Being a Faithful Witness in Harrowing Times with Rev. Marcos Canales & Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero

by on August 15, 2025

What does it look like to stand with a community through fire—both literal and systemic? 

In this conversation, Rev. Marcos Canales and Dr. Robert Chao Romero join Rachael Clinton Chen to share their experiences leading and loving the Latino community in the Los Angeles area, especially during recent times of crisis. From homes lost and families displaced by devastating wildfires this year to the crushing weight of recent unjust immigration policies that threaten daily survival, these realities are urgent and relentless.

Amid these challenges, they share how they create space for lament, fierce hope, and necessary rest in their lives as leaders. They show what it means to bear witness with empathy, stand in true solidarity, and nurture resilience when the world feels like it’s falling apart. Beyond politics, agendas, and policies, their witness points to a deeper hope in Jesus—one that sustains, heals, and empowers communities to keep moving forward.

We invite you to listen, learn, and be moved by their wisdom—shaped by personal and communal healing.

About Our Guests:

Rev. Marcos Canales, an immigrant from Costa Rica with Peruvian parents, has been pastoring amongst the Latina community of Los Angeles for two decades. He has also worked in the areas of community-based youth development, immigration advocacy, leadership coaching and theological education. Marcos is pastor of La Fuente Ministries: a bilingual, intercultural, and intergenerational congregation in the city of Pasadena, CA. He received his Master’s of Divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary and his most recent publication includes a co-authored book entitled Las Casas on Faithful Witness. This work highlights key historical and theological writings from Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first community organizer and priest during Spanish colonial times who advocated for the dignity and defense of indigenous peoples in the Americas. One of his greatest passions is to integrate Christian discipleship, social justice, and Latina theology. Marcos will begin his Ph.D. in Theological Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary this coming Fall 2025.

Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is “Asian-Latino,” and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005.  He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley. Romero has published more than 30 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and received the Latina/o Studies book award from the international Latin American Studies Association. His recent book, “Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (2020),” received the InterVarsity Press Readers’ Choice Award for best academic title.  Romero is a former Ford Foundation and U.C. President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute’s Sabbatical Grant for Researchers.  Robert is also an ordained minister and community organizer. 

Related Resources:

Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. It really does feel these days as if it’s almost impossible to catch a breath or to find language for all that’s happening. In the face of ongoing collective trauma, how do we tend to ourselves and the communities we serve in courageous and honoring ways? Especially as those who proclaim to follow Jesus, what does it actually look like to be a faithful witness on the ground in harrowing times? I wanted to take an opportunity to cut through all the polarizing and disembodied noise of social media and the news cycles and our family drama and hear from some of the pastors, leaders and healers who I believe have embodied wisdom to share. Leaders who I believe practice the do justice, love mercy and walk humbly kind of Christianity that we’re called to, especially in the wake of trauma and abuse. Toward that end, I’m so honored to be joined today by Reverend Marcos Canales, and Dr. Robert Chow Romero, who both reside in Pasadena, California, and whose community has experienced the devastating wildfires from January and the ongoing raids taking place in the midst of the Latino-Latina community that they are a part of and serve.

So Reverend Marcos Canales and Dr. Robert Chao Romero, welcome to the Allender Center Podcast. I’m so honored that you joined me today, especially when I know you’re in a season that is requiring much.

Marcos: Thank you for having us.

Robert: Pleasure to be here.

Rachael: I want to start off with just even a caveat or I guess just share some knowledge that when I pursued you for this conversation, your very generous, and also invitational response, was just to name that there’s no possible way you could really honor the collective of your community and the multidimensional nature of storytelling, especially amongst your female leaders and the importance of that and having a more collective voice and not reenacting historical patriarchal harm. And I really appreciated that. It meant a lot to me, and we are in conversation around more storytelling with your community and various leaders and just the importance that no two people, and especially how our identities show up, should be responsible for the voice of the whole. And so I felt deeply honored by that and I hope that your community feels honored by that. And I hope our listeners are invited to deepened imagination for honor. So I want to thank you for that. The work of pastoring and teaching and advocacy and community care is really not new to either of you. You serve, Pastor Marcos, you serve in pastoral leadership at La Fuente Ministry, and also you teach at Fuller. And Robert, you also are a professor and I know have pastoral roles in just how you live and move and have your being. And this has been a very acute season for your community, and I would just love to make space to hear more what has this season held for you and your community.

