When devastating wildfires swept through Pasadena in early 2025, La Fuente Ministries faced a test of what it means to be church in community crisis. Pastor Marcos Canales and Nina Lau Branson join us to share how their bilingual, intergenerational congregation discovered that being church in community crisis isn't about having perfect emergency plans—it's about cultivating spiritual practices and community connections that help people encounter God even in the midst of catastrophe. From grief stations during the pandemic to emotional vocabulary work and neighborhood-based "casitas" groups, their intentional approach to formation created a foundation that served them well when members lost homes and their entire community faced displacement and trauma.

This conversation reveals what authentic church in community crisis looks like beyond typical disaster response protocols. Marcos and Nina demonstrate how embracing the full spectrum of human emotions, creating liturgies that externalize trauma, and fostering distributed leadership can transform crisis from something that destroys community into a pathway for deeper discipleship. Whether your congregation is currently navigating challenges or you want to understand how to be church in community crisis when difficulties arise, their witness offers hope and concrete tools for any church leader committed to shepherding with authenticity and care.

As I witness my own journey, I just am aware of how much the emotional response to so many experiences of the darkness seemed to overcome the light still has colored what I can perceive about this incredibly good news.

And it is only as I've been able to just embrace and witness other people beginning to embrace all of their whole human-ness, emotion, spirit, ⁓ intellect, and ⁓ body, that begins to shift the perception, shift what I can attend to, shift what I'm motivated by. man, if Easter's for real,

Let's go for it.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Pivot Podcast where we explore how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Alicia Granholm and I'm joined by Dwight Zscheile

As we all know, the Los Angeles area was devastated by fires earlier this year. What was it like to minister as Christ's body in the heart of that catastrophe and its aftermath? How did God show up and what was gospel witness amidst so much loss? Today, we're glad to welcome Pastor Marcos Canales and Nina Lau Branson from La Fuente Ministries in Pasadena, California to the show. They have been walking with their congregation

and neighbors through this crisis over the past several months. Spiritual practices and community care have become not just crisis management tools, but pathways to deeper faith formation during an incredibly challenging time. We invited them to join us on Pivot today to share about their journey since it's often in times of crisis that clarity about why we need the gospel and the church becomes evident.

to all. So welcome, Marcos and Nina.

Thank you for having us.

We are so grateful that you are joining us today. And I'm wondering if you can start by telling us about La Fuente Ministries and your community in Pasadena. And could you start by telling us what your ministry and community was like before the fires of 2025?

I'll start and then Nina can fill in. ⁓ Well, we're committed to being a bilingual congregation and ⁓ one who also through its bilingualism continues to cultivate intergenerational relationships and also mutuality through intercultural life. So for us, bilingual, intergenerational, intercultural

our ⁓ core to our identity that mobilizes us and that allows us to then be able to be church. so given those, ⁓ we have ⁓ Latinos, Latinas, ⁓ and the whole variety of what that means, right? ⁓ We have over 12 countries from Latin America represented. And then we also have a lot of intercultural, interracial marriages between

Latinas, Latinos and non-Latinos and ⁓ other races and ethnicities. ⁓ And then that allows us to also connect with a lot of families and ⁓ individuals who value their biculturalness and all of the intersections that that brings. ⁓ And so for us, those are kind of the identity markers that allow us to pay attention to God in different ways.

to be able to continue to cultivate life with God, life with one another, and life with our neighbors. So we've been on this journey for 12 years. We planted this congregation and our main goal was to have a space for multiple generations of the Latina family to worship together. And then along the journey, we discovered that it was not just Latina families, but it was neighbors and communities beyond the Latina community that also needed a space to worship.

especially in relationship to being formed in the ways of Jesus's kingdom and ⁓ just what it meant for us to hold both gospel news and justice news in the midst of so much injustice in terms of immigration, in terms of race, in terms of ⁓ life in the midst of our community and the different challenges that we face locally. And so all of that has been building up

through the years and we've been creating that kind of a community and culture. ⁓ And so for us, it's just been a gift to be able to really cultivate together that kind of community. So that in moments of crises and moments of disruption, we are more attentive to how to adapt versus manage or control. ⁓ Because for us, it's very...

when we returned, we also did grief stations. And so we were already attuning to the grief and the loss. ⁓ Many people that ⁓ had family members ⁓ in Latin America and family and friends across the world lost a lot of loved ones during the pandemic. Within our community, we lost loved members as well. And so we could not be together and we could not mourn together. So we created

resembling the stations of the cross. My wife, Drea, she created and designed grief stations to be able to process that collectively, individually. And so we're already attuning to grief, to loss, to emotions. ⁓ And then ⁓ the elections happened. And so for us, it was really critical to gather the night after.

