Rev. Jacqueline C. Lahey is a very native New Yorker who grew up on Long Island, where she went to the beach every day in the summers of her childhood. She graduated from The College of William and Mary in Virginia, then served four years on active duty as an officer in the U.S. Army, with duty stations in South Korea and San Antonio, TX. She worked for non-profit organizations in San Francisco and New York City, and earned her Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary. She was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 1998 at the Community Church of New York in Manhattan.

After graduation from Seminary, she served as an ecumenical chaplain at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ, as a hospice chaplain with Odyssey Healthcare in Edison, NJ, and as coordinator for the New Jersey Unitarian Universalist Network for Promise the Children, which was based in our own UU Congregation at Montclair. She now works as a hospice chaplain for Compassionate Care Hospice, providing pastoral care to terminally ill patients in their homes and in nursing homes throughout Bergen and Passaic Counties.

She is married to Scott Lahey, and they have two children, Patrick and Margaret, who are enthusiastic participants in the RE program here at UUCM. They live in Maplewood, and enjoy the Jersey Shore as a family as frequently as their schedules allow.