From swimsuit competition glamour to parish pulpit clamor

Beauty queen is now a pastor

COTUIT - On a recent Sunday morning, 30-year-old Nicole Lamarche, a former Miss California, stood before a crowd in a simple clapboard church next to a local watering hole. She wore high-heeled boots, her thin figure draped in a black robe.

"I feel so lucky to be your pastor," she proclaimed.

Lamarche became minister of Cotuit Federated Church two years ago, shaking up its stodgy routine and causing quite a stir in this quiet Cape Cod village of about 2,600 year-round residents.

She says four parishioners defected early on, after people Googled her name and discovered her beauty pageant past, but these days residents credit Lamarche with injecting new dynamism into the town and the church.

Lamarche says she understands that for some the "pastor in a swimsuit thing" is hard to swallow, but she simply needed the money. Loyal members of her congregation accept her explanation, buoying her spirits. Plus, says Lamarche, "If you can walk on a stage in your swimsuit, you can do anything."

After a service earlier this year, the congregation gathered for coffee, fruit salad, and cookies in an adjoining reception room, chattering with each other and the pastor who was once Miss Desert Vista.

"Just listen to it," said Pam Bode, a member of the church since 1985. "This is a church that has come alive."

"She's good for God," agreed Norman Knight, a 79-year-old retired welder, one of about a hundred regular members of the church who now attend weekly.

The path from beauty-pageant winner to pastor has not always been smooth. Lamarche grew up going to church near her hometown of Chattaroy, Wash., and joined a campus ministry group when she started college at the University of Arizona. An international relations major, she planned to join the foreign service after graduation.

The minister at her church suggested she consider seminary school instead. She had her doubts, but agreed to attend a "ministry as vocation" weekend at the Pacific School of Religion in California after the minister offered to pay her airfare to Berkeley. She enrolled and started the following year.

But Lamarche needed money, she recalled, and she was drawn to scholarship prizes she heard about in pageant competition.

Her first attempt was for the Miss Tucson title in 2000. Things did not go well. Recently returned from a backpacking trip around Europe, she had what she describes as "a short German haircut."

She cried onstage during the swimsuit competition and wore an old prom dress for the evening wear portion. She walked away empty-handed.
But in 2001, she became Miss Desert Vista, coming in first runner-up for Miss Arizona later that year.

When she moved to California that summer for seminary school, she thought her pageant days were behind her. But the mother of the 1998 Miss California winner found Lamarche on an online message board and convinced her to compete.

Source: Boston.com