Matt Boswell

Matt Boswell has been the pastor of Camas Friends Church in Camas, WA since 2015. This call has included responsibilities such as organizing worship gatherings, providing spiritual care, teaching and preaching, coordinating and empowering volunteers, facilitating small groups, promoting engagement in social concerns, creating and sustaining mentoring relationships, facilitating weddings and memorials, and nurturing his meeting’s vision and practice of what it means to love God and others in a distinctively Christ-centered and Quaker way. 

Matt grew up in Woodland, WA, and attended Woodland Presbyterian Church, where he was an active leader as a teenager. During his time at George Fox University (’01-’05), Matt was a Resident Assistant in the dorms, a camp counselor and camp program director, an active worship leader, and a GFU campus ministries intern. After college, Matt was a worship pastor in Canby, OR before resuming school at George Fox Evangelical Seminary where he completed an MDiv (2009), feeling called both to academia and ministry. Matt then spent a year with Teaching Abroad (NWYM) in China (’09-10) before moving back to the U.S., marrying Joann (Jo) in 2010, and teaching English in Olympia, WA for two years. He then moved to Berkeley, CA in 2012, where he completed a PhD in Christian Spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union (graduated in 2016). During his doctoral studies, Matt taught seminary and undergraduate courses in spiritual formation and social justice, worked part time at First Congregational Church of Berkeley (UCC), and welcomed three children – Kai, Renee, Teddy – into his family.

While at Camas Friends Church, Matt revised his dissertation and published it in 2018 through Cascade Books (Eugene, OR) as The Way to Love: Reimagining Christian Spiritual Growth as the Hopeful Path of Virtue. This book draws together ethics, theology, psychology, and spiritual practice to articulate a way of thinking about spiritual growth centered on the cultivation of Love. Matt has utilized this book as an adjunct professor at the University of Portland, where he taught an introductory theology course from 2020-2024. Matt was also a contributor to The Quaker World, published in 2023.

Matt was on the SCYMF Nominating Committee for six years and currently serves on the Nurture of Ministry Committee. He is the lead organizer of the annual SCYMF Ministers Conference and was the featured speaker at SCYMF’s Annual Sessions in 2025.

Matt identifies as a “progressive, Christ-centered, Quaker love mystic” and feels that his spirituality has been valued and nurtured at Camas Friends and within SCYMF as a whole.