on Wednesday after the elections to also grieve and mourn because there's a lot of people within our congregation whose vulnerability, whose ⁓ image of God was threatened and it ⁓ really sat heavily with us. And so we had a space to do that. So all of that has been building throughout the years. So when the fires hit, ⁓

mean to be church in the midst of constant disruption. So it's been kind of already brewing with all of us. ⁓ the more that we've ⁓ walked through the valley of the shadow of death, right? And the ⁓ loss of loved ones and loss of jobs, ⁓ the loss of ⁓ a lot of safety and security for many of our members. ⁓

The loss of faith communities we thought ⁓ loved Jesus in a specific way and then voted a different way. And just the disappointment of that and the vulnerability of that ⁓ have all allowed us to be more attentive. So when the fires came, was one more crisis that we were ⁓ attentive to. ⁓ And we, yeah, geared towards responding accordingly.

Nina, tell us a little bit ⁓ about when the fires did come. ⁓ Were there members of the congregation who lost their homes? Was the place that you worship affected? I mean, what was that immediate aftermath and kind of my sense is you were right in the heart of where some of the deepest impact was of the fire. Play that out a little bit for us.

Yes, ⁓ we had ⁓ several families in our congregation lose their homes. And the place that we worship was very smoke damaged. So we were not able to gather there for a couple of weeks. And even the first time we did regather in that worship space, ⁓ it definitely still smelled of smoke.

of their whole neighborhoods that would just.

They're just barren. They're just black, barren places now.

Thinking about just those first days and what it was like to respond as a congregation, it sounds like you had a lot to draw on from the practices you'd been doing and probably a lot of community neighborhood connections as well. But ⁓ what did those days look like then? So you're balancing, of course, thinking about your own homes and...

survival with all the community needs and in the congregation, also the neighborhood itself.

We, most of us who lived here, we are accustomed to fires and wildfires. ⁓ so a lot of us were kind of operating with this will, ⁓ this is on a mountain where we're ⁓ at the foothills. so it'll just go towards ⁓ east of us, which that's the pattern every single time we have fires.

but the combination of heavy, heavy, high, fast winds ⁓ and the fact that they were changing direction and they were going south to all of the urban area and all of the neighborhoods just created a different kind of dynamic. So the first thing was to respond by making sure everybody was safe in the area. And ⁓ Pastor Rosa, who's part of the pastoral team, and she just started.

mobilizing different leaders to make sure that everybody was safe, either in a safe place or they were in the process of evacuating. And if they had already evacuated, ⁓ which homes were available for people ⁓ to evacuate to. So there was a whole ⁓ assessment of who needed what and who could provide what at that moment. So the first thing was the safety and the evacuations.

After that, it was taking an assessment of who had lost homes, who had lost everything, who had partial damage, who was where, and we needed to locate that. ⁓ Previously, we had already started ⁓ what we call casitas, which is ⁓ just neighborhood-based groups that are attentive to life in their neighborhoods and life with God.

Through the Casitas group, we were able to check on people, but we were also to mobilize resources for the families in our congregation that were impacted. And then Casitas were also trying to gather accordingly when they could after it was safe because the streets were filled with debris and everything else. So those first few hours and they were very, very disorienting and very stressful.

as we were trying to coordinate everybody's wellbeing as well as our own uncertainty of our homes not knowing if they were standing, et cetera. ⁓ As soon as the winds died down, then there was different news coming in in terms of our own city and our own community. We had eight churches that were burnt down to the ground. We had a mosque and a Jewish temple, so that were burnt.

Then we had 12 pastors whose homes were lost. ⁓ And then the report started coming in from each of the congregations here in the city. We have a coalition of pastors, the clergy community coalition. so through that network, also, we were finding out the community needs and just devastation of what that meant for our local churches, our African-American churches, know, multicultural churches and Latina churches. So it was just a really heavy. ⁓

time of trying to find out what is what and who is well, who is not well, et cetera. ⁓ So that was kind of the response at the local level for our own community. And then once we had that in place, then it was a matter of finding out how do we start engaging the community's needs as well, which resonated with our local ones. you know, we... ⁓

one of our families was out of the country and they were out of the country when the fire happened and their whole house burned down. So was also, how do we support them to come back? ⁓ And there's flight delays and there's all sorts of things happening. And so our community mobilized to embrace them as well as they would return from out of the country and ⁓ walk with their needs.

