Interview by the Rev. Dr. Jin Cho, Leader of the Revelation 7:9 Task Force

To celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, we’re getting to know some Hispanic leaders in C4SO who embody our values of kingdom, spirit, formation, mission and sacrament. This week, we’re delighted to introduce you to the Rev. Manny Galvan.

Hi, C4SO! I’m Manny.

I currently live in Citrus Heights, California, right outside of Sacramento. Sacramento is one of the most diverse cities in California, and we love that we get to embrace that.

 My wife Kristen and I have been married for 12 years, and we have three little boys, Elijah, Parker and Joel. And we spend a lot of time caring for them, loving them, playing sports with them. Meanwhile, I get to serve and love the Lord as an associate pastor at Horizon Church in Roseville with [C4SO’s Director of Church Planting] Brad Swope.

The Rev. Dr. Jin Cho: How did you step into the world of Anglicanism and Horizon Church specifically?

Manny Galvan: It happened a little by accident. Brad placed a call for a pastor on Indeed.com, and that never, ever works! But I was scrolling through the site [and saw the position]. My car broke down on the way to the first interview, and Brad is generally not a guy who likes it when people show up late. But for some reason, God drew us together!

Brad will say he hired a Mexican pastor by accident, but now we get to explore what that looks like together. It’s been a good relationship between Brad and me, learning how to reach this diverse population in Roseville and Citrus Heights, learning to embrace who we are and how God has drawn us together.

When Brad hired me, he asked how I felt about the liturgical world. I had worked in Presbyterian and Baptist churches, but through my journey, I’ve fallen in love with how the liturgy draws us together. It unites the whole global, historic Church and pulls us away from these microorganisms of churches.

As Brad was [pursuing holy orders in C4SO], I’ve been able to peek in and see what it looks like, join C4SO in several things, and think about where God is leading me in the denomination.

JC: Describe your cultural background. How did you become aware of your heritage?

MG: From the moment he could speak, my middle son Parker embraced the fact that he was “a real Mexican.” It was a running joke in the family because Parker is blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned. He knows his dad has dark hair and is dark-skinned, but something deep inside of him said, “I’m a real Mexican.” People would ask him, “Parker, what does that even mean?” And he’d say, “I don’t know. I like hot stuff. I like burritos.”

Finally, there was this possibly bad-dad-teaching moment, when I was trying to motivate him to jump off a diving board, and he just wouldn’t do it. After using every trick in the book, I said, “You know, Parker, a real Mexican would jump off the diving board.” He jumped off with excitement, landed in the pool and had a great time!

I share that story because I’ve been working through this question, What does it mean for me to be a Mexican? And what does it mean for me to embrace my cultural identity? Do I have to be the one who always orders things with the hottest hot sauce to validate I’m Mexican? Be the one who listens to Mexican music when it’s my turn to pick music on a road trip?

God seems to continually position me in places where my cultural and ethnic identity helps to share the love of God with people. My first full-time position was a youth pastor in Watsonville, which is 85% Mexican. Many families felt comfortable with me because I looked like them, I shared the same stories, and I ate the same food.

But I’ve also felt like I didn’t belong to that group. When I was young, my parents never spoke to me in Spanish, we never really hung out with that side of the family, and my mom would even joke, “I don’t even identify as Mexican. I’m Native American.” She was Mexican. She carried some historical hurt and raised us with that as well.

It wasn’t until college that I really started to embrace my cultural and ethnic identity. Then I fell in love with where my family is from. I’m still loving it—but there is a sense of belonging that I am trying to figure out. I ask God, “Where do you want me to belong?” And if I can’t have my footing all the way in the Mexican community, and if I can’t be completely in white spaces, I wonder, “God, why do you have me in this middle-ground, this unstable middle-ground? Is this the space I’m supposed to be, and is this a place where I can still work out who I am, and how you called and gifted me to love your people and serve this community?”

JC: I often hear from others of a multi-cultural background who are in this “unstable-middle ground.” How do you navigate this space?

MG: It’s tough at times. When I used to do youth ministry, I’d say, “Junior high and high school is when you’re figuring things out. But by the time you are married and have kids, you should really know who you are.” Well, a part of me is still asking, Who am I? Sometimes there is this pressure to conform. There are terms like “code-switching” that describe [the feeling that] I have to lean into more of this part of who I am, whereas in other cultural settings, I want to lean more over to the other side.

Horizon Church where I work is not by design ethnically diverse. I mentioned earlier how Brad and I stumbled onto things accidentally. When I became part of the church, our cultural context shifted a bit. So, as I embraced my cultural identity, some [culturally Latino] friends whom I got to know through my kids’ Little League came to our church, and we had ask ourselves, How do we become a more culturally diverse church?

I wouldn’t say I am a different person when I am up front, but there is still a part of me that is trying to figure out my pastoral voice. I read an essay by Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, during grad school, and it talks about allowing marginal people to have their own voice and still be within an academic discourse. And what that got me asking was, How do I have my own voice in this liminal space—not quite Mexican, not quite white—but still fully be the pastor God has called me to be without being ashamed, or feeling like a poser or a fake?

I think about those things when I’m preaching. Which crowd am I speaking to? Am I speaking to my baseball families where some of the parents haven’t graduated from high school, or am I speaking to the professors in our congregation? And oftentimes, they don’t line up. So I think about how I can honor everyone in the room. How do I pastor this multicultural, multiethnic, educationally diverse congregation? At times, it’s a struggle, as I’m wondering, Who am I speaking to in this moment? Who am I if God is calling me to be all things to all people?

JC: Why do you think it is important for you to have both of those groups—in tension—in the same congregation?

