Nadia Bolz-Weber

Nadia Bolz-Weber (born April 22, 1969) is an author, Lutheran minister and public theologian. She served as the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Denver, Colorado, until July 8, 2018. She is also a three-time New York Times bestselling author.

Bolz-Weber is known for her unusual approach to reaching others through her church. Heavily tattooed, her work in the church is considered part of "a new Reformation" by scholar and writer Diana Butler Bass.

Bolz-Weber grew up in Colorado Springs with a fundamentalist Christian family.

In 1986, at age 17, Bolz-Weber started getting tattoos, and the ones on her arms mark the liturgical year and the story of the Gospel. Bolz-Weber briefly attended Pepperdine University before dropping out and moving to Denver. She says that she became an alcoholic and drug abuser and often felt like one of "society's outsiders".

By 1991, Bolz-Weber became sober and, as of 2020, has remained so for twenty eight years. Prior to her ordination, she was a stand-up comedian and worked in the restaurant industry.

Bolz-Weber felt that she heard the call to service in 2004 when she was asked to eulogize a friend who had committed suicide. In 2008, Bolz-Weber was ordained as a pastor. She started her own church, the House for All Sinners and Saints, which is often shortened to just House. One third of her church is part of the LGBT community, and she also has a "Minister of Fabulousness", Stuart, who is a drag queen. Her church is also very welcoming to people with drug addiction, depression, and even those who are not believers of her faith. Bolz-Weber spends nearly twenty hours each week writing her weekly ten-minute sermon.

A feminist, in 2018 she called for women to send her their purity rings to be melted down into a vagina sculpture as part of healing the psychic damage of the purity movement of the 1990s. At the Makers conference on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2019, Bolz-Weber gave the sculpture to American feminist and political activist Gloria Steinem.

Bolz-Weber speaks at conferences across the world. She has also given talks about how faith and feminism can co-exist.

• Salvation on the small screen?: 24 hours of Christian television. New York : Seabury Books, 2008. ISBN 9781596270862, OCLC 221174864
• Pastrix: the cranky, beautiful faith of a sinner & saint, New York ; Boston ; Nashville : Jericho Books, 2014. ISBN 9781455527076, OCLC 868044878
• Accidental Saints: finding god in all the wrong people. Convergent, 2016. ISBN 9781601427564, OCLC 934193175
• Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. Convergent Books, January 2019. ISBN 978-1601427588, OCLC 1035435905.