Marcos: Yes, thank you again for having us, and anytime I get to share with Robert and also give glimpses of our own community and what does it mean to be church together, it’s a real, real joy and an honor. So thank you for making this episode especially about that. For us, I feel that there’s been different waves and obviously we could pinpoint perhaps a threshold or a breaking point already in the 2016 election as a breaking point in terms of figuring out where we were going to revisit our allegiances and where our Christian identity was not going to be tempted by Christian nationalism. At those times, I feel like there was more shock and more of a collective trauma of how did we get here. And at the same time, we as a bilingual congregation, having the gift of both languages, English and Spanish, we are able to lean into some of the cues that each language provides for different logics to understand, to explain and to wonder about the world. And one of those, I feel like it’s the fact that in Spanish, historia and historia are the same thing. So in English you have history and story, storytelling and telling about the history are two different words, but in Spanish they’re woven because you can’t tell our people’s story without telling our people’s history. And so 2016 was an opportunity to really continue to pay attention to the threat of our history as colonized descendants of Indigenous, Mestizo, Afro-Latino communities and colonial powers and how that has been replicated over generations. And yet at the same time, the ways in which Jesús with an accent is able to intervene in that history and reshape our own stories. And so already we felt like 2016 was a stopping point to be able to look back and be able to discern in the future. And so that’s where also a lot of the work of paying attention to intergenerational trauma, grief and the ways in which migration tied in with the history of U.S. interventionism in all of our countries in Latin America are all part of how did we get here and how does an election, the first election of Trump reflect and shape and push back against our very own existence in this country. So from that point on, we’ve been working and paying attention to all of those areas through different means of being formed. We take spiritual formation, congregational formation, and missional formation, all about the process of discerning. And so instead of strategic planning in our congregation, we plan for attentiveness. So how do we create space to pay attention to how we’re doing emotionally? And so we’ve learned the language of emotions and how do we pay attention to our grief, which then showed up in COVID. And so COVID let us embrace and pay attention to the multiple losses that we had been carrying, and the fact that many of us could not travel to different countries to be able to mourn those who had passed. That’s where the work of Drea, Drea is my wife, shout out, created the grief stations, and that was our first reiteration of it to be able to express and to pay attention to our grief. And as she always says, grieving well leads to healing well. So that’s been part of that nurturing and attentiveness that we’ve given, plus the rich deepness of Latino theology, of Latin American theology of resistance movements and knowing the racist history of this country and migration patterns, you name it. So it’s all woven there.

Rachael: And you guys have had some in the midst of that. You were in the path of some of the wildfires in January and certainly are being deeply impacted by this administration’s very cruel and inhumane immigration policies that are playing out. So what does it look like to care for community and to make space for grief that feels both historical and the volume getting really loud when we’re in crisis, when a trauma is kind of ongoing, how have you responded not only on behalf of your people, but on behalf of your own bodies and your own self?

