Meet Sarah Solis, a Duke seminarian navigating her call to ministry in The United Methodist Church through her heritage and the encouragement of strong women.
Transcript:
I feel that when I am writing poetry that's when I am best able to listen to God and imagine what life with God might be.
My name is Sarah Solis and I am a second-year student in the Masters of Divinity Program.
Right when I came to Duke and moved to North Carolina, Alma [Tinoco Ruiz, Director of the Hispanic House of Studies at Duke Divinity] was very intentional about pulling the Latinx Studies Fellows together. And so we were prompted to join Caminantes, which is the spiritual formation group that's tied to the Hispanic House of Studies.
The Latinx fellowship as well as a possibility for growing in my capacity to think theologically through my poetry which is the art that I do that's what brought me here.
I didn't know exactly what that called ministry would be. But I developed this heart for the church. At the same time I had a lot of questions: What's the relationship between the church community and the larger community? When so much suffering is happening. And so that along with the summer of 2020 began like my questioning kind of an urgency. But when Duke announced the Latinx studies fellowship, I thought like, "okay, like, I think this is an open door that God is opening for me."
And I think there have been little glimmers. I grew up in the Catholic church and I have childhood memories of like reciting the great thanksgiving along with the priest and like people next to me like you can't say that, like that's not your part to say. I also never did first Communion and so I wasn't allowed to take communion in the Catholic Church and the first time I took communion was actually at my Father's Methodist Church that we went to on a handful of occasions in my childhood. Then when I was at this larger non-denominational church, we were serving food to people and I don't know if I was just serving taco meat and the idea was like, I could do this.
Just glimmers of preaching for the first time and hearing people like, "Oh, I never saw things that way until you said it," or a leading Bible study with that group and having just now like a network of women pastors who are like, "Yes. We see this in you” so all of those things I think I definitely do feel a call to ministry leadership and now I'm still new to the UMC and so I'm still exploring but it's definitely something that excites me and something that I'm looking forward to kind of taking the next steps for. And so I am currently still serving as a student pastor at White Plains UMC with the Spanish congregation there. So I'm under pastor at Edith Salazar and she's been a wonderful mentor. I've never been led by a female pastor, let alone a Latina pastor. And so it's been wonderful to just be under her leadership.
Even though I say that I'm new to the United Methodist Church, in so many ways it feels like a homecoming. I've always like longed for the opportunity to kind of like live into, you know, reclaiming my language, reclaiming the language of my grandparents, of, you know, the matriarchs of the family. who were such strong women of faith on both sides, the Catholic and the Methodist side. And so it's been wonderful to kind of grow and live into that. I know that I'm coming in at kind of a complicated time, but I am so hopeful for learning how to dialogue together. When I think about the body of Christ when I think about what the kind of people that were called to be and that messy in betweenness God and the spirit of God holds us together so I think that's what I am hopeful for.
This video was produced by United Methodist Communications in Nashville, Tennessee, USA and published on March 15, 2024. Contact: Aileen Delgado
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