Natalie Owens-Pike ’11

You are holding a bouquet of selves, all the ways you’ve bloomed over your time at Mac. Wonderful mentors helped me name those parts of myself and see that I didn’t have to choose between them.

Natalie Owens-Pike ’11

I am one of five pastors at a large Presbyterian church in New York City. I minister to the online campus—people who live across the country and the world, who join online for worship and fellowship. Some of the work is traditional nonprofit management (directing programming, having meetings). I also lead retreats, write and teach curriculum for Bible study, lead a portion of the weekly in-person service, and connect with congregants across the US. My favorite part of this work is that I get to walk with people in all aspects of their lives.

Although I was not an ed major, I worked as an intern teacher in a breakthrough collaborative program in Minneapolis while at Mac. I loved working with youth, creating a classroom space where joy and belonging were just as important as academic outcomes, and so I applied for Teach for America after Mac. I am grateful for professors who prepared me to arrive at that teaching job in rural Mississippi able to ask big questions of myself and to reflect on the world and my choices. The women I worked with there taught me what it looks like to seek the good, despite multigenerational challenges related to racism and structures of power in the region. 

I went to Yale Divinity School to become a pastor, but I call on experiences from Mac all the time in my work. My foundational entry point was through Pluralism and Unity—a Department of Multicultural Life program that was an introduction to understanding racialized history and communities in St. Paul and has been an anchor for my career of working in multiracial settings. Another set of skills I rely came from my four years in Fresh Concepts, which is the improv team. From teaching Spanish in a Mississippi high school to how I lead as a minister, the ability to use humor as a way to connect with people has been vital. What we think is funny is such an interesting entry point to building a diverse communities and to helping us speak truth to power in ways that can be heard. 

We are living in a time where we are faced with a lot of risk to our own bodies, our futures, our planet, and there’s a temptation to hunker down and do the safe thing, to seek security in the things we’ve determined give us stability— finances, a career path that seems linear, legible, illustrious. But if I could tell Mac students one thing, it would be: You have four years to learn and live alongside people who think differently and have lived differently than you. Now is the time to figure out how to take risks, so that we are creating a web of support for each other, instead of expecting our stability to come from outside us.

Last updated: November 2025