Working for Safe Water Through Dual Roles as Engineer, Deacon

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Disasters and Climate Change

The Call - Holston Conference | April 17, 2025

bCHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- The Rev. Caroline Archer remembers the first time she felt the call to serve as a minister of clean water. She was a junior in high school on a mission trip to Nicaragua.

“I have this really vivid memory of kids with bare feet and just how dusty everything was, and they didn’t have any water in their homes,” Archer says.

Later, on a college trip to Uganda, Archer saw firsthand how far people have to walk just to find water to drink. "Essentially it was a puddle or small pond, supplied by a spring.”

Today, Archer is pursuing a unique ministry as a United Methodist deacon with a full-time job as a water engineer. She also serves as associate minister of environmental justice at First-Centenary United Methodist Church in Chattanooga.

At age 32, Archer has already spent half of her life learning how to help people get access to safe, clean water.

“This industry touches everybody’s lives in ways that we take for granted,” she said. “We don’t think about our drinking water because so much of the infrastructure is out of sight, out of mind for everyday people.”

The daughter of a “cradle Methodist,” Archer grew up in the former First United Methodist Church of Carrollton, Georgia, where she led youth worship with her guitar. She loved working as a counselor at Camp Glisson, a ministry of the North Georgia Conference.

When Archer returned from her eye-opening mission trip to Nicaragua, she was already in the process of making decisions about her future. “I’ve always loved chemistry and calculus, so my teachers helped me understand that engineering would be a good place to take that practical use to help people have good access to clean water.”

She studied environmental engineering at Mercer University. During her junior year, Archer spent three weeks in Uganda, helping local people do manual drilling of wells. Her life’s calling became clearer to her.

“I had pictured moving abroad and being a missionary,” she says. “But when I went to Uganda and had a chance to be with these people a long time and realize just how wonderful their own stories are, I realized they didn’t really need me, a white American woman, to do this work for them. They had so many skilled engineers there already.”

The Mercer student was also motivated by news of the day, the 2014 water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where children were poisoned by lead in the drinking water. When Archer returned from Africa, she decided to go to seminary -- “to figure out what it would mean to have this call to ministry and still be able to help people find access to clean water.”

After graduating from Mercer in 2015, Caroline Cooper married Ryan Archer, a fellow counselor at Camp Glisson and the son of a United Methodist pastor, the Rev. Ed Archer. Off they went to Nashville, Tennessee, for Caroline to attend Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

From 2015 to 2019, Archer gave birth to two children and completed her M.Div. While studying at Vanderbilt and worshiping at Belmont United Methodist Church, Archer encountered some 20 ordained deacons who were connected with United Methodist agencies and boards in the Nashville area.

(A deacon is an ordained clergyperson called to serve all people, particularly the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, and to equip and lead the laity in ministries of compassion, justice and service in the world, according to Ask the UMC.)

“It was a really unique opportunity to see how people … marry their call in the outside world to the local church,” Archer said. “But it certainly has been a process of making my own way. There were no other deacon engineers at Belmont.” 

Caroline graduated from Vanderbilt, and the Archers moved to the Chattanooga area to be near grandparents as well as the mountains and river. She returned to her technical roots with a full-time engineering job, first at a utility company, now at an engineering firm.

One of her current projects, she says, involves testing for “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, in a small water plant in North Carolina. PFAS are “really everywhere, all around us,” used in various products to render them waterproof, grease-proof or stain-resistant. After discovering chemicals in the water supply in North Carolina, her engineering company offered treatment options.

The realities of her work cause her to be concerned for the future of safe water in the U.S. In recent weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been threatened by budget cuts. Presidential executive orders could also affect regulations established by the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act of the 1970s.

“These acts have been foundational to helping us get to environments that are healthy to live in,” Archer said. “While I think we all can understand the need to watch our budget, it’s really concerning that we’re doing this in places that directly affect people’s health.”

Since arriving in Chattanooga in 2019, Archer has followed through on her call to ordained ministry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her family found a Zoom Sunday school class that connected them with First-Centenary United Methodist Church. 

Archer transferred from the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference to Holston Conference. She was commissioned as a provisional deacon at Holston Annual Conference in June 2024 and appointed to First-Centenary.

Moving back and forth between technical fields and theological fields has not been easy, she admits. “Engineers want to be as concise as possible, and seminary wants you to wax and wane. When writing papers, I found it really difficult to meet all the word count requirements.”

Archer is making her way by bringing her gifts to both fields. At her engineering job, for instance, “It’s a really demanding field, and to just represent how we can approach that with grace, which is often missing, is something I can do.”

As First-Centenary’s minister of environmental justice, Archer has implemented a coffee-grounds composting effort and is slowly incorporating compostable materials at all the church’s meals. She teaches Sunday school classes and Wednesday-evening classes, with a goal of helping people understand “the connection between climate change, creation justice, our faith, and how we’re all connected.”

While some see climate change and creation justice as partisan issues, “to me, they aren’t,” Archer says. She cites Hurricane Helene as a recent example of severe storms, related to climate change, that impact communities directly. The communities most at risk are “already under-resourced and pushed to the edges of society.”

Archer is encouraged that just this month, Chattanooga was recognized as North America’s first “National Park City,” after reducing pollution and ramping up green spaces. She also mentions that her denomination has made climate justice progress through General Conference actions approved in May 2024.

Christians who are baptized into the faith have even more reason to work for safe, accessible water as a life source, she notes.

“Our water is a renewable resource, but that means it is the same water that we are using over and over and over again. So we need to care for it at every step along the way.”

Annette Spence is editor of The Call, the Holston Conference source of news and stories. Holston Conference includes United Methodist churches in East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and North Georgia, with main offices in Alcoa, Tennessee. Sign up for a free email subscription to The Call.