The Southwest California Synod presents We are the Lord’s: A Conversation on Grief, Death, and Life, Saturday, 10/29,2022, 10am-1pm MST/PDT, 11am-2pm MDT, via Zoom. This Zoom event featuring Rev. Francisco Javier Goitía Padilla is for rostered leaders, seminarians, interns, and congregational leadership in general.

To register, please contact Pastor Abel Arroyo Traverso, Southwest California Synod’s Assistant to the Bishop for Faith Formation and In House Theologian at abel.at@socalsynod.org or call 626-665-9133.

The event is a purposeful and critical conversation on grief, death and life as we experienced it as pastors both in our personal lives and as part of our ministerial vocation using Romans 14:8. We will explore our experiences and reflect critically in a theology of life, a theology of death, and ways to take care of ourselves and to take care of others. Our conversations will have an intentional Lutheran focus.

Francisco Javier Goitía Padilla is an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America rostered in the Caribbean Synod. He is currently Senior Director for Formation for Leadership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Rev Goitía has an STM in Lutheran hermeneutics and Reformation history from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, a Th.M in Latin American Liberation hermeneutics and Lutheran hermeneutics and a Ph.D in systematic theology with a component in homiletics from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He has served as pastor in Puerto Rico and Chicago and as professor of systematic theology and homiletics in the Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico. Rev. Goitía is married to Denise E Vázquez Ortiz and they have two children, Javier Andrés and Gabriela Denise.