WEBINAR: July 20th at 5:00pm Pacific /8:00pm Eastern
Atlanta, Georgia, July 7, 2021 – On August 3, 2019, a shooter killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas. His motivation was to fuel an anti-immigrant hatred in the United States. Before his attack he posted an anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant manifesto that promoted a white supremacist thought on the internet and during the attack he admitted that he targeted “Mexicans”. This is one example of the tragic cost of racism for the Latinx communities in this country. This month’s “Raise Up Your Voice Against Racism” webinar will examine the numerous hardships and challenges for the Latinx communities when it comes to racism.
Our guest speakers will be: Rev. Dr. Eliezer Valentín-Castañón, Rev. Lydia Muñoz and Rev. Dr. Giovanni Arroyo.
This hour-long webinar will be held on July 20th at 5:00pm PST /6:00pm Mountain/ 7:00pm Central/ 8:00pm EST.
For more questions, please contact: Rev. John Oda JOda@umcmission.org
Panelists
Rev. Dr. Eliezer Valentín- Castañón began his faith journey in his homeland in Puerto Rico. When he was 14, he gave his life to Christ and at 18, he was ordained as a pastor at an independent Pentecostal fundamentalist church and his gifts as a preacher were noted. In 1984, after college, he went to Boston and, then in 1985 he moved to New York. In New York, he joined Fordham Road United Methodist Church Latino Ministry in the South Bronx. He began preaching and people nudged him toward seminary. After seminary he served his first church in 1990. In 2013 he was appointed to Trinity UMC in Frederick, Maryland. As of July 1, Rev. Dr. Valentín- Castañón begins his new ministry as District Superintendent of the Frederick District in the Baltimore Washington Annual Conference.
Rev. Lydia Muñoz is an Ordained Elder in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. Her call is in ministries of justice among marginalized and multicultural communities, leading worship in a variety and diverse settings, both locally and nationally. She is a published author and contributor on the New United Methodist Hymnal Committee and has been featured in Abingdon Preacher’s Manual 2019 and again in 2020. She is the chair of the Eastern Penn Conference Methodist Federation for Social Action and the conference’s Rapid Response Team for Immigration. Anti-racism justice work is one of her priorities, combating white supremacy in all its expressions both in the church and in society. She believes that public worship is the most consistent public witness that we can do and so her general rule for worship is that the Church needs to worship and live incarnationally, which means we live what we sing and we sing what we live and we are working to become- God’s Reign on Earth.
Rev. Dr. Giovanni Arroyo is the General Secretary of the General Commission on Religion and Race, and is an Elder of the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City, he started professional ministry in 2001 as pastor of Iglesia Metodista Unida El Camino and served as one of three chaplains caring for families, victims, and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He was at Bellevue Hospital where 287 survivors received medical care following the attack, and also comforted family members at the city morgue. Rev. Dr. Arroyo previously served cross-racial/cross-cultural pastorates in both New York and Baltimore-Washington conferences, while also leading Religion and Race and Hispanic-Latinx ministries. Before becoming ordained, he was a researcher at The City College of New York in language acquisition and experimental psychology. He did further research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute on exposure to violence and child abuse and at the National Development and Research Institute with young adult drug users. He also served as adjunct faculty, teaching English as a second language and world religions.
