In September 2025, The Maine Monitor spoke with BTS Center Executive Director Allen Ewing-Merrill and Chaplainy Initiative Coordinator Alison Cornish in an article examining the role of chaplains in addressing climate anxiety.

Ewing-Merrill was hired as executive director in 2019. The center, originally Bangor Theological Seminary, stopped operating as a seminary in 2013, and its board of directors spent the next six years looking for a new direction. A month after he was hired, Ewing-Merrill had an epiphany. While pursuing a doctoral degree, one of Ewing-Merrill’s professors began a lecture talking about what global climate devastation would mean for the planet.

“And I just knew with a greater clarity than I have ever experienced that this is what the BTS Center needed to turn its attention to,” Ewing-Merrill recalled. 

He went into his first official meeting with the board of directors and pitched his idea: a hard focus on environmental issues. Six years later, the BTS Center is carrying out this mission under the slogan, “Spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world.”

The Rev. Alison Cornish began working with the BTS Center in 2021. Two years later, she helped spearhead the center’s climate conscious chaplaincy program, in partnership with the national Chaplaincy Innovation Lab. 

Cornish sees the program as offering a new lens for spiritual leaders in a variety of fields. University chaplains might work with students who feel a sense of doom about their future because of potential climate catastrophes, while hospital chaplains need to be aware of how the impacts of climate change could lead to more patients needing care.

“We’re working with faith leaders in lots of different roles — preachers and pastors and spiritual directors, chaplains, et cetera,” Cornish said. “Really the questions that we’re asking are: ‘How are you as a faith leader needing to do your work or are called to do your work differently because you live in a climate-changed world?’”