And each of the families that were impacted, we assigned 10 of advocates so that not everybody was bombarding people with what do you need, what do you need, what do you need. We were just telling people, contact the advocates and they will be the ones that tell you what is it that they need. What do they have too much of? do they, they don't have enough of. And that really helped to alleviate a little bit of that overwhelm that all of our families felt.

Nina, as you've been leading spiritual practices, specifically designed for this crisis, what practices have you found most helpful for people as they've been processing the trauma and the fear?

As I pondered what would the community need as we gathered, that was kind of my first focus. And something I noticed was that the fires broke out the day after Epiphany, the day after we had celebrated the 12 days of Christmas. And what came to me was that... ⁓

Christmas wasn't over.

that we had to press even more deeply into Christians, that God is with us and this God is fully human and fully God. And that part of the being fully human is the embracing of our whole selves, which we had already begun to do that more intentionally as Pastor Marcos just mentioned. But the

the fullness of being human, loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength, ⁓ with our whole selves, emotions, spirit, intellect and body, making space for all of that. And that when all of that comes together, when that is working in harmony, when ⁓ there's collaboration and fullness there,

then there is something even more that emerges out of that, that our full Imago day is there. And so it was with that ⁓ that I had just this clarity of naming that story, the Christmas story, of being able to naming what was like it.

we have to be able to, If the gospel can't engage what is, what reality is. And that is actually what it means to contemplate, is to perceive and to be with what is. That's where we have to begin. And then to make space for simply what is and to encounter God in the midst of that.

couple of the characteristics of trauma is a feeling of overwhelm. And in overwhelm, people tend to feel very isolated and they also feel powerless. And so ⁓ one of the first parts of the gathered time together, the liturgy that we did together, was first is to make space for people simply to arrive as they were.

That however they were, they were welcome just as they were. But there was no shoulds. There were no conditions. And so we did some centering and guiding into silence for people to connect with themselves. And it was just interesting, the feedback of just how many people said just that was so supportive of them because in the midst of crisis, it's...

hard to create that space for yourself, but also there's just a lot to do. And then in that guided silence, there was also just this attention to that we are connecting not just to ourselves and to God, but we are connecting to one another. I called it the La Fuente forest.

that we were planted in the Lefuente forest. We were not just a lone tree off somewhere. And that in this forest, we were also planted among the cloud of witnesses and the angels of heaven. That we're not alone, we're not isolated. God is with us, cloud of witnesses, other embodied people, angels. ⁓ The liturgy was very rich with symbol. ⁓

the way that symbol works in terms of speaking to us. It speaks to a different part of us than just linear data does. And when we are experiencing something that is so, so huge, like what we were in the midst of, it requires a different kind of engagement with who we are. So we... ⁓

We had an altar set up that ⁓ had black cloth that was a symbol of mystery. We had different candles that were reminders of the cloud of witnesses, the angels, of those that are in the unseen realm that are supporting us. We had a...

a Christ candle that was already lit when we came as a sign of Christ is already there. We don't have to ⁓ ask God to come. God is already here. God is ahead of us. We had ⁓ pieces of paper that people had with as they were connecting with themselves. were able to, if they wanted to, to write down words.

that came forward for them. We gave them ⁓ what's called an emotion vocabulary list because just being able to have more language to name what we're feeling, that alone, ⁓ research shows, can help us to down regulate some so that we can actually really work with what's going on better. ⁓

And then after people wrote down whatever it was they wrote down, there was a time where they could bring it forward and to place it on the altar. So the key was that we gave them a way to externalize things, to work with things, tangible, physical, of what was ⁓ just interiorly going on so that they could... ⁓

place their hands on it, and then also to do it ⁓ in community. Then we also lastly ⁓ had these little candles that people could take home with them so that it was a connection between our gathered time and people's ⁓ individual home spaces.

So I'm curious what ⁓ kind of leadership emerged during this season from within your community. Were there people who stepped into new roles or who leaned in new ways? mean, how did it change the leadership landscape of your church, if at all?

I think everybody started using their gifts ⁓ and there was plenty of room to use that. ⁓ think One of the first times we gathered, ⁓ we had one of our members make this wonderful soup that everybody remembers as a comforting presence of God and God's maternal.

side just kind of taking care of us, nourishing us, ⁓ and just re-aliving in us. ⁓ And this member had just all of these different ingredients that she had purposely chosen and wanted the soup to have so that it could help us in our midst of trauma.

