I'm Rachel Rogers (they/she), a communications professional, seminary student, and church leader based in Nashville, Tennessee. I work at the intersection of strategy, storytelling, and community-building, with experience in internal communications, team leadership, and organizational planning. I’m especially drawn to work that invites clarity, care, and alignment with values.

Right now, I’m navigating full-time corporate work, graduate studies in Unitarian Universalist ministry, and active leadership in my congregation. My work spans everything from crafting organizational messages and facilitating strategic planning sessions to writing sermons and supporting collaborative decision-making. I also serve as a guest preacher in congregations across the region and regularly support my home congregation as board president and worship leader.

My theology is rooted in a relational understanding of the sacred—emerging not from distant authority but from connection: between people, communities, the natural world, and the cosmos. I experience the divine as immanent, encountered in mutual care, interdependence, and the ongoing work of collective meaning-making.

Anchored in Unitarian Universalist values, I affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the interdependent web of all existence as theological truths. These convictions shape a spiritual practice that is both reverent and responsive—open to wonder, grounded in this world, and oriented toward justice.

I understand trauma—whether arising from interpersonal harm, systemic oppression, environmental collapse, or religious abuse—as a profound spiritual reality. It disrupts belonging, disorients meaning, and fractures embodiment. As such, healing from trauma is sacred work. I believe faith communities must be places where wounds are acknowledged, not erased; where resilience is nurtured through truth-telling, ritual, and relationship; and where spiritual practices help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world.

I would describe my theology as both contemplative and practical. It honors mystery while remaining accountable to lived experience. I hold a hopeful eschatology—not defined by an ultimate arrival, but by the continual unfolding of beloved community: a vision always in process, always calling us to greater courage, compassion, and collective care.

This theology calls me, as a minister, to nurture relationships of reciprocity and communities where connection is prioritized—where the work of collective justice-making is grounded in the art of witnessing one another’s wholeness, including the complexities of trauma. I believe that when we truly witness one another, we help to heal one another. When we heal, we are more open to connection. And when we begin to understand our deep interconnectedness with all people and with the living Earth, we become more intentional in our choices and more energized in our work toward liberation. Ministry, for me, is the faithful practice of cultivating spaces where healing, connection, and transformation can take root—and where together we can imagine and build a more justice-centered world.