Presbyterian Life & Witness Board members share their stories

ZEPHYR POINT, Nevada — Two of the new members of Presbyterian Life & Witness Board expressed excitement as they look ahead to their years of service — and to the 228^th General Assembly, which their native Puerto Rico will host June 11-22, 2028.

“I’m quite frankly very excited about working with the board as a whole, especially after seeing the different gifts they have,” said Miguel Rosa Morales, a member of the former Committee on the General Assembly and a doctoral student in aerospace engineering at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. “There is so much work to do. I may not know the nitty-gritty financial stuff, but we have experts on that. We have such a wide net of different gifts and different things we excel at.”

“I’m really excited to work with this group. It enriches us and helps us see how great our church is,” said the Rev. Osvaldo Montalvo-Nazario, pastor of Third Presbyterian Church in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. “We have different opinions, but we can still work for the glory of God.”

“I hope that the next four years [on the PL&W Board] are going to be great because of the things God is going to do,” Montalvo-Nazario said during a break in last week’s initial in-person board meeting, held at Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Center. “Everyone is here with the same intentions — to keep demonstrating that the love of God is real, and that today we can still make a difference. That will help us widen our vision.”

“At the end of the day, we worship together and keep being brothers and sisters,” he said.

Rosa Morales called the presence of agency heads within the PC(USA) “valuable.”

“It’s good to be able to have them at the table,” Rosa Morales said. “They are interacting with the group, voicing how the church can be more welcoming and open to the challenges we face. For me, that was impactful.”

Asked about his thoughts on helping to host the 228^th General Assembly, Montalvo-Nazario said he believes “this might be the single biggest Presbyterian event” to happen in Puerto Rico.

“For a very long time, there was a disconnect with being Presbyterian in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Seeing the whole body convening in Puerto Rico with people  being able to worship with one another — it is wonderful and speaks to who we are as a connectional church and who Christ calls us to be.”

“I one hundred percent encourage people to come,” he said. “I’m trying to get people [in Puerto Rico] to volunteer so they can get exposed to what the church is on a national level.”

“Many would never see a General Assembly,” Montalvo-Nazario said. “Now they can have that.”

“It goes the other way too,” he said. “The denomination is going to Puerto Rico, and a lot of people have never been there. It’s a good way to show that even though we are in the same denomination, we might be a little different in the way we worship and do our things.”

“We follow the Book of Order and do the thing Presbyterian-style, but we have our own sub-culture. It’s a way to show the people Puerto Rico is more than Bad Bunny and JLo. You’re going to see how welcoming Puerto Ricans are.”

“It is our culture. We are warm and welcoming,” Rosa Morales said. “You can’t sit down for a meal without someone saying, ‘God bless you.’”

San Juan will be hosting the historic assembly, “but all the presbyteries will be pitching in,” said Rosa Morales, whose home church is the Hato Rey Presbyterian Church in Rio Píedras, about 20 minutes southeast of the Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan.

“Sometimes you hear people saying, ‘The church in the U.S. doesn’t care about us,’” Montalvo-Nazario said. The site selection and approval by the 227^th General Assembly “shows they really do, and we in Puerto Rico care about the church.”

Read Presbyterian News Service reporting on the initial in-person meeting of the Presbyterian Life & Witness Board here, here and here.