A team of five pastors, one of whom is also a seminary administrator, and one seminary professor, all experienced in the context and practices of Latinx ministry, will work on this two-year project to explore the presence and impact of Latinx pastors in majority white or multiracial congregations. We will initially meet for a day and a half to share our stories and plan for the various aspects of this grant project. With technical assistance and training in ethnographic research from colleagues in the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, we will organize and distribute a survey, analyze its results and then arrange for “two-by-two” site visits to a variety of selective congregations and pastors in the New York/New Jersey/Southern New England Regions.

After collecting stories and impressions from various site visits, the team will reconvene to analyze what we have learned from our visits, divide up writing assignments about our initial findings, and plan a conference at the beginning of the second year of the grant, which will gather Latins congregational leaders from the region and others in order to further explore our learning. A final written project, completed by June 2022, will help identify the issues and practices that make for successful Latinx pastorates in majority white and multiracial churches. We will, of course, learn from such pastorates that were not as successful, and we will try and understand what made the difference in our effort to share the results of our research widely.