Rev. Laura Thompson is a Unitarian Universalist minister at Minnesota Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bloomington, Minnesota. Her path to ministry was far from direct and at the heart of that ministry is the creation of the sense of belonging she sought for much of her life.
Laura was born in California and lived there for most of her childhood. Her father was not around for much of her early childhood. When she was 6 years old, her parents divorced and over the next few decades she only saw her father a few times. Laura reconnected with her father as an adult in her 40s, though they did not develop a very close relationship, speaking or seeing each other maybe once every two years or so. She did not ever develop relationships with her cousins, aunts and uncles on that side of the family, but she has gotten to know and develop relationships with her two half-sisters, who she met after reconnecting with her father.
Laura’s mother is from California, and Laura did grow up with close ties to that side of the family. However, the family moved around a lot. Really a lot – Laura, for example, had five different 1st grades and five different 7th grades. Before her parents’ divorced, they moved because her father was in the military. But the moves continued after the divorce. As a child, Laura didn’t know why there were so many moves, or even understand how unusual it was. Looking back, she suspects they moved so much because her single mother couldn’t keep up on rent. That meant Laura seldom was settled in a place as a child, and so had little chance to establish friendships or a sense of connection. After her mother remarried, Laura and the family moved from California to Minnesota where her stepfather was from. Laura was 13 years old.
Religion had not been a big part of Laura’s early life. In California, no one in the family went to church or really talked much about religion. Though her grandmother did regularly watch Rev. Robert Schuller on “The Hour of Power,” she never really talked to the family about Schuller’s message, and Laura does not have the impression that it was the Christian message her grandmother tuned in for; she mostly loved that the “Hour” was broadcast from the “Crystal Cathedral” because she loved “fancy things.” Laura got her first personal experiences of church after moving to Minnesota. Laura’s stepfather was Lutheran, and in Minnesota the family started to attend a Lutheran church. Laura was baptized as a Lutheran when she was 14 years old, and attended the church for several years. She greatly appreciated the teachings of Jesus from the Bible, but did not find much meaning in the “other worldly stuff and miracles.” At the age 17--after coming out--Laura left the church because of what the Bible and the church had to say about homosexuality.
She did not give up on the ideas of faith or spirituality altogether, though. As a young queer person, Laura attended meetings of Twin Cities Gay and Lesbian Youth Together in the mid- to late 1980s. This group was a precursor to the Gay/Straight alliances that would come to schools in the years to come. In the 1980s in St. Paul, there were not individual LGBT youth organization in each of the area high schools. Rather, Twin Cities Gay and Lesbian Youth Together was an umbrella group for queer youth across the metropolitan area. Laura believes it may have been the first group organized for LGBTQ youth in Minnesota. “We were a bunch of at-risk kids with some really good adults keeping tabs on us.” Through connections in Twin Cities Gay and Lesbian Youth Together, Laura discovered that church was not necessarily anti-gay. She learned about Metropolitan Community Church ( Minneapolis’ All Gods Children church was chartered by the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in 1976) and the Lutheran Wingspan ministry in St. Paul, which offered a pastoral ministry to gays and lesbians. She did try reconnecting with church, attending services at All Gods Children a handful of times. The MCC worship was an “overwhelming experience” for her and many others. She recalls the church offering an “embracing communion” that left her openly weeping. Laura remembers the impact of the message telling everyone in that sanctuary that “you were loved and a child of God. For gay folks, it is so welcoming, and so great to have that space of belonging.” Still, even as she came to realize and appreciate there were churches that would accept her, Laura also was realizing she did not accept all of their beliefs or theology. As she put it, “I was still having a hard time accepting virgin births and bodily resurrection for the sake of my sins.”
In the following years, Laura would describe herself as spiritual but not religious. She “dipped [her ] toe” in various traditions--Buddhism, Taoism, paganism--and found aspects of each that resonated with her. Paganism was “way too ritualistic” for her, but she did like the imagery of the turning of the wheel and the embrace of embodiment. Likewise, she found meaning in Buddhism’s mindfulness and in the balance of the Tao. But she did not associate herself with any particular religion, or even really think that there was a tradition where she would fit. That started to change, if slowly, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In these years, she was working in the food service industry as a chef and in other capacities after graduating from the Culinary School at St. Paul Technical College 1989. About half of her 25-year culinary career was in Lanesboro, Minnesota, a small town of about 750 people. Spiritual but not religious--and queer--Laura did not see a place for herself in the Catholic or Lutheran churches in town. “And then along came the internet,” and somebody told her about Beliefnet.org – an online quiz that tried to connect the test-takers with a faith that fit their personality, perspective, and experience. Laura took the quiz, and Unitarian Universalism was her top choice, followed by liberal Quakerism. Out of curiosity, she and her partner when to the UU church in Rochester, about 45 minutes away. As soon as the minister started the sermon, Laura was struck. She leaned over to her partner and said, “Hey, I should totally have that job.” Her partner reasonably, pointed out that Laura wasn’t even a Unitarian Universalist. “I know,” was Laura’s response, “but wouldn’t I be good at that job?” But working as a chef did not leave many Sunday mornings free for a 45-minute drive to church; they didn’t return to the Rochester church, and Laura didn’t think much about it for years.