Marcos: Yeah, I mean, I think, thank you. I just didn’t want to take all the time, but yeah, definitely that led us all the way to the fires and what we’ve been naming also the first fire, which was the Eaton Fire, which disrupted all of our community and was another collective trauma, plus the most recent expression of the fire that we saw coming since the election in November of the abductions and the kidnappings and the immigration enforcement without due process. So part of it is the work of really creating a congregational culture that allows for emotions to be seen as a gift versus something you have to suppress, question. So for example, during COVID, we shied away from the phrase that everybody kept using “faith over fear, faith over fear”. It’s like, no, no, no, fear is real and fear is a gift, and fear is trying to tell us something. So Nina Lau-Branson helped us, one of our leaders to really pay attention to the various gifts of emotions and giving permission to ourselves and to others. And so for me during COVID, it was helpful and necessary for me to also stop referring people to therapy and do therapy for myself and actually go through that process and learn another language of emotions. And so that has woven us together in terms of how we not only respond, but how do we, in the midst of crises and traumas and traumatic events, what is the collective need in order to fill in the blank? And so for the fires, we were already had been working on, we call them casitas, which are smaller groupings by geographic region to pay attention to our neighborhoods. And so each of those casitas in different parts of LA, were able to respond to the fires and the different needs of the families that lost everything. So different people mobilized in different ways. We all were evacuated, and so we were able to check in, and this is the same way with what’s happening now with immigration and our migrant community being attacked and racialized. Then there’s different levels of care and commitment and different visible ways of protesting and vigils, and then there’s the silent but much needed ways of checking in food, of accompaniment, of listening, of creating emergency plans for people if they get deported. So there’s multiple layers that are just constantly happening, but they’re also being taken care of by the collective, not just one person. So being able to say, I can’t do this. I need help, or I’m about to burn out, so who can tap in or from the very get go saying This is going to require all of this kind of work, so who’s available to do X, Y, and Z? Or please help me contact people so that we get a clear assessment of what it is that people are needing versus us prescribing this is what you need in a time of grief.

Rachael: There’s just a lot of humility in what you’ve named that I think kind of taps into that faith over fear, right? Because fear makes you vulnerable. And I just struggle with how fear and faith become antithetical because it’s just like God made our bodies to actually respond pretty appropriately to fear. Fear can actually be a very helpful clarifying emotion, but I’m just very struck by the humility because I think especially for many structures of pastoral leadership, to ask for help or to say, I don’t know, or I can’t do it all, would probably lead to some people losing their job or there’s just, especially in, yeah, I mean more Eurocentric cultures where individualism kind of rules the day, and that just still shows up in the way things are structured and what’s expected. There’s just something really beautiful in even learning how to ask for help, learning how to get the help we need that we are really great at encouraging other people to do, which I just think is a little bit the curse of all healers and pastors. We’re really good. We can be really good at getting the referrals and knowing how to get people access to what they need, but still have to be like, and you can ask for that same help too.

Robert: Absolutely. Yeah.

Rachael: You can have those same needs too. So I’m just very much struck by that.

Marcos: Yeah, absolutely.

Rachael: Robert, I’m curious, just as you’ve been listening and I know you were making space, just curious what you would add or what’s coming to mind?

Robert: I think that what’s coming to mind is sort of, I think the unique way that hope shows up in our church in La Fuente and the unique way that hope kind of shows up in the immigrant community. I remember seeing a Facebook post or something where there was one gentleman who cared a lot about immigration, and I’m grateful that he did, but he expressed this deep utter just almost crisis of faith that I’ve showed up to all these protests and nothing’s changed. I remember thinking about that and being like, okay, hopefully I prayed for him, but also thinking, but it’s different in our community because we don’t expect one march or one protest to change things. And yes, we want policies to change, but there’s hope in the day to day, I guess the Spanish term is lo cotidiano, the daily and seeing those… Another thing from a sermon a couple of weeks ago in our church, destellos of Hope, these glimmers of hope that show up in the day to day, and they can be small things, but seeing that, that’s what gives us a deeper hope. Seeing one person show up for another person, one person just selflessly showing up at someone’s house and providing food or someone can’t go to work because of whatever, things like that. And then I think just one more example and I’ll stop was I remember asking one of my mentors, Alexia Salvatierra, asking her, why haven’t you burned out after four decades of community organizing? When in contrast, almost every single one of her peers that started doing this work in the seventies, Christian peers either stopped doing justice or burned out or started going to a megachurch. The casualty rate is almost a hundred percent, and she said it was staying close to the grassroots communities, the grassroots immigrant community. That’s what was running through my mind as I heard Marcos share, and I’m so grateful for having that space in our church to be able to be connected in that way to the grassroots community.

