Lauren D. Sawyer, PhD

Manager of Curriculum and Instruction, Allender Center & Affiliate Faculty, The Seattle School

Dr. Lauren D. Sawyer graduated from The Seattle School with her MA in Theology and Culture in 2014. She then became an Assistant Instructor before taking on the role of Notetaker for the Allender Center, focusing on Dan Allender’s teachings. In 2020, she returned to Seattle and began teaching as an Adjunct Instructor, and a year later, she expanded her role with the Allender Center as a Curriculum Specialist. In July 2022, her roles were combined: Adjunct Instructor at The Seattle School and Curriculum Coordinator at the Allender Center. She has since been promoted to Affiliate Faculty and Manager of Curriculum and Instruction.

As Manager of Curriculum and Instruction at the Allender Center, she creates and manages systems to help make sure Narrative Focused Trauma Care teachings are cohesive, coherent, and accessible to all learning styles.

As Affiliate Faculty, Lauren teaches about 12 credits a year primarily in the theology program. Her favorite class has been TCE 543: God, Gender, and Sexuality, where she gets to use her training as a sexual ethicist while playing with theological categories of the doctrine of God and theological anthropology.

She appreciates how The Seattle School has always been a space for her to share her expertise and passion as well as a space for her to learn and grow from her colleagues, some of the most thoughtful and creative people she knows.

Lauren received her PhD in Religion and Society (with a concentration in Christian Social Ethics and a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies) from Drew University in 2022. Lauren is part of the Purity Culture Research Collective, an interdisciplinary research cohort “created to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between academics and researchers interrogating evangelical purity culture.” Lauren’s debut book, Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture, will be published with New York University Press in fall 2025.

Lauren lives in North Beacon Hill with her spouse Joel and kiddo Davy. Born and raised in Indiana, she escaped to the Pacific Northwest as soon as she could.

For fun every week, Lauren open water swims in Puget Sound (even through the winter). She has swum among seals and jellyfish and has spied sea stars, moon snails, and brightly colored anemones on the ocean floor.