A few years later, she decided to go to college, pursuing a history major and thinking she would be a teacher. By the time she graduated in 2009, she had changed her plans and applied to law school. She was accepted into Hamline University in St. Paul, but deferred her enrollment for a year while she and her partner got settled in the Twin Cities. During that year, she remembered the church in Rochester. There are several UU churches in the Twin Cities, and one Sunday morning she and her partner Emily went to Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul. And again, as soon as the minister started his sermon, there was that “clanging bell” telling Laura she should be in the pulpit. She went back the next week, and the same sensation came over her. She told her partner--now her wife--"I can’t help going to church without feeling like I want to be a minister.” So she met with one of the ministers at Unity to talk it over. The minister sent her home with a Parker Palmer book and invited her back to talk again about whether she really was feeling a call to ministry. It was weird, Laura thought, that she would pursue ministry when she had only been to a UU church a handful of times. But thinking it through, Laura realized that her career choices--an actual career making meals, and contemplated careers in teaching or law--were, for her, about “ministering to the disconnection.” Now, having found a church where a sense of belonging meshed with her own spirituality, she saw that ministry was the path for that. So she enrolled at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. In her time at seminary, she was also developing and forming her Unitarian Universalist faith. She graduated in 2015, served a year as a chaplain with the Good Samaritan Society, and in 2016 became the full-time minister at Minnesota Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, the congregation she continues to serve.
Laura sees Unitarian Universalism as a tradition that--though imperfect--is more welcoming to queer folks than many other religious traditions. A few decades ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association launched a “Welcoming Congregation” program that individual churches were invited to follow, with steps they should take to embrace the value of welcoming LGBTQ people and put that value into practice. For years, the Welcoming Congregation certification was a “one and done” arrangement – once a church met the criteria, it did not have to revisit the question again. In recent years, however, there has been a realization that this is ongoing work, and as minister at Minnesota Valley Laura has encouraged the congregation to work through the certification process every year because going through the process helps the congregation realize the ways being welcoming have evolved and keep evolving. To maintain Minnesota Valley’s status as a truly Welcoming Congregation, Laura works with congregational members to make sure the fellowship meets or exceeds the program’s criteria every year. That includes:
- Hosting teaching events for the congregation on queer and trans issues, usually discussion groups based around books or films like “Will and Harper.”
- Supporting LGBTQ+ organizations and events. This has included sharing the congregation’s Sunday collection with Oasis for Youth (a non-profit that supports homeless youth, a population that is disproportionately queer and trans) and being part of local Pride events, including offering glitter blessings.
- Including queer and trans people and ideas in worship. Laura delivers at least one or two sermons on LGBTQ+ questions each year, and in January 2024--when the worship theme for the month was “Liberating Love”--she invited a local drag performer to lead the Sunday morning service with a fabulous drag show.
Unitarian Universalism has been a good fit for Laura as a queer person and as a religious person who sees and feels the value of spiritual teachings but is not comfortable with many of the doctrines of Christian churches. Among the blessings of being a queer Unitarian Universalist member of the clergy, she says, “is that I am not alone” because Unitarian Universalist churches have long ordained and accepted lesbian, gay and bi individuals as members of their congregations and as clergy. She sees Unitarian Universalist spaces also opening up to and welcoming trans folks, but acknowledges that “their full embrace is still a work in progress. Unfortunately, our theories on this are further ahead than our practices.” Even so, and recognizing the importance for Unitarian Universalists of ongoing self-reflection in their efforts to widen the circle of concern and embrace, Laura also believes that trans and non-binary folks are more accepted in Unitarian Universalist spaces than they would be in many other religious traditions.
“I know that a lot of queer and trans people can come into this space and feel overwhelmed at the sense of being welcome--explicitly welcome--and a sense of belonging.” That acceptance and sense of belonging is infused in Laura’s ministry. It stems, in large part, from her own experience as a queer person. “I don’t think you can separate them,” she says. As a young queer person, “there were places I was shunned from – churches, family to some extent.” Having found spaces where she experiences belonging, Laura thinks about it less than she used to. But she remembers “not feeling like I belong,” and in her ministry feels called to “to make absolutely certain” that she helps create a “space to help people belong, to explore meaning, the stuff I missed as a kid.”
(This biographical statement was written by Chad Snyder for a fall 2024 Queer & Trans Theologies class at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities from information shared by Thompson in emails and in interviews at Minnesota Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on November 26 and December 10, 2024. The statement has been reviewed and edited by Laura Thompson.)
Biography Date: December 2025
“Rev. Laura Thompson | Profile”, LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, accessed December 24, 2025, https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/laura-thompson.