Nadia Bolz Weber

speaker

123 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Nadia Bolz Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Moth · Cotton Candy and Revolutionary Rides: The Moth Radio Hour · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

I'm not what you would call the biggest fan of church.

Which can be awkward since

Technically, I'm a Lutheran pastor.

My dislike of church, I came by honestly.

I was raised in a really very strict, conservative Christian church where there was just a whole lot of rules and very little fun and no possibility of actually getting to be my whole self.

And so when I felt the call to go to seminary, I thought, you know what I want is to start a church from scratch.

There could be very few rules, a whole lot of fun, and everyone gets to be themselves.

So in 2008, I founded a congregation called House for All Sinners and Saints.

And the amazing thing about being able to start a church from scratch is you don't have to worry about being conventional, so you can just make shit up.

So if the very first thing you want people to see when they enter in the church is a velvet painting of Elvis crying that says, Elvis welcomes you to House for All Sinners and Saints, you can do that.

And if you don't really want to do a blessing of the animals, but you want to do a blessing of the bicycles, you can do that.

And if you want to take over the basement of a bar quarterly for an event called Beer and Hems, you can do that.

And we did all those things, and that's what started to get the attention of my denomination.

And I was so excited to get an email that said, we want to invite you to give the keynote presentation at a pastor's conference.

We really want you to share your expertise.

The thing you need to know is I didn't graduate college until I was 36.

I had never been an expert in anything.

And when I went to seminary, I was so old that they called me a second career student, which I thought was adorable because it implied I had a first career, which I did not.

But the difficult part of starting a church from scratch is that you have to start it from scratch.

And so my denomination gave me a little funding to get going, but all they cared about was how many people came and how much money did you bring in.

Showing 1–20 of 123 · page 1 of 7