Rachael: Well, and part of what you’re naming is there not only the preparation you’ve been doing, since 2016, and what that brought about, but a long history of you put words to this Marcos, even in talking about just your people and the history of colonization. And I think a lot of history, many of our listeners wouldn’t actually know or have been invited to know the stories of US interventions in Central and South America and what that caused and the disruption and the harm, and usually on the opposite side of democracy. But you can do your research, you can go, there’s some books that have been written here that you can read by these two authors. And so yeah, there is a resilience of faithful witness and attentiveness to life with each other and leaning into each other and glimmers that your people have that has sustained many, many generations. And I’m just deeply grateful for both of you and the ways that you bring those stories to bear for younger generations now that they can know. But yeah, that is not my experience of just my spiritual heritage as a collective people of European immigrants to the United States of America, and I’m just, I have been deeply shaped by listening and learning. I remember in 2016, I’m just thinking about this, going to church, the church I was going to, which I won’t name because I don’t want to expose in a way it’s not kind, but I was feeling such despair and needing a place for that sorrow to be held. And I remember going into the church service and there was just very triumphant kind of like Jesus is Lord praise and worship, which don’t get me wrong sometimes in the midst of sorrow, I do need to remember and feel that Jesus is Lord ultimately, that my allegiance isn’t to any state, nation or empire, that it is to Jesus Christ. But I remember that day feeling like there’s just so much work to do to make space. We’re still so afraid of grief. We’re still so afraid of truth telling, of lament that somehow it’s also going to be something like faith over grief. It’s going to be something that somehow takes away from our faithful witness as opposed to actually empowering it and helping us be more embodied with each other and caring with each other. So I would love to hear more just how… the rich history that you are connected to shapes your capacity to live in a moment like this.

Marcos: Robert, that that’s your cue right there, the history…

Robert: The Brown church. So I think that historically, I know that there’s a lot of people who are going through, say spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction now because of these misrepresentations that you’ve alluded to. But as the brown church, we’ve had to deconstruct and reconstruct for 500 years. And so right now I think in the U.S., U.S. Christianity is reaching, it’s like the chickens are coming home to roost. There’s been this seed of nationalism that’s been there for several hundred years. It’s always been there. But in Latin America, even when that seed was first being planted a hundred years before the pilgrims came, when it was being planted in Latin America, we had Latin American theologians that were challenging that and saying, no, this is a corruption of the Christian faith and here’s why. This is what Jesus is, this is what the gospel is. And using all the theological tools of their day in the 15, 16 hundreds to challenge that in the last 70 years in Latin America, beginning in the sixties and seventies, there was a whole fresh movement of theology, both Protestant and Catholic. The Protestant version was called Misión Integral or Holistic Mission. Your listeners may have heard of liberation theology, which often gets a bad rap, and it’s in an un nuanced way, but it was like where we had to sort of deconstruct and reconstruct in a way that our faith could continue to thrive. And we have so many rich theological frameworks that allow us to thrive versus let’s say, and this is where I pray for people who are going through this, they’re deconstructing, they’re reconstructing, and they see the last 10 years, or even the last hundred years in the U.S. as the sum total of Christianity and Latin American Christians, not all but the tradition of the Brown Church, we’re like, no, that’s not Jesus. And here are some helpful ideas and frameworks as to why. And I know Marcos can share those frameworks so beautifully and poignantly. But that would be one kind of response to your question.

Rachael: And it’s like, I think I’m really grateful one of those people who has had to deconstruct, and I feel really grateful that I haven’t been left with just, oh, find the answers here in this very narrow box or in some other version of Christian nationalism light that’s still going to come to this. I actually think we get some beef on this podcast sometimes because people hear some of the conversations we’re having and they hear anti-Republican and certainly that Christian Nationalism’s largest expression is playing out right now amongst Republicans in the United States. And if we’re thinking of Christian nationalism tied to kind of Christian expressions of empirical power, as someone who maybe even identifies more left, I can look and see ways in which I even am still like, but can’t we keep empire power and Jesus, if we just get the right people in these power structures, Jesus will prevail, which I just think can kind of be a version of Christian nationalism, right? Or we’ll perpetuate so much of the violence outside of the US and that’s okay, but we just won’t do it inside. I’ll stop waxing about this, but I’ve just been really grateful. I do a lot of work with survivors of spiritual abuse, many of whom are coming out of places where they’re waking up to the reality of supremacist structures and the ways in which a lot of the Christianity they’ve been given has been fused with a kind of empire power. And I just love what you’re naming that that’s not the only image of Jesus or version of Jesus that exists in the text, in interpretation of the text, in faith tradition and faith expression. So it’s just basically saying thank you in a long-winded version.

