Meet the Keynoter: The Reverend Katharine “Kitty” Babson

The Reverend Katharine Babson serves as the official missionary of The Episcopal Church USA to the Church of the Anglican Province of Myanmar (Burma). She travels to Myanmar twice a year to lead retreats, consult with church leaders about grants applications, preach, teach, encourage, meet with Myanmar-based nongovernmental organizations, and in all ways possible to assist the Myanmar people and nurture the relationship between the Church at home and the Church in Myanmar. She returned in early March from her 29th month-long mission trip, and is planning her next trip for October when she will deliver the annual all-provincial Mothers’ Union’s Leadership Retreat.

Reverend Babson is seen here in Sittwe, western Myanmar.Kitty’s active work with the Christian community in Myanmar began in early 1994 when she traveled from Bangkok, where she and her husband were living, to Myanmar for the first time to participate in the service of consecration of a Virginia Seminary friend who had been elected Bishop of Toungoo Diocese, one of the six dioceses of the Anglican Church of the Province of the Myanmar.

Now, when at home in Brunswick, Maine, Kitty Babson continues her relational mission work for the Church in the United States and abroad by seeking and nurturing grants awards that will enrich the lives and ministry of the Myanmar Church and people; consulting to individuals and groups about Myanmar’s Church and predominantly Buddhist culture, history, socio-economic and political situation; and seeking educational placements and scholarships in the U.S. for worthy Myanmar students who seek advanced educational opportunities in theological studies and nonreligious fields that will assist the redevelopment of their society.

Kitty sits on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission for World Mission, and is the founder of a small mission agency - Christ-Myitta Myanmar/Burma – which is a member of Episcopal Partnerships for Global Mission (EPGM). EPGM is the primary consortium of mission agencies of the Episcopal Church, and she currently serves as its Convener. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Mission and Global Christianity at her alma mater, Virginia Seminary, where she teaches an intensive immersion course in Myanmar every other January, with the next course to run in January 2009. She authored the article on Myanmar liturgical use published in the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, (Oxford, 2005). She also addresses civic community gatherings on the complex issues that trouble Myanmar. At home, she serves the Episcopal Diocese of Maine as an interim rector, supply priest, and consultant to the parish search process.

Parish of the Widows, Mogaung, Kachin State in northern Myanmar.Kitty understands "mission" broadly, not according to old colonialist perspectives as a one-way process of converting another to one's own values, practices, and belief systems about God, Christ, and world, but instead as a way of right life and action rooted in the mutual search for full relationship with God and all others which she believes is both challenged and clarified within dimensions of difference. She holds that this way is actually founded in the Biblical record, and that it has always been within dimensions of difference and meetings with alien others in their own strange contexts that the people of faith have been stretched to comprehend expansive possibilities of meaning, faith, and action in a complex relational world, and then to return to serve God's mission with greater wonder and respect.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1992, Kitty is a graduate of Williams College and Virginia Theological Seminary. She is currently at work on her Doctorate in Ministry at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C.

With her husband, Bradley, a consultant in development economics, she enjoys two grown children who are also faithful internationalists. Oliver works in policy planning at The Gates Foundation in Seattle; and Augusta, is a program planner at The Academy for Educational Development in Washington D.C., where she is organizing educational exchange programs between American and Saudi Arabian universities.

She and her husband live in an 18th century farmhouse from which they pursue their mission and consulting work, and garden, write, walk, and revel in the restful sea, fields and forests of Maine.