Margot Armer: A Very Brief Bio

I’m an associate pastor at a Hebraic Christian congregation, so I get a lot of questions about biblical Judaism.  As it happens, I do have a secular Jewish background.  I was born in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital in 1943, at a moment in time when the city of New York was the demographic center of the Jewish world.  At the time I was born, my father was a Jew who didn’t go to synagogue and my mother was an Episcopalian who didn't go to church.  I spent my formative years in a secular, almost completely Jewish neighborhood near Pleasantville, New York, that spent its formative years as a close-knit cooperative community that would eventually become known as the Usonia Historic District.  (If Usonia had actually had a rabbi, that rabbi would have been Frank Lloyd Wright.)

When I went off to college, I had to choose between Jewish or Christian on a pre-admission form.  I chose Jewish because I had to check a box by something, but I self-identified as half and half.  Today, I identify as 100% and 100%.  I’m 100% Jewish because in the Bible a person's Jewishness is inherited through their father.  I’m 100% Christian because I’m a born-again, water-baptized believer in Jesus. I’ve been one of the pastors at Shalom Hebraic Christian Congregation since 2009.  And since 2011 I’ve been married to my husband Will.  (It was an answer to prayer for both of us—and in my case it “just so happened” to take place a biblical 40 years and 4 days after the day I chose to follow Jesus.)

Margot Armer