The Rev. Betsy J. Sowers – Minister for Earth Justice

Betsy represents OCBC outside the church through involvement in both faith-based and secular climate justice organizations and actions. These range from fossil fuel divestment, to energy policy at the State House and Federal level, to working with opponents of new fracked gas infrastructure in the Commonwealth.

Inside the church, Betsy serves as a resource person to our Pastor and Teams to help interpret the climate crisis and sustainability issues within of a context of worship, prayer, education and action, both personal and public. She also helps members and friends of the congregation connect the dots between Earth justice and the other justice concerns that are intimately intertwined with it, especially racial, economic, gender, and immigration/refugee justice, and the possibility of just peace and redemptive community in a climate-stressed world.

Betsy came to her lifelong call to peace and justice ministry via her first post-college job as a flight attendant for Pan American World Airways, which gave her the gift of global awareness and brought her to Cambridge, where she found OCBC, a congregation that confirmed and encouraged her call. After earning an MSW at Boston College Graduate School of Social Work, and the M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School, she was called as a staff person, and later Director in The Department of Church and Society of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts, serving as educator and advocate on peace and justice matters to Baptist churches in the Commonwealth. She also served the Massachusetts Council of Churches as Adjunct Associate Director. A clear call out of retirement to climate justice service has both surprised and energized her for another chapter of activist ministry.