Since July 2020, Lee has been serving as pastor of Valley United Methodist Church in West Des Moines, Iowa. She comes to this work from nine years as pastor of Women at the Well in Mitchellville, a church based inside the walls of the Iowa women’s prison. That work planted in her a vision of the church outside the prison embracing persons right in their communities who face challenges like the ones we see so often inside the prison: addiction, mental illness, sexual assault and domestic violence. The church on the whole is impoverished by the absence–and the silence–of those experiences and voices in our midst.
Lee previously served (2003-2011) as co-pastor of Polk City United Methodist Church, a small-town church near the Des Moines metro. A 2007 graduate, with honors, of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, Lee was ordained an elder in the United Methodist Church in 2009.
Lee’s ministry career follows what she had thought would be a career in law. After college, she went east to Harvard Law School and began her career at a private law firm in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1995 she and her family moved home to Iowa and she worked as an in-house lawyer at a life insurance company. A lifelong United Methodist, she sensed a call from God after she began praying in earnest at the age of nearly 40. Her ministry has combined a delight in the creativity and wonder of worship with a deep commitment to social justice and how we mobilize the church to be a Spirit-led force to transform the world.
Lee resides with her husband on her family’s century farm near Prairie City, Iowa. They are the parents of three sons, a dear daughter-in-law and one more daughter-in-law-to-be.
Prior publications
- Lee Schott, Job, Immersion Bible Studies (Abingdon Press, 2011). You can check it out on Amazon here.
- Lee Schott, “Preaching the Church toward Robustness,” in Doxology: A Journal of Worship, Vol. 24 (Order of Saint Luke, 2007).
- “The Pamela Rae Stewart Case and Fetal Harm: Prosecution or Prevention?,” Recent Development, in Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Vol. 11 (Spring 1988), 227.
Some links
Lee was featured among the Des Moines’ Register’s 2018 “People to Watch” with a great profile about her work at Women at the Well. You can check it out here.
You can watch Lee’s ministry at Valley UMC through their web page and on their Facebook page, where the latest updates are posted.
If you’d like to learn more about Women at the Well, which was so formative for Lee, here’s a link to their website!
Join the “Foolish Church” conversation on our @FoolishChurch page on Facebook. Take time to share your experiences of making room by using the hashtag #FoolishChurch on Facebook or Twitter. Don’t forget to check for others’ ideas posted there as well. Lee will collect the best of these and share them periodically on her blog.