Spiritual Ecology for Spiritual Leaders Retreat
Renewal and connection, with Earth and each other
Sunday June 5, 2022 • 5:00pm (Eastern) – Wednesday June 8, 2022 • 12:00pm (Eastern)
With the support of our funders, all retreat expenses will be covered for participants. Also, participants will receive an honorarium of $500 in recognition of the time they will take away from their work and the wisdom they’ll bring into the community. After the gathering, participants will also be eligible for a grant of $500 to catalyze their local organizing or community partnerships.
“A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to be grounded, and that no matter how high we go it is from our roots that we draw sustenance.” — Wangari Maathai
WHO IS ROOTING
Spiritual Ecology for Spiritual Leaders is a four-day retreat in Portland, Maine for a diverse group of early-career faith leaders and others 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 intentionally 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 ritual, seeking the sacred in mundane activities, and finding comfort in familiar forms of gathering.
During our retreat 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 festering on our planetary home.
During our retreat we will take time to uncover challenging questions about the climate crisis and to reflect on the exigent historical and contemporary experiences of native tribes in our local contexts.
We hope that each leader will return to their community with creativity flowing, imagination sparking, body rested, and spirit renewed. Through these four days of retreat 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
What gifts, traditions, and insights can spiritual leaders offer a world beset by multiple ecological and social crises?
What impact can we have beyond mobilizing communities to advocate for needed policy change and technical solutions?
What new relationships, voices, and perspectives do we need to navigate the days and months and years ahead — through this pandemic, through ecological transition?
What old or new ways might we need to set aside or take up to prepare our communities for deep transformation in our daily lives and across the planet?
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?
Meet Our Host Team
Keisha E. McKenzie, PhD, is a strategist who interprets communication, religion, spirituality, and politics as social change technologies. She has worked in communication and development strategy, faith organizing, research, facilitation, and management with nonprofit and educational organizations across the US since 2004.
Keisha believes that all people have inherent worth and dignity, we deserve a world of connection and flourishing for all, and people of faith have a duty to help make that world real.
Keisha is a member of the Aspen Institute Religion and Society Program’s Powering Pluralism Network; a Rooted in Resilience Fellow at Faith Matters Network; and author at the newsletter On Tomorrow’s Edge.
Rev. Matt Deen (he/they) is Public Theology Fellow for Ecological Justice at Auburn Theological Seminary and pastor of Newfane Congregational Church in Newfane, Vermont. He also serves as an advisor and coordinator for the Cecil Corbin-Mark Fellowship for Environmental Justice Leadership.
Prior to joining Auburn, Matt served as a Community Minister for Judson Memorial Church, where he co-facilitated an ecological grief support group called Extinction Resilience. Matt graduated in May 2020 from Union Theological Seminary, where his work focused on constructive ecotheology and animal liberation.
Rev. Nicole Diroff is ordained in the United Church of Christ. Having served as Program Director for The BTS Center since 2020, with primary responsibility for coordinating the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the Center’s programmatic offerings, Nicole recently assumed a new role as Associate Director, effective July 1, 2024. She holds expertise in facilitation, data management, and strategic planning. Nicole is a certified Maine Master Naturalist, serves as Chair of the Spiritual Formation Committee at Williston-Immanuel United Church and Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee for the Scarborough Public School District. She lives with her family in Scarborough, Maine.
Prior to her work with The BTS Center, Nicole served as the Associate Director at Interfaith Philadelphia, where she coordinated the Religious Leaders Council of Greater Philadelphia and directed the creation and expansion of the organization’s many Dare to Understand initiatives.
Nicole is a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia and Ohio Wesleyan University. When she’s not leading programs or facilitating meetings, she can be found exploring tide pools with her son, hiking with her dogs, or reading a memoir at a local coffee shop.
Aram Mitchell
Meet Our Partner
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.