Marcos: And I think for us too, I mean within that same vein, we are very mindful of speaking about resistance. We’re resisting the empire, we’re resisting all of these narratives, whether it be Christian nationalism or white supremacy, hierarchies, et cetera. And yet, as Robert was mentioning, part of it is you can deconstruct all of that, but if you’re still just always resisting and deconstructing, resisting and deconstructing, then it’s exhausting. And so what appears to be healing, it just seems to be another form of what Marx called opium of the people, is that you can make deconstruction just an opium of just like this is what’s wrong with everything, and then you just are still left with no relational connectivity that mirrors back to you. This is all the good in you and this is all the growth that you still are invited to walk into, and we are here with you and for you, and we want that growth for you. And so in that silo, while it’s easy to point to one or the other extreme, you replicate the same thing, which is part of the empire’s logic. And so with that tradition and with that history, we talk about resistance, but not just for the sake of resistance, but resistance for the sake of re-existance, for re-surging, for reemerging. And part of that, I know you probably are looking for stories, so I’ll tell you some stories… Part of the beauty of it, of the thread of that existence. For example, in November when this second election happened, we gathered and both virtually and here at our home for a time of lament. The second term was coming up and actually going back to the same point, I was like, I have no words to lead our community. I have nothing. And so it was beautiful that Nina was able to step in and she’s a spiritual director, and so she led us through lament and we, she asked for the candle in our children’s ministry. We do Godly Play, which is a contemplative,

Rachael: I love Godly Play. Yes.

Marcos: Godly Play is awesome. And so we brought the Christ candle that our children use every single week for Godly Play into our living room, into our virtual space. And we had the candle lit before we all gathered. And so Nina’s point was, we gather around the light when darkness seems to be overcoming it or winning, and just as a reminder that people before us, our ancestors in the faith and our ancestors and our culture and our families have been in times like this before and they’ve been drawn to the light back and back again. And so part of it was spiritual weightiness of an imagery and a symbol of Christ candle that goes generationally from our children all the way to our adults as a symbol of that. And so as lighting that and being able to point to that imagery, it was the same candle that we lit the Sunday after the fires, right? Because it gave continuity to our mourning and to our grief. And this time it was even to a different level because that same kind of burning was part of what had devastated our community. And to be reminded of fire, yes, it can be destructive, and there’s also a different kind of fire too that holds us together. It’s Pentecost fire, and there’s all sorts of imagery for Pentecost. It’s not denying the devastation and the destruction and the pain and yet the symbolism holds us together and our ancestors in our faith. And Nina said the same things, that kind of continuity, visual continuity. And part of what Godly Play says is when you put out the candle, right, you say, and always mess it up. So I might mess this one up because we put out the light, but the light is not extinguished. It actually changes form, and you can see the smoke come up in a certain way. So it’s just changed form. And so that’s kind of the longing of that existence of yes, we are beaten down, we’re persecuted, and we’re not abandoned. And yet we’re trying to figure out collectively what is re-existing in this place, in this time mean and look like when it seems like it’s much easier to just deconstruct how do we build together alternatives that reflect kingdom work? And so another story that I have about that is part of what I think is so special too, is that in that process of reconstruction, it really takes a humble approach of saying, and this is what white members in our congregation have said, right? We want to be under leadership of people of color and submitting to that and being uncomfortable with that. We do everything bilingual, so it takes longer, it takes learning and relearning. And for us, it’s a glimpse of Pentecost where we’re equalized in power. And so one of the stories that we have is evacuation. One of our families, their whole property was burned to the ground. They were in the evacuation center, and they called one of our pastors, Pastor Rosa, and her phrase was, I got you. And she mobilized everybody. Found them shelter, found them a home where they stayed for about a month and they were able to navigate. And so I think that is another glimpse of a congregational culture where we got you, we got you is a glimpse of that fire changing form and holding us in our process of healing and growing, not getting through it, it’s not healing from it, its post-traumatic growth. And so how do we grow from this when that time is ready for you to begin to face it? What is that going to look like? We got you. We’re going to be here for that for the long haul.

