
To date, the Emerging Leaders project has included regional gatherings of faith and community leaders across the United States. Each group includes participants from several religions and cultural backgrounds.
WHERE WE ARE ROOTING
We will spend our time together in and around Portland, Maine, which is on the unceded territory of the Wabanaki – People of the Dawn. Portland is the largest city in the state of Maine (though quaint by most accounts) with a downtown area that weaves together good food, quirky shops, spacious parks, and a working waterfront. Situated on the southern edge of Casco Bay, with nearby beaches and forested trails, Portland serves as an excellent urban basecamp from which to find quiet corners of connection with the natural world.
HOW WE ARE ROOTING
Spiritual leadership calls us to find ways to center ourselves and our communities with day-to-day rituals, seeking the sacred in mundane activities, and finding comfort in familiar forms of gathering.
We will take time to immerse ourselves in restful and comforting practices of nature connection, artistic expression, meal sharing, and story-telling.
Spiritual leadership also demands of us a prophetic commitment to revealing, naming, accounting for, and unsettling the forces of domination, extraction, and alienation festering on our planetary home.
During our gathering we will take time to uncover challenging questions about the climate crisis, and to reflect on the exigent historical and contemporary experiences of the native tribes in Maine, known collectively as the Wabanaki, "People of the Dawn.”
We hope that each leader will return to their community with creativity flowing, imagination sparking, body rested, and spirit renewed. Through these four days, we hope to seed lasting connections that can grow as needed into regional forms of solidarity, encouragement, and collaboration.
WHY WE ARE ROOTING
Spiritual leadership matters. It is practical. It takes up space. It is elemental. It lives in deep time and it must be grounded. Spiritual leadership is accountable to the health and wholeness of the Earth-bound relationships that give it shape.
Spiritual leadership is an ecology of diverse commitments to justice. It thrives when various elements commingle and form a habitat that pulses with common good. It is not a solitary affair. It is a shared project.
At its best, spiritual leadership expresses through multifaceted rhythms of mutual engagement. These rhythms manifest at times as collective action, at times as collective rest, and always with careful attention to the bodies that give form to our theories of self, Earth, and other.
QUESTIONS FOR OUR ROOTING
Spiritual Resources: What gifts, traditions, and insights can spiritual leaders offer a world beset by multiple ecological, social, and economic crises — all of which are fundamentally moral issues?
Relational Orientation: What new relationships, voices, and perspectives do we need to navigate the days and months and years ahead — through this pandemic; through ecological transition?
Communal: What ancient, ongoing, or inventive approaches might we take up in preparing our communities for personal, communal, and planetary transformation?
Individual Practice: What are some practical ways that we can deepen our relationship with wild nature and align ourselves with Earth’s regenerative tendencies? And how can we invite our communities into these practices that amplify our interconnection?
Multispecies Flourishing: How might we reconceptualize our relational, ethical, and political commitments so that we better understand, value, and contribute towards the flourishing of all living beings and landscapes on Earth?
Meet our Host Team
Meet Auburn Seminary
Auburn equips leaders with the organizational skills and spiritual resilience required to create lasting, positive impact in local communities, on the national stage, and around the world.
They amplify voices and visions of faith and moral courage. They convene diverse leaders and cross-sector organizations for generative collaboration and multifaith understanding. And they research what’s working — and not — in theological education and social change-making.
Meet 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 workshops and retreats, learning cohorts, courses, public conversations, and projects of applied research, all focused around spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world.
