July 21, 2025
Dear Friends,
On June 13, 2016, I walked into the sanctuary and took this picture:
It was my first day on staff at St. Paul’s. My ordination to the diaconate took place two days earlier (the ordination to the priesthood would follow six months after that).
On the morning of my ordination to the diaconate, I woke up feeling anxious. I felt the weight of the as-yet-unknown challenges ordained ministry would bring. At the time, I reassured myself the best way I knew how: I reminded myself that I could return to any number of career options should the “church gig” not work out as I hoped.
Over nine years later, my call to this work remains and continues to grow. And you, the wonderful, loving, and lovely people of St. Paul’s, Cary, helped make that possible.
Today I am writing to inform you that I have accepted a call to be the next rector of the Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill. My last day at St. Paul’s will be Sunday, August 24. It is bittersweet to say goodbye, but I am excited about this next step: I am looking forward to applying what I have learned with and among you in a new role and context, listening for the Spirit’s movement among the people of Holy Family and learning what it means to be the people of God there.
In Scripture, the Apostle Paul outlines the collaborative nature of the work of the church: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor 3:6). To be a member of the church, whether lay or ordained, requires tending to our own patch of land. We do not bring forth the growth, but we do plant seeds, water the soil, and gather the crops. We till the ground, letting fields lie fallow, occasionally, only to start the process all over again.
In doing such work, in caring for our own patch of land, we bear witness to a grace greater than the sum of us. And today I am grateful, not only for the opportunity to care for you over the past nine years, but also for the way that you have cared for me. You have been the Paul and Apollos in my life, the people who nurtured the call within me. You took a reluctant ordinand, and you made of him a priest.
Thank you for inviting me into your lives and teaching me what it means to practice the priesthood with great love, abundant joy, and resilient hope.
It has been a gift—one of the best I have ever received. I will carry it with me, always.
With deep love and gratitude,
Javier