Father Bill Beers, Ph.D.

Episcopal Speaker

Before his ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, Bill Beers was a carpenter, cabinetmaker, and wood carver. Keeping things plumb, level, and square were lessons Fr. Bill brought with him to his twenty-five years as a hospital chaplain. In turn, the sick and the dying taught him again and again that loss and change are at the heart of all spiritual growth. After years of teaching sociology, religion, and philosophy, Fr. Bill felt a need to nurture his own spiritual growth. He traveled to Central America were he met poor Mayan farmers eking out a living high in the mountains and volcanoes of Guatemala. People who had so little invited him into their tiny homes. One missionary priest from Montana showed him how it was possible to change the lives of people brutalized by over thirty years of civil war.

Returning to the US, Fr. Bill found an eye-catching Food for the Poor position advertisement in Episcopal Life. The ad had a photograph of a poor Central American girl and asked “Do you want to work for her … just on weekends?” He was absolutely certain he did. He sent a resumé and a sermon tape, and a few months later, after a life-altering trip to Haiti, Fr. Bill began his long and loving relationship with the poor and Food for the Poor. That was fourteen years ago. In the ensuing years Fr. Bill has come to know and respect the poor in ways unimaginable without the yearly trips to such places as the municipal dump in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, or slums of Cité Soleil, Port au Prince, Haiti.

But, as he visited churches in the US each weekend, he also came to love more deeply the Christians worshiping with him each Sunday in a different church, seeing in them the same loving Christ he had met in the poor. He understands his priesthood and the Eucharistic meal that binds the rich to the poor, the stranger to the neighbor, and the dead to the living, confirming to him each time he touches an open hand with a piece of broken bread and repeats, “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” “El Cuerpo de Cristo, pan del cielo,” that we are the One Body of Christ.

Fr. Bill is married with two grown sons and a couple of granddaughters. He’s a marathoner and triathlete, and he always carries his binoculars and bird book when he travels, never knowing when a birding opportunity will arise. Throughout the years, many hosting families have graciously indulged this particular passion, for which he is very grateful.