And even as others were trying to help, she was like, no, no, no, you need a little bit more of this. No, you need more of this. Like, can I just do it? It's like, yes, just go for it. Right. So I think that communicates a lot of that sentiment. Right. It was very felt that what people had gives, they could bring them and we would accept and respond accordingly. Nina led us through that, through many of those

spaces and others were taking initiative in the community with our families. So a lot of leadership was already present and they took on different roles ⁓ or more roles I should say and others engaged accordingly.

it look like ⁓ to help people connect their daily experience ⁓ during this with, you know, the larger biblical narrative? there particular scriptures or theological themes that became especially meaningful to your community during this time or already were and, you know, became even more highlighted during this time?

You know, I think one of the things that we did to support people in that was we really pressed more into our emotions work. ⁓ Trauma, crisis, I think actually generally where we are as a society, there is just a lot of fear.

And when these very intense emotions are, we're not able to welcome them and work with them. It's not that they go away, but they begin to have an energy that is more subconscious and get kind of morphed and then ⁓ we're not able to harness them and use them.

to move toward life and toward God. And so in the midst of all this loss, and often we think of lament as simply sadness, that lament is really around loss. And loss has, yes, absolutely, it has sadness and grief, but it also has anger and it also has fear. And particularly for my observation is for us as Christians,

and even more so for Christian women and immigrants, people who are more vulnerable. The emotions of anger are just not permitted.

And there's all kinds of theological reasons that have put it around. Which, yeah. So we began to do more to support people ⁓ coming in touch with their anger. And for many people, when they think of anger, they think of somebody who's just ⁓ exploding. That's violent. That's destructive. But that's really anger with panic.

that panic's only value is to help you survive. But anger is really about ⁓ what makes you distinct. What do you value? Jesus' Nazareth sermon is really an incredible statement of what he valued. And that carried him all the way to the cross. So Jesus is just this model of holy and

healthy anger. And so like the day before Palm Sunday, we actually had a half day retreat that was loving God with your anger. Because without anger, really getting to grief, coming to the loss is very, very difficult. It's very compromised without anger, being able to really work with fear and panic.

⁓ is very, very difficult. So that's what we're doing. And it was so fruitful that we, you know, we like, okay, we need Loving God with Your Anchor part two, and maybe there's gonna be a part three and four, we don't know. But there were just some beautiful, beautiful fruit that came out of that half day retreat. I mean, just one particular moment.

was ⁓ part of that day was doing some ⁓ Ignatian Imaginative Prayer with the story of blind Bartimaeus, Jesus' last encounter before he enters Jerusalem. And that story is a story that really illustrates anger and shame actually really, really well. And we had ⁓ a group of first gen

immigrants, mainly all of them, actually who, after doing this work, and we also gave them these emotion resources to be able to delve into the story in a way perhaps they might not have, just as an offer of other lenses to enter the story from. They named how they had not been present to before, how often they'd been told to shut up.

and just what this story brought forward for them of wanting to use their voices. So that was just one of the most precious parts of the retreat.

Would you be willing to share more about how you helped shepherd people through worshiping God through their anger?

So

in a time where there's so much to pay attention to, we have a 24-7 society, knowing what to pay attention to and what is distraction, I think is one of our greatest spiritual formation ⁓ challenges.

So in ⁓ the Gospels, when Jesus is asked, you know, what is the one thing? You what's the greatest commandment? You know, I just have such great empathy because it's like, I know there's so much to pay attention to, just tell me one thing. And, you know, then Jesus' reply is, you know, love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength, with everything. And the second commandment is,

like it, to love your neighbor as yourself. ⁓

This shepherding of people to love God with their anger is about loving God with your whole human self and our emotions and particularly what some would call our distressing emotions, anger, fear for sure. Sometimes sadness, sadness has a little bit more space in Christian circles, but definitely happiness and joy and peace.

But if we believe that God has designed all of that into us and that God's design is good and that they are actually all of these emotions, including rage and panic, are all here as allies, as resources, but we have become polarized from them.

