FEATURE

Larissa Romero is the first female head pastor of Downtown Presbyterian Church, home of ‘The Contributor’

BY HANNAH HERNER

On the wall opposite of her desk, interim head pastor of Downtown Presbyterian Church Larissa Romero has collaged black frames, with grayscale pictures inside. These are her saints.

They are civil rights activists Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., poet Maya Angelou, Saint Oscar Romero, Catholic social activist and anarchist Dorothy Day, her former professor Rev. James Cone, artist Frida Kahlo and actor Robin Williams. These are all people whose work has changed her deeply, she says.

“When I am asking myself a question, I think it's really good to remember that we stand on the shoulders of people who've come before us,” she says. “We're beholden to them. So these are folks that I try to make myself accountable to if I'm making a decision or asking questions about myself or my place within a system.”

She was brought in as an interim pastor on a yearly contract to lead the church through some big changes, though they’re still developing what those will be. DPC has done some discernment over the last year through a program called Project Thrive. The idea is that a church doesn’t have to have a certain number of congregants or a certain amount of money to be thriving.

Next they’ll work together to come up with a mission and a vision for the church, and what they can do to move toward that.

One part of the Project Thrive findings is that quite a few members of the congregation are people 30-40 years old — which is a shift to a younger demographic. Additionally, in the downtown area, there are many young singles that may be looking for a place in the church community.

The process is less about numbers and, “more about what is God doing through the church at that time that's energizing people and making people feel good and connected with one another and with God,” Romero says.

Being in downtown Nashville feels good because it reminds her of her time in seminary in New York City. DPC is different from other churches that she’s been involved with in logistical ways, like being home to artists' lofts and a street paper, but it also stands out in an ideological way.

“They have a unique drive to live into their gospel values as they relate to social justice. So that's quite beautiful,” she says.

While she was in New York City, she worked with Picture the Homeless, an organization that organizes for social justice, especially on issues such as housing and police violence and the shelter system. The whole board of that organization is made up of people who have experienced or are currently experiencing homelessness.

“The line is, nothing for us, without us,” Romero adds. “I think similarly, it would be interesting if we asked those questions of ourselves, you know, what does it look like for us to minister alongside and with our community, because the homeless folks in our community are a part of our community.”

In her bio on the church website she describes her commitment to working thorough, “deliberative tendencies we share in the midst of contradictory complexity.”

To Romero, that means her role is to sit with people in their cognitive dissonance and their inner conflicts. That’s the key to freedom, she says.

“I think a lot of our lives are paradoxical. We like to think of ourselves and the world around us as being black and white, able to be easily categorized,” she says. “And I think the real truth often times lies somewhere in between, in liminal spaces. And I think when we can be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and we can learn to sit in those in-between spaces — then we start to experience all kinds of freeing up of our hearts, mind, body, souls, everything.”

It’s important to give a lot of grace to others, and not think of people as good or bad, but constantly growing and changing, she added. The church reaching out to people experiencing homelessness is a part of that.

“If we're talking about our homeless neighbors, it’s recognizing the need for deep solidarity, not that I do for you, so you do for me, but something much deeper, which is my liberation and my freedom, being well in this world, is bound up in you doing well and being well — all of us together,” she says.

She hesitates to say what she envisions for the church. She knows that change has to be collaborative, with buy-in from the congregation.

“It's actually our vision and not just my vision,” she says.

“Times of transition are known to be difficult,” Romero says. “So our relationships are going to get strained at some point by virtue of the fact that we're going through so much change together. But something that I'm grateful for is their leadership, and the congregation, from what I understand — I think we can really trust that we each have the best hopes for the church at heart, and we really trust God is doing some good work here. And we don't entirely know where that's going to lead us yet.”