Rev. Roger Bertschausen
Developmental Lead Minister (he/him)
rbertschausen@unitytemple.org :: x102
Rev. Roger Bertschausen grew up in Grand Rapids, MI. He and his family were active members in Fountain Street Church, a liberal, non-denominational church that had around 2,000 members when Roger was a kid. Roger was president of the youth group and worked as a custodian at the church.
Roger went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick along the coast of Maine. He majored in religion with a concentration in Buddhism and Hinduism. Studying these religions in Sri Lanka for a semester was one of the most formative chapters of his life and eventual ministry.
Roger received a Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He took a couple years off in the middle of divinity school to do a UU internship in the congregation on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts and to get married to Amy Holzhausen, a fellow student at the divinity school, who was serving a Disciples church in Columbus, IN. They lived in Columbus for a year after getting married and then returned to Chicago for Roger to finish his M.Div. and Amy to do a year-long chaplaincy residency at Rush Medical Center. During his year in Columbus, Roger served as the first, quarter-time minister of a small UU congregation and worked full-time as a chaplain at a drug and alcohol treatment center.
After graduating from the University of Chicago Divinity School and being ordained by the UU church in Nantucket, Roger was called to be the first settled minister of the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Appleton, Wisconsin. He served there for twenty-five years. During that time, the congregation grew from around a hundred to seven hundred members. The congregation built a new facility and added a 330-seat sanctuary during Roger’s ministry. Roger was extensively involved in the community including helping to co-found Toward Community: Unity in Diversity, an organization committed to diversity, equity, and belonging work.
In 2014, Amy became the executive director of a counseling center in St. Louis. Roger completed his work in Appleton and followed nine months later. During six years in St. Louis, Roger worked in the President’s office and taught UU history and polity class at Eden Theological Seminary as an adjunct faculty member, was a church governance consultant with Unity Consulting out of Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota, and served as executive director of the UU Partner Church Council.
In 2020, Roger returned to congregational ministry. He did interim ministries at First Unitarian Society in Madison, Wisconsin, and White Bear UU Church in the suburban Twin Cities, Minnesota. He became Unity Temple’s Developmental Senior Minister in August 2023. Roger is recognized as an accredited interim minister by the UU Association.
Roger received an honorary Doctorate of Ministry from Meadville Lombard Theological School in 2021. He has been involved in many ways in the UU Association, the MidAmerica UU Region, and our global Unitarian/Universalist faith.
Roger and Amy have two children who are both attorneys. Their daughter, her husband (a UU minister), and their two children live in Columbus, IN. Their son and his significant other live in California. Roger loves spending time with family. Other loves include hiking, running, travel, and whiskey collecting. He is a fan of a major league baseball team from an adjoining state to the southwest of Illinois, and is an owner of an NFL team to the north of Illinois.
Rev. Emily Gage
Associate Minister (she/her)
egage@unitytemple.org :: x103
A life-long Unitarian Universalist, Emily grew up at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Pittsburgh. There, she cultivated her love for learning about what people believe and why. This led her to major in religion at Swarthmore College. Upon graduation, feeling an urge to see—and save—the world, she joined the Peace Corps, and she taught English as a Foreign Language to high school students from 1991-1993 in Poland.
When Emily returned to Pittsburgh and to the congregation where she grew up, she became the youth advisor, and it was in those months that she realized that she was called to the ministry. It would call upon her many passions and interests in life: learning, making a difference in the world, being part of and cultivating multigenerational community, writing, creating worship, making music, teaching, and listening to people’s lives. She attended Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, MA., and as part of her training, served as ministerial intern at First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA. That congregation ordained her to the Unitarian Universalist ministry on June 7, 1997.
The Universalist Unitarian Church of Joliet, Illinois called Emily to be their minister, and she served this community from 1997-2008. She has been at Unity Temple since August of 2008, first serving as Minister of Faith Development and now as Associate Minister. Her current major areas of leadership include lifelong learning for adults, pastoral care, and justice ministries.
Emily has always been active in the wider Unitarian Universalist world. She served eight years on the Central Midwest District Board, five of those as president, from 2002-2007. She was a member of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, the Unitarian Universalist ministerial credentialing committee, serving from 2006-2011. She has served on the Religious Education Credentialing Committee since 2018.
She and her wife have a son, born in 2011. In her spare time, Emily enjoys reading, writing, walking the dog, traveling, puzzling, and listening to and playing music.
Emily Mace
Intern Minister (she/her)
emace@unitytemple.org
Emily grew up attending an Episcopal church in Saratoga, CA, near the Santa Cruz mountains, where she was an avid French horn player and enjoyed reading books about philosophy and religion. Family roots drew her back to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where she majored in religion with an initial focus on Buddhism. By senior year, Unitarian Universalism had become both her religious home and academic focus. She decided to continue studying at Harvard Divinity School, in part because of the school’s historic associations, but also because two of her professors in undergrad had met and fallen in love at HDS.
At HDS, Emily did meet her future spouse, Ben, a fellow academic student of religion in America. By then checking out ministry from the sidelines, Emily served on the board of the Harvard UU Ministry for Students group while completing her MTS/Master of Theological Studies degree. At Princeton University, Emily studied the history of religious liberalism in America, writing her PhD dissertation on world religions practices among late nineteenth-century Unitarians, Universalists, and other religious liberals. Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, uncle of Unity Temple’s Frank Lloyd Wright, figured prominently in this history, alongside other Chicagoans and their progressive friends.
Emily completed her dissertation while living in Brevard, NC, south of Asheville. Somehow, she combined fiber arts, hiking, and Western North Carolina’s music scene with adjunct teaching at Brevard College, serving as the executive director of the online UU resource the Harvard Square Library, and teaching UU history and polity for two years at Starr King School for the Ministry. In 2013, Emily and her family moved to Chicagoland after a six-month stint in Finland, with their second daughter born soon after.
In Illinois, Emily worked at Lake Forest College until 2019, after which she spent several years pursuing freelance editing, writing, and academic writing coaching. She joined North Shore Unitarian Church in Deerfield, and her family also joined a local synagogue in order to raise their daughters in their father’s Reform Jewish tradition, giving their family’s life a distinct interfaith flavor.
What finally pushed Emily to say “yes” to ministry was the mass shooting that rocked the community of Highland Park during the Fourth of July parade in 2022. In the midst of the community’s grief and supported by her home church, Emily finally understood that she wanted to be part of the transformative power that religious communities and professionals could play in fostering healing and ministering love. Two years later, she enrolled in the Master of Divinity program at Meadville Lombard Theological School. She completed her clinical pastoral education (CPE) training at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she continues occasional work as a chaplain. Her ministerial interests are shaped as much by paths through grief and trauma as by interfaith and multi-faith perspectives, liberal religious history and culture, and ongoing engagement with writing, the fiber arts, music, and a love of nature.