Rachael: Yeah, I think it’s Gabor Mate who says, or he says it maybe I think in an intro to Peter Levine’s book on just trauma, but he says, trauma is not so much what happens to you, but it’s left behind in the absence of an empathetic witness. And what I hear you putting language to is a picture of what does it look like, not just for a therapist to be an empathetic witness, which I mean I’m grateful for, but what does it look like for a community to be an empathetic witness, to help someone make meaning of what’s happening to them? But to also say, I’ve got you. I’ll be here with you. We may not be able to stop the traumatizing thing, but we can do something to stop it from taking up residence in your heart, mind, and body.

Marcos: Absolutely, absolutely.

Rachael: Or in this community in a way that brings isolation and neglect. So I just…

Marcos: Yeah, and just to add, I know, I’m sorry, Robert, but one more thing. I think that’s important because then the work of leaders and pastors and people that are committed to this work, I think, I don’t need to say this but I’ll say it anyways, right? Your focus shifts from church growth and attendance and trying to get more people through the door, and it actually shifts to how much work are you willing to do for yourself so that those external factors are not a measure of your worth. And so in that process, I just recently just to also make note of how much light and darkness language sometimes we use and how helpful and sometimes not helpful it is. We tend to prefer light over darkness. But I read a really powerful piece from Mariana Alessandri, which is called Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods, and she has a great phrase, which I think really describes what pastoral leadership looks like in this moment. She says, well, we need going forward is to stop trying to shed light on darkness and instead learn to see in the dark. And I feel like that’s the role of pastoral leadership. That’s the role of healers and leaders in this very moment. How do we learn to see in the dark, like Robert was saying, glimpses and shadows. And so learning how to see in the dark requires us a lot of trust in one another and a lot of trust in the Spirit’s work.

Rachael: That’s a certain kind of resistance, isn’t it? Both those things you named Robert, anything you would add to that or…

Robert: I think as I hear Marco sharing, I think what comes to my mind is in our context at its best, Latino church is definitely not perfect. So La Fuente is very good…

Rachael: You’re still made up of humans?

Robert: We’re still made up of humans, but at its very best in our context, healing is both personal and communal. It’s both personal and communal at the same time even. And I think of the EMDR session I did this morning with my therapist, and you could see church at its best is like a communal EMDR session. That’s one of its roles. It’s healing from that trauma together and personally, right?

Rachael: Yeah. Yeah.

Marcos: Absolutely, yeah. And that’s a different kind of witness in the streams of Evangelicalism. We’ve all swamped for so long. Witness is always verbal proclamation, which there’s room for it. There’s room for us to give a reason to the faith that we’ve so proclaimed. And yet most of the gospel and most of the scripture, the role of the community in the individual and collective healing is to give witness to in saying, I believe you, that is possible that that could actually happen at a church. Yeah, I believe you. That either happened to me too or I don’t accept the church from that kind of behavior. It’s very possible. So that kind of witness to people’s pain is critical. And so if you work on that, congregationally, when you need to do it in the streets is not that farfetched. So all of June was a blatant attack to our community, and so there was no due process. There was just ramping up of deportations and our whole county was being attacked. And so part of it was like, we can’t take all of LA, but it’s happening in our neighborhood. And so in Pasadena, we participated along with a coalition of churches and pastors here in the city with the Clergy Community Coalition, and we mobilized because our neighbors were being taken. The corner at the park where my son and all of his friends play soccer at. That’s where people were kidnapped and taken. So we give witness to that and we don’t just say, that might have happened. That might not have happened. Denial is one of the fruits of this season as well, right? And so when people were picked up and kidnapped outside of the Winchell, the local Winchell’s here in a supermarket also around here, people mobilized because it doesn’t matter whether they’re part of our church or not, they’re all our church members. And so as a coalition of pastors, we’ve been saying, we’re shepherding, we’re walking with, we’re pastoring 148,000 people because that’s our whole community. And people do it from different kind of starting points, but to be on the streets, to be in caring of these families, to show up at court hearings when they may be released on bond or not, what do they need? I mean, the needs are extremely, extremely complicated and layered. We need all the different churches mobilizing. I mean, this is not an aggrandizement of one church. It’s the kingdom work of everybody, everybody working so that the mustard seed, so we can all be branches and all sorts of birds and perch on our branches. And so that’s why I think it’s important that that kind work in the long term, but also internally, just what that does to us in our own formation.

