Faithful Determination
Faculty Interview: Mark Garcia On July 1, 2021, Dr. Mark Garcia (PhD, University of Edinburgh) joined the faculty at Westminster as Associate Professor of Systematic Theology. Dr. Garcia has been in various teaching roles throughout the years, has served as a minister at Immanuel OPC in Coraopolis, PA for the last fourteen years, and is Executive Director and President of The Greystone Institute. This summer, Dr. Alfred Poirier, Professor of Pastoral Theology, had the opportunity to interview Dr. Garcia. Their conversation included a splendid variety of intriguing topics such as being a sommelier, the theology of the Lord’s Supper, and the role and importance of systematic theology in the church today. This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity. To listen to the full-length interview, please visit wts.edu/Garcia. Alfred Poirier: Let’s begin by getting some sense of who you are, your family, and anything else you’d like to share.
for all my years growing up before becoming a pastor myself.
Mark Garcia: I am married to Jill, and we have four children, two daughters and two sons. Our eldest, Adriana, was born when I was a seminary student here at Westminster, just nearby at Abington hospital in the year 2000. And our second daughter, Elisa, was born when I was in Edinburgh, Scotland doing my PhD work, which I left Westminster to do in 2001. She was born in 2002. After three years of study there, we returned to the US, and I was a pastoral intern for a year. I stayed on to do some adjunct seminary teaching for Reformed Theological Seminary and a variety of campuses. I was ordained and was an associate pastor for that second year as well in Orlando. And we moved from there back overseas to Cambridge University, where we had our third child, my first son, Mark Andrew, Jr. I was there on a research project working with Dr. Van Dixhoorn of Westminster on the Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly. And from there we moved to Pittsburgh, on the extreme other side of the state from Westminster, where we had our fourth child, Thomas. I moved to Pittsburgh to become the pastor of Immanuel Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And just earlier this summer, July 4, was my last day of ministry there as I anticipate my transition to Westminster. And that also marked exactly 14 years of pastoral ministry at Immanuel. So, we have four children that we like to say are four different souvenirs of places we’ve lived over the years. I grew up in Southwest State County in Miami, Florida, the son of a Baptist pastor. And I grew up under his Spanish speaking Baptist church ministry
AP: Spanish speaking? What’s your family background?
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MG: My father is Cuban, and my mother is American; both are American citizens. But he came to the US during the time of Castro’s transition into power. But in God’s kind providence, his family had resources back then and he required open-heart surgery. And the family was able to work out on arrangement with the emerging government at the time, and to allow the family as a whole to make their way to the US legally in exchange for all their Cuban assets. So, they turned everything over to Castro’s new government, and that’s how my father ended up in Miami with his family. I grew up in a context where I didn’t have a first language except for Spanglish. So, my father and his family spoke primarily Spanish, and my mom’s, English. The school I went to, the church I attended was also very, very much a blended situation. AP: Apart from your pastoral and academic interests, we’ve heard that you have an interesting relationship with wine. Tell us about that. MG: Well, I am a sommelier, having gone through the training programs and so on. A sommelier is a wine specialist and wine instructor. . . While I always enjoyed a good glass of wine and knew that there was something interesting historically, philosophically theologically, and culturally about wine, I was also coming through a very difficult time as a pastor. I had been just fiercely
