Rev. Beth Monhollen is originally from southeastern Kentucky and called Milwaukee, WI home since her teen years. Raised in Pentecostal and Baptist churches, she has a deep appreciation for the joy and beauty created in vibrant, music-filled, embodied worship. But, the restrictive beliefs and practices of her childhood churches led her to seek other more inclusive paths, and she stumbled upon Unitarian Universalism while engaging in reproductive rights activism in the mid-1990s. While she wasn’t ready for church at that time, she knew that UUism was her spiritual home. 

She began attending her home church, the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee, in 2012, where she dove in whole-heartedly as a lay leader: serving coffee, greeting and ushering, chairing membership and worship committees, serving on the stewardship team, and volunteering in RE, including as a trained OWL facilitator. The joy in that work helped her to discern a call to UU ministry and in the fall of 2020, she enrolled in the Master of Divinity program at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago. Her training included time as a hospice chaplain and a two-year congregational internship at a UU church near Philadelphia, who ordained her in June 2023. Shortly before her ordination, she earned her MDIV and was accepted into Preliminary Fellowship as a UU minister.

Rev. Beth had a twenty-year career in higher education and grounded her educational practices in feminist pedagogy. She served as an academic advisor for undergraduate students, oversaw college-wide orientation programs, provided career counseling, and taught a variety of courses, including intro to theater. Parallel to her professional education experience, she worked in the Milwaukee theater community from the mid-1990s until 2014. She loves art in all of its forms, but truthfully, poetry is her favorite. She reads indiscriminately, enjoys sic-fi, learning languages, and meeting new people. She has been married to her spouse since 1999 and after all this time, many rescue pets and living in three states, they’re happy to say they still like each other. 

Rev. Beth’s grounds her theology on experiencing the divine through our interconnections and interdependence with all life and in fostering mutuality in all our relationships. 

Rev. Beth can be contacted at: minister@uucuc.org

For urgent pastoral needs call: 414-482-5191

Schedule a meeting: https://calendly.com/revbeth-uucuc