Rachael: I mean, I just hear you saying there are some muscle memory there on how to be attentive and with people, and even if you don’t have all the resources you need that mustard seed of showing up and calling more people to come and be and bring their skills and their gifts and their resources and their capacities.

Marcos:  Absolutely. Yeah.

Rachael: Just that power of presence, the power of the collective and the power bearing witness and being with even when it’s terrifying and even when it might be really costly to you.

Marcos: Absolutely. Yes.

Rachael: And we’ve talked about this I think even with the glimmers, but just the importance of rhythms of rest and joy, which sometimes feel really counterintuitive or antithetical. But yeah, when we are together, when we are trusting in the spirit and the power and presence of the Spirit are also part of sustaining our life together and our mission and work together. And just curious what you’ve experienced of that as you also keep laboring.

Robert: I’ve really had to learn my limits this time because the last time we went through this in the previous administration of the guy that starts with the T, I was younger, my kids were in a different season, and I’m just like, now my kids are teenagers and it’s a different place for me. So I really had to discern and say, okay, Lord, I just can’t do everything now. So I had to discern and I felt like, okay, my main focus is UCLA as a professor to care there at my local church, La Fuente. That’s all that I can handle right now. The last time around I was in the streets, I was getting arrested and all those kinds of things, but that’s okay. It’s different now. And I sleep nine to 10 hours a night too.

Marcos: That’s awesome. Yes, and I’m in a different season as well. So I think for me, I mean, I think I can say this in here, I don’t know, you can edit it later, but in the first administration, I wasn’t a citizen yet, and that mobilized me to go through the process because I knew if it would come again, I needed to have some sort of status to be able to represent our people and our undocumented members in a different kind of way. Given the current situation. Sometimes I wonder if it really matters or not because my status,

Rachael: There’s no due process.

Marcos: My status is based on my skin color, so

Rachael: That’s right.

Marcos: But nonetheless, it’s still allows me to be able to go to the streets or represent in a different kind of way on behalf of with the permission of, because part of the way in which we operate too is first we check in with those most directly impacted because I could be on the streets, but if the members of our congregation are saying, I don’t care if you go there, I need this kind of help,

Rachael: Right.

Marcos: then I’m just being a hypocrite. So I have to pay attention to that as well. The other thing too, I think is it happened during the fires. We’re talking about almost 8,000 structures burnt to the ground. Eight churches, one mosque, one Jewish synagogue or temple, and all of them burned to the ground, right? Thousands of people displaced. It was way too overwhelming, and the coalition was already mobilizing and everything, and I had to say, listen, for the next two weeks, I’m tending to my people. I will join you in two weeks. This is going to be a long-term work. We’re talking about five to 10 years of rebuilding our whole community. So the first two weeks, two and a half weeks, it was intense work of making sure that our families who were directly impacted, who were displaced, were taken care of by our own congregation and starting to build from there. That I felt like helped. Obviously it always catches up and you need a break. We didn’t get a break because then we started with all the bunch of executive orders. And so I think I’m still in a work in progress. I think I still need to work on my checking on the phone so much. So I don’t want to be a hypocrite and say, I got it, but I’m always on the lookout. But when I go to sleep, I try to go to sleep and not be checking. And also I think part of it is being in community, being with Robert and Erica, they’re modeling something and they remind us of rest and others in the congregation too. So it’s like, okay, they’re not expecting this from me. I can take a break. I can put pause. My son plays a lot of soccer, so that’s the rest I need to attend to tournaments or to games. And that just takes a little bit of the focus of always being on high alert. And honestly, just having conversations with people outside of a context sometimes helps to have more just levity and more kind of other than they know we’re going through hard times and always checking in, right? Checking in on what’s actually going on inside, and having times to pause and to say, okay, what’s really coming up at this moment? So I feel that there’s waves. Waves of engagement and retrieving going out and coming back in, going out and coming back in.