MG: One of the things that drew me into [C4SO] was the Revelation 7:9 and Acts 2 understanding of Church—that it began in a multiethnic expression and will end in a multiethnic expression. As we embrace fully who we are, we reflect the full image of God. God is not any one ethnicity. When we come together, we get to worship him in a multicultural, multiethnic experience. That’s when we get to fully—as community—embody the imago Dei. Individually, we are all made in God’s image, but God created us in community, so it is necessary that we are multiethnic, multigenerational, and multicultural, coming together as best we can, as broken as we and all systems are. [It is necessary] to come together and proclaim who God is … and how he intended for us to worship him. When we worship together in multiethnic spaces, we get to embody the fullness of who God has created people to be, and we get to appreciate the others in the room.

JC: Where is this leading you? Where is God calling you in your ministry?

MG: I always hold loosely to plans, because I’ve been in ministry long enough that as soon as you get a storyboard and plans and say, “This is what we are going to do,” that is usually when God says, “I have a better idea!”

I’ve learned to ask, What are you doing in this moment? What are you doing in me, and what are you doing in the community? How can my giftings and skills fit into what You are doing in the community?

 I used to have a Field of Dreams mentality—if you build it they will come—[where I would] create programs and things for people to come to. But now I am asking, “How can I come alongside what you are doing in people? How can I hear their stories, hear where they are at, and continue to remind them of your great love and care for them? How do I become so in tune with what you are doing in my life and in the world that when I think about your kingdom and who you are, I can codeswitch in the way that Jesus was able to do?”

Jesus was so in tune with the Father that he could see a field and say, “Ah, the kingdom of heaven is like that open field!” Jesus wasn’t a realtor! But he was so connected with the Father that he could see things in the world and say, “That’s his kingdom right there.”

[I’m sensing that] God is moving in me to embrace this ethnic identity. I was telling one of my baseball family friends about a recent ESPN 30 for 30 episode on a famous Mexican baseball player. And he said, “Man, you are really in touch with your Mexican side.” And I said, “Yeah, I think it’s really important to know your heroes.”

Through that, I was able to tell him some of the things I was thinking about how we [can] embrace who God created us to be. So that simple conversation about baseball, and our shared Mexican identity, became a conversation about God’s kingdom. I think God has instilled in me a curiosity that I am embracing as I meet people who are in this “between” space as well.

Programmatically, there are things at Horizon we are thinking about, like how do we address the language barrier? We’ve come up with some creative ideas with liturgy, things being read in Spanish, or possibly having a live translator… and I think all those things are important, but I don’t think we can slap a quick fix on it and expect a whole church to suddenly be a welcoming space that is not just multi-language, but a truly multiethnic expression.

[We need to think about] things like, what does it look like to embrace different music, or a different understanding of time, or different value on finances? As a church, if you have members from different cultures, you have to accept that people think about money in different ways! You can’t just become multiethnic or multicultural by adding a song in Spanish once a month, but the core things we operate out of have to change! So we are negotiating that—[asking] “Is our church really ready for that?”

JC: I love the conversations you are having in your church. What has been hard, as you try to help people understand the goodness of diversity?

MG: Dr. Martin Luther King wrote “Why We Can’t Wait,” and in it, he talks about school segregation. Although there was legally a desegregation process in place in 1957, at the pace that they were going, schools would not be desegregated until 2040 or something like that. And MLK wrote this as a critique of culture, and in response to pastors who were telling him, “Just wait; slow down.” His point was, “We can’t; it won’t happen naturally.”

It’s hard to feel that same pressure sometimes, of people wondering, “What’s the big deal? Why do we have to push this?” And unfortunately, we are in a political environment where the moment I or others bring something up, we are told, “You are speaking woke.” I am really not speaking “woke”; I just want to build a church that my son wants to go to, that my son can see himself in. You can call me woke or whatever, but I want Parker and Eli and their friends to feel like they can belong here. That’s what I’m really trying to do. Many things get really politicized, and you can get labeled—here comes Manny up on stage and he’s going to talk about the shooting, or violence against a person of color—and you kind of become this white noise, or a trope. It’s hard to speak into something that can be so beautiful, an inviting space for people to be part of the church, but in order to get to that, it feels like I have to get through different doors into people’s hearts. It is hard for me to talk about something so important without being quickly dismissed.

Some years ago, I told someone at church, “What would it look like if we did some liturgy in Spanish?” And he said, “That’s the dumbest thing ever!” (laughter…) Then he said, “Just learn English.” And when I hear that, I hear this politicization [of language] in the church. In some ways, we are battling that, just to get to something so essential to the gospel! So essential for many people to even understand the gospel—that there’s a place for them. How can we even think about hospitality if we can’t even do something so silly as change one portion of liturgy into Spanish?

JC: I appreciate your insights and thoughtfulness. What is one way we can pray for you?

MG: Again, the thing that I want is for my kids to want to be in church, and for their friends to be in church. My kids have embraced kids of different cultures and backgrounds, and our youth group has really shown that. So, there’s a sense of urgency that I feel, as a dad, for my sons—how do I give them a vision of a local and global Church where they feel like they belong, and they feel like their friends belong, so that when they go away to college, they will want to stay connected?

Because I feel that pressure, I also feel a sense of anxiety, and at times a level of impatience. I often pray, “God, continue to reveal to me when my heart has become impatient, and it is not for your kingdom.” I don’t always think that impatience is “bad”—if there is injustice, and we can do something about it, it’s okay to not be patient. Sometimes I get frustrated with the Church, because there is a large group of people that need to hear the Good News, and there’s a lot of things we can do about it, so why are we not doing them?

But there are also times when God is calling me to be patient, as in Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” When do you want me to be still and not overwork or try to produce something? To work as you are working, and be calm?

 Learn more about Horizon Church Roseville.

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