Kara Reagan, FTE Ministry Fellow
“My passion is to challenge others—both believer and non-believer—to consider Christ, the nature of the church and to find their role in it.”

Kara Reagan says her choice of friends raised some eyebrows at Colorado College, where she studied physics and history as an undergraduate.

Brought up as a Southern Baptist, Reagan had “gone Bible study shopping” and ended up in a diverse campus interfaith group. “I was hanging out with Air Force Academy Baptists and Catholic pacifists,” she says. “People started calling me the ‘Roamin’ Baptist!’”

Straddling different perspectives has always been second nature for Reagan, who describes herself as “amphibious—always a bit between two worlds.” An active interest in science led her to take flight training and consider a career in U.S. space programs. But she also loved the humanities and felt pulled toward discussions about faith, starting in the sixth grade when she volunteered as a vacation Bible school leader. From her earliest beginnings, Reagan remembers being literally touched by her family’s faith. “I had a lot of health problems as a baby, including heart surgery when I was hours old,” she recalls. “My mom and grandma would sit with me at night. They would lightly touch my skin, reassure and comfort me, and tell me about Jesus. I remember they prayed for me constantly.”

Reagan was later inspired by a high school teacher who asked big open-ended questions like, “What exactly is the church?” At the same time, she discovered that her own love for “playing with the big ideas” was merging with an intense interest in service. “It wasn’t a divine whammy, but I made a long, gradual progression toward integrating my faith into my life after I graduated from college. Faith has always been part of my life’s interests but it’s now at the center of what I’m passionate about.”

Today as a second-year student at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Reagan works closely with youth groups and spent the past year as a hospital chaplain. She feels “as if I’m being led toward campus ministry, maybe even college chaplaincy,” and to other places where she can continue to explore life’s big questions with a group of faithful seekers. “My passion is to challenge others—both believer and nonbeliever—to consider Christ, the nature of the church and to find their role in it.” She hopes her seminary studies will provide “new tools to engage others on higher intellectual and spiritual levels.”

Her FTE fellowship further sparked that passion. “They put some big ideas on us at the Fund’s ministry conference,” Reagan recalls. “I loved being around bright, articulate people who are passionate about the life of the church.” For her FTE Ministry Project, Reagan will engage both the external and internal dimensions of preparing to be a leader for the life of the church. She will be trained in advocacy for social justice in the United States Congress and then spend several weeks in silence and reflection with a community of Carmelite women religious in the Colorado mountains.

Reagan thinks the seeds of this idea were planted during a mysticism class at Colorado College when she was assigned to “go into the Sand Dunes National Monument—after we’d been studying the desert ‘fathers and mothers.’ We started hiking. When I got to the top of the highest dune I came face-to-face with a 70-year-old German physicist from Los Alamos…someone quite different from me, but a wonderful point of connection. Yet again, two of my seemingly separate worlds had joined in perfect harmony!” laughs Reagan. “Maybe bridging people and ideas is what I’m born to do.”