Holy Trinity Church on Mercer Island welcomed Pastor Rhonda Bostrom from Lincoln, Nebraska, with open arms as their new Senior Pastor on March 1, 2022.

This March, Bostrom moved from her home state of Nebraska to answer Holy Trinity’s call for service as the new Senior Pastor with her husband Eric (Lead Pastor of Mountain View Lutheran Church in Edgewood), and their two children, Annika and Soren.

Bostrom was ordained as an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) pastor in 2003 and has served as a full-time minister since then.

Having been warned before moving to the Puget Sound area of the “Northwest Freeze,” Bostrom was pleasantly surprised by the community’s reception upon her arrival.

“Mercer Island is a charming community. It’s beautiful in terms of environment and the people are very friendly here,” said Bostrom. “The Mercer Island community has been very welcoming.”

Before moving to Mercer Island for their new positions, the Bostroms felt they were being called to do something different than the work they were doing in Nebraska.

“Primarily it was to be senior pastors. We just had the experience that would really serve a church or churches well who needed a senior pastor because of all the experience we’d had in full-time ministry up to that point.”

Then it was just a matter of figuring out where to go.

“We always enjoyed going west when we’d go on vacations. We like the geography,” she said. They decided to focus their job search from the Denver area to the Pacific Ocean.

“We just really opened ourselves up to going in that geography, which is pretty big,” she said.

The Bostroms were approached by different churches in the western U.S., but found these two congregations (Holy Trinity Church in Mercer Island and Mountain View Lutheran Church in Edgewood) to be the best fit for their family.

“The conversations kept going [during the hiring process] and we took that as a sign of this is where God is calling us,” she said.

Holy Trinity Church invites the community to engage with the church at their booth at the Mercer Island Summer Celebration on July 9.

“Come on over to the booth, play some games and introduce yourself, we’d love to meet you!”