The Rev. Cindy “Cyd” Andrews-Looper’s first message to Nashville: You can be gay, and you can be a conservative Christian, and there is nothing mutually exclusive about those two things.

Her next message: You can be Christian, and you can talk to angels, and there’s nothing mutually exclusive about those two things, either.

Andrews-Looper resigned in October from pastoring the West Nashville church she founded nearly two decades ago, but she’s busier than ever.

She’s spending five months consulting, planning and preaching at Holy Trinity Community Church in Memphis, releasing a book about her life called “Two Pews from Crazy” and teaching seminars on plugging into the spirit realm.

“We read about angels in the Bible. Billy Graham wrote a book about angels,” Andrews-Looper says. “They are God’s messengers, they are here to help God, and God uses them to impart so much of what we need.

“They want to work in tandem with us in making our lives hopeful and living in this place of abundance, but they won’t step in unless we ask.”

Rev. Cyd Andrews-Looper looks to reach people 40-60 years old who may be searching for something meaningful despite life’s setbacks.

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Those ideas may not seem in tandem with her ordination in the Wesleyan church – but she resigned from that when she came out as a lesbian. Booted from her job as a traveling pastor, she arrived in Nashville from South Carolina in 1996 to work in marketing and, still moved to preach, started up a living room-based Bible study attended by eight people.

By 2006, Holy Trinity Community Church in Nashville was affiliated with the United Church of Christ denomination, plus had its own building and three Sunday services.

Her congregation was predominantly gay and overwhelmingly from Southern Baptist, Church of Christ or Pentecostal traditions – churches where they were denied full participation or rejected outright. She performed 10-15 same-sex wedding ceremonies a year, even though the state of Tennessee didn’t see those as legally valid.

She became an active and well-known figure on Nashville’s mainstream religious scene.

Last year, already in touch with a spiritual intuitive about messages she believed were from her dead father – at first through dreams, but sometimes through the appearance of doves, she says – Andrews-Looper took her first sabbatical from the church. She spent a month on Florida’s Gulf beaches, meditating, journaling, painting, praying and walking.

When she returned to Nashville, she made the emotional decision to break with Holy Trinity and pursue her new path – a mixture of Christian theology, Eastern philosophy and New Age spirituality.

Christian faith has an element of fear, she explains, but that’s not necessary. Perhaps Jesus didn’t talk about vibrational frequency or the law of attraction, but in John 15, he talks about living within his disciples and the commandment to love.

She’s aiming her message to an audience of people ages 40-60 who have done everything right, at least in this physical world’s estimation – earned an education, got a job, joined a church, got married and had kids. But instead of feeling fulfilled, they’ve been left underemployed by the recession, divorced at least once, perhaps addicted to drugs or alcohol or something else – and completely disillusioned.

Andrews-Looper wants to tell them that none of those surface things are real.

“My desire is to speak to the very real part of them, the authentic part of them – their soul,” she explains.

“I want to remind them that they are and always have been an eternal, spiritual being infinitely loved by God. Somewhere along the way, when all this was happening, they disengaged the unseen spiritual realm.

“The physical realm is defined by scarcity and finiteness. Who they are is not this physical body. Who they are is their soul.”

Intelligent people can debate that theology. What’s clear is Andrews-Looper’s passion for it – a passion perhaps lost after years of preaching her traditional brand of Christianity, inclusive as it was.

To reach her, email [email protected].