By Sarah Gallaher | Staff Writer
Primera Iglesia Bautista de Waco, a Hispanic Baptist church, will be the first bilingual church to host Baylor’s faculty and staff chapel as part of Baylor’s commitment to diversity. The service will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at George W. Truett Theological Seminary.
The faculty and staff chapel began in Nov. 2022 as part of Baylor’s spiritual well-being initiative, according to President Linda Livingstone via email newsletter. Livingstone said the Baylor family can show “love in action” by attending the service.
“The services, conducted once per semester, bring a guest congregation to campus and complement both our personal spiritual growth and Baylor’s mission – where faith is central to who we are and how we prepare men and women for a life of leadership and service in the world,” Livingstone wrote in a Presidential Perspective.
Although chapel has long been a requirement for students, biannual chapels for faculty and staff are a recent endeavor. Associate Vice President for Strategic Communications and Initiatives Torie Johnson came to Baylor last November and was tasked with coordinating both the fall and spring chapels.
As the lead chapel organizer, Johnson works alongside Spiritual Life, Truett Seminary and the President’s office to make a collective decision on who will lead each chapel. The faculty and staff chapel aims to highlight the voices of outside organizations, with Calvary Baptist Church and Toliver Chapel Missionary Baptist Church hosting the two previous chapels.
“I think anytime that we’re working to have an organization or a person in front of the Baylor family, particularly our faculty and staff, whether that’s once a semester, once a year or once a week, that is a significant opportunity,” Johnson said. “We don’t take those lightly, because we want to make sure that we’re giving the right amount of significance and weight to that moment.”
Emmanuel Roldan, senior pastor at Primera Iglesia Bautista de Waco, had previous connections with Baylor prior to his invitation to speak at the fall chapel. The church is one of twelve congregations included in Baylor’s Soundings Project, which supports churches in Texas that share commonalities with Baylor’s spiritual mission.
“I think ultimately the decision to extend an invitation to Primera, one, the senior pastor there, Dr. Roldan, has a relationship with the institution apart from chapel,” Johnson said.
Additionally, Roldan and his church share ties with Baylor’s faculty—World Christianity Professor Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi is one faculty member who attends the church regularly. Cardoza-Orlandi joined the church in 2018 and said he appreciates its intersectionality between culture and religion.
“The church is a bilingual church — everything is done in two languages … The first thing that appealed to me was that it was truly a bicultural, bilingual congregation,” Cardoza-Orlandi said.
After coming to Baylor, Cardoza-Orlandi noticed the lack of Hispanic faculty and staff. Joining Primera Iglesia Bautista de Waco gave him the opportunity to build a community with those who share his heritage.
However, Cardoza-Orlandi said he hopes that diversity will go beyond the church and extend to Baylor’s faculty and staff as well. He said that Baylor’s highest faculty diversity numbers in history, according to demographics from the start of the fall semester, are a sign that change is on the horizon.
“I think that Baylor bringing Primera to lead a chapel service is another sign of Baylor bringing awareness and trying to create an agenda for what it means for a university in Texas to have such a small percentage of Latino and Latina faculty,” Cardoza-Orlandi said. “I think that Baylor has become aware that should not be the case.”
Baylor’s commitment to diversity includes interacting with others with love and understanding, according to Livingstone. This includes giving a platform to individuals and organizations with diverse backgrounds, such as Primera Iglesia