About the TRC Director
 Troxler |
Rev. Jeremy Troxler, a 2002 Duke Divinity School graduate, grew up on a farm in Brown Summit, N.C. and was baptized in the small congregation of Gethsemane UMC.
He and his younger brother spent their summers working on the family’s 140 acres of tobacco – helping with its produce business selling tomatoes, cantaloupes and watermelons.
Like many rural N.C. youth, they helped pull—or prime—individual tobacco leaves as they ripened on the stalk. Troxler jokes that “after priming tobacco in the blistering August sun, nothing else has been hard in comparison.” Jeremy’s father, Steve, now serves as the Commissioner of Agriculture in North Carolina.
Before joining Thriving Rural Communities in 2007 Jeremy served as lead pastor at Maggie Valley United Methodist Church, a 300-member congregation in a rural mountain community in western North Carolina. Prior to his four years at Maggie Valley, Troxler served as president’s assistant and pastor at St. Aubin, Ebenezer and Communicare Methodist Churches in Great Britain.
He was a John Motley Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Duke Scholar at Duke Divinity School.
“At the heart of Thriving Rural Communities is our belief in a God of abundant grace who is present in these communities and churches,” Troxler says. “All of us will be strengthened in our ministries and in our witness by sharing the gifts and the stories of what God is doing here.”