Rachael: Yeah. One of my friends is, she lives in the global south in the Philippines, and she’s an activist, and she actually went to The Seattle School, Gabes Torres, and she has a little booklet called Oscillation. And I like that language of like, yeah, there’s kind of a cycle of going out and coming in, and yet you keep returning. And so I just want to say thank you for your time. Thank you for your vulnerability and your wisdom and your invitation to all of us listening. And may there be very particularly more conversations with your community in this season ahead, just for further equipping and learning together how we can grow and lean into the collective at such a time as this, and to lean into the spirit and to rediscover Jesus in a new way.

Marcos: Amen.

Rachael: So thank you so much. Amen. And I hope that there is some good rest for your bodies in this short season ahead.

Marcos: Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Thank you so much. Yes.

Rachael: So as we bring things to a close, if our listeners want to be able to send some support to your community from afar, are there ways they can do that at this time?

Marcos: Yes, absolutely. We, in La Fuente, we have a giving page, and within that we have a dropdown menu where you can choose the fund. And one of those funds is the compassion fund. And that fund has been used from the time of the fires to be able to support families both in our congregation and in our community who are recovering from and are trying to rebuild, and all the various different needs that come up from having lost everything. But also that is also the fund that we’re using currently to support our immigrant community, both in undocumented immigrants in our congregation, but also in our community. And the main reason for that fund is to be able to supply income disruption given the abductions and the raids and masked man, armed masked man, unidentified, just coming and terrorizing our communities and picking up people in their workplace, criminalizing work, not even looking for criminals, but just criminalizing workers and all of that has terrorized our community. Many people are not going to work. Many people are being very cautious even to go grocery shopping. And so our fund has been able to provide over $10,000 in the last month to different neighbors, members and acquaintances to just be able to make it to the months, to the end of the month, whether for rent, food, different expenses. So by you giving to that, it helps us concretely distribute to the various needs of the various families, children, single mothers who are working and are not working and waiting until it’s safer to go out. 

So it’s real, it’s needed. We are also using that fund to pay or to contribute to GoFundMe pages or to the families of people that have been detained to be able to pay for their bond, their bond money. And sometimes it’s set at up to $5,000, $10,000. And so we need to contribute to that so they’ll be released and have due process. And in other cases, we’re supporting for a legal fees for people to have lawyers and to be represented accordingly. So there’s a wide range of needs that this fund is being used for. And so we invite you to help us in that, and it’s going far and wide within our community, and we want to express God’s generosity because God has been so generous with us. So may you join us in that generosity in solidarity. This is not charity. We’ve learned that from our day laborers. This is not charity. This is not just a contribution. This is a way of standing in solidarity with our neighbors and with our community. So do the same in your community. This is not… LA is the microcosm of what’s happening in many other neighborhoods and many other cities. So just because it’s not in the news, just because you don’t see it, just because it’s not in your feed, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. So pay attention to your Home Depot. Pay attention to your local immigrant community centers. Pay attention to your schools. Pay attention to where you don’t usually go because there is something usually happening there. And organize accordingly. There are organizations that are trying to mobilize a lot of people to be able to stand in solidarity. So don’t just think this is an LA problem. This is everywhere. And our neighbors, our immigrant neighbors, need your presence, need your body, needs your resources, need your voice to be able to join to theirs. Don’t speak on behalf of them. Just join their voice and let them know that another world is possible, another church is possible.

Rachael: May it be so,

Marcos: May it be so.

Rachael: And we will make sure that people can access those links in our show notes today. In a climate and culture that is increasingly hostile and polarized, may we encounter the Christ who defies all polarities and rigid binaries, political and beyond, who is just and merciful, who is not bound by broken systems, no matter who’s in power, or misaligned power, but who has overcome the very power of death.