Nicole Lamarche is a minister in the United Church of Christ, a spiritual creative and a faith-based organizer and community leader. She currently serves as Pastor of Community United Church of Christ in Boulder, CO.

Nicole Lamarche
Nicole Lamarche

A dreamer and a doer, a partner and a parent, a lifelong member of the United Church of Christ, and ordained minister since 2005, Nicole believes the church can be a powerful place for personal and social transformation. She is currently serving as Pastor of Community UCC in Boulder and before that she served two congregations in Massachusetts and a congregation in California. 

Nicole is committed to building a just world for all and was a member of the Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland as part of Occupy Wall Street Movement. In San Jose, she supported efforts to ban fracking in California and was a member of People Acting in Community Together working on the movement for Black Lives, the Rapid Response Network, Night Walk and more. 

Currently she is a member of the Faith Leaders Caucus of Boulder County with Together Colorado, a volunteer with TGTHR a local non-profit serving homeless youth, a leader with Colorado Faith Communities United to End Gun Violence, as well as GreenFaith

Nicole has also been instrumental in launching and growing the Guns to Gardens movement, where communities of faith and other non-profits host safe surrender events for unwanted firearms. Nicole believes people of faith have a special role to play in building the world we want.

Nicole is dedicated to fresh expressions of spirituality and loves the church as a place for each person to be seen, to belong and to be actively engaged in building a just world for all creation.

She’s served churches in New England, before co-founding a congregation of progressive Christians, agnostics, spiritual independents and other people of conscience in Silicon Valley, now called Urban Sanctuary San Jose. She is dedicated to fresh expressions of spirituality, the search for meaning and religious community.

Nicole earned a BA in International Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. In 2003, she won the title of Miss California and went on to earn Fourth Runner-up at Miss America. In 2005, Nicole earned her Master of Divinity and a MA in Theology with a focus on Feminist and Process Thought from the Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.

“People with power will use their position to convince us to vote against our own interests and to mistrust the margins and the voices that are not centered, but that doesn’t mean the ones on the sidelines are wrong. When any leader of any political party or group claims that their policies are especially blessed by God, beware. We should celebrate any politician that is willing to become unelectable for the sake of a Higher Love!”

– Rev. Nicole Lamarche