They feel like enemies, they feel like disorders and problems to solve. And so part of the shepherding of how to love God with our anger is first to receive it and to begin to even dare to believe it's a gift. That is not to say that what we have, many of us have experienced as anger

which is anger paired with panic, which then leads to violence and destruction and diminishment of others. ⁓ That's not what we're saying yesterday. That is not good. That is not God. That is not God. ⁓ But to be able to say, but anger is actually this other thing that gives me strength, that gives me definition, that

points me to like, what do I really value and what must be protected? It really gives us the capacity to relate to ourselves, to others, to God. A psychological term that some people sometimes use is the emotion that we need to individuate. We say, nope, this is me and we need to

that you're going to relate to me. is something you need to come up with. I mean, this is what you're engaging with, not in a way of saying, this is me and the rest of you can just go wherever you go. It's not that. Anger is actually inherently a very relational ⁓ emotion. It's one that allows us to engage with the fullness of ourselves.

with the fullness of another because it tells us all the space that is ours to take up and where we stock. And another begins.

because of Epiphany, because of Advent, ⁓ the Christian and the Gospel story, and with Nina, we've talked a lot about this, right? The light and darkness became a very clear ⁓ theological theme as well, right? ⁓ And so, Nina, I don't know if you want to also comment on that and the ways in which that

reframed even our own understanding of the light and the challenge of how much darkness still keeps winning and it feels like there's not enough light, right? But also just the imagery of the flame from our Christ candle in Godly play and all those stories.

Marcos and I were just talking a couple days ago because now we've come through Lent and he had an Easter season. And we're just talking about like.

just great empathy for those first believers who had had centuries of the lived experience with the darkness actually overcomes the light. And so despite all of Jesus's like, well, this is something different. I'm, you I am, you know, it's like all that lived experience, all the emotions that arose from it, all the capacity to

to see what's real because emotions very much impact what we're motivated by, how we're motivated, what we pay attention to, and what we perceive.

So for example, if we say we're bitten by a rattlesnake and we have not really processed that trauma, then it may be that when we walk into a rune and we see a bunch of cords, and they will jump because it will somehow feel the closest of snakes. So that's just a small example of how.

emotions can affect actually what we actually see and experience in the process.

⁓ But anyway, just back to Easter, is that...

It's like if Easter is not true, then we should all just go home and do something easier, because this is hard work. The industry is hard work. There's goodness in it that it is hard work. But if Easter is really, really true,

If there is, I had mentioned earlier how trauma, a couple of characteristics of it is feeling isolated and feeling powerless and small.

⁓ It's like the two high points of our liturgical calendar, Christmas and Easter, that. Christmas, God with us, we're not isolated. We're not alone. And Easter, this is not just the power over an empire to overturn it in that particular location, but it's the power over death.

The very thing that the empire trades in is death. That's what they threaten us with. All kinds of different kinds of death. But if there really is a kingdom and a power...

That's if there really is a light that the darkness has not overcome. By golly, we need to be at this. That is really good news.

I mean, as I witness my own journey, I just am aware of how much the emotional response to so many experiences of the darkness seemed to overcome the light still has colored what I can perceive about this incredibly good news.

And it is only as I've been able to just embrace and witness other people beginning to embrace all of their whole humaneness, emotion, spirit, ⁓ intellect, and ⁓ body. Anyway, that begins to ⁓ shift the perception, shift what I can attend to.

shift when I'm motivated by. So, man, if Easter's for real, let's go for it.

Amen, I love that. I think that's a great place to end our conversation for today. But Marcos and Nina, thank you so much for sharing your stories and your wisdom and the beauty of your community's witness amidst just really incredible loss and trauma and suffering. Now, Nina, I know that you're offering a class on some of this emotional ⁓ healing work and practices. Can you say a bit about that in case our viewers or listeners wanna take that class with you?

Yeah.

Yeah,

love to. So I am on staff with a spiritual direction training program called CenterQuest. And CenterQuest is an ecumenical and a global program. we, in addition to our School of Spiritual Direction, we had something called the Life Learning, Lifelong Learning Community. And that is a space where we just

put out classes around spiritual formation for whoever is interested in learning. so starting the week of June 9th, I will be doing a six-week course on emotions, and it will definitely be very much within this Christian framework. And it will be very praxis-driven because ⁓ that's a huge part of what changes what we know

And what I knew by no is not just no up here, but we know with our whole selves is through practice and reflection. There will be the introduction of a framework of thinking about emotions and how they work, their different purposes. ⁓ But yeah, I'd love for anybody who's interested to join us for that six weeks, it's all online. And there will definitely be people from an

other countries. if you would like a more international space, this will be a space for you.

Great, thanks, and you can find out more about that in the show notes.

And to our audience, thank you so much for joining us with this episode of Pivot. To help others find inspiration and hope to faithfully navigate a changing world, please like and subscribe. If you are catching us on YouTube or if you are listening, head to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It really helps.

And as always, the best compliment you can give us is to share a pivot with a friend. Until next time, this is Dwight and Alicia signing off.