Nick Strauss

After joining Parish Council in 2024, Nick accepted the post of Treasurer at the beginning of 2025. With fifteen years of data science experience in the telecommunications industry and a Master's in Adult Education, Nick hopes to use his background to bring clarity to the financial realities of running a small church, helping parishioners and leaders make informed decisions about tithes, operational budgets, and strategic improvements.

Nick holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MEd from Seattle University. All through his childhood he dreamt of being an engineer and designing airplanes, but college math classes disabused him of that vision. As a result, after a diverse career across e-commerce startups and telecommunications megacorporations, he now considers his work at Boeing, designing training materials for aircraft assembly workers, to be something of a circuitously arrived at dream job.

Raised in a nominally Lutheran but entirely non-observing household, Nick eventually fell away from even the vaguest trappings of faith and spent decades as an atheist. It was during the stress and isolation of COVID that he eventually recognized a need for more in his life, and began to embrace the teachings of Orthodox Christianity. His first service at Holy Apostles was the Vespers celebration of the Synaxis of the Holy Apostles on June 29th, 2021, the day before Washington's official "reopening" with the easing of COVID restrictions. He remembers his first act of service to the parish: pushing chairs back into the nave to get ready for the following morning's Festal Divine Liturgy.

Nick appreciates the clarity brought to his life by Orthodoxy's teachings, particularly the reality of the divine and the noetic, and its recognition of the spiritual warfare in which we are constant, if often unknowing participants. He appreciates the guidance his faith offers to navigate the struggles of living in a fallen world and the beacon of Christ's light that guides us towards a better life in this world and the next. He is deeply grateful for the spiritual home he has found in Orthodoxy, and the community he has found in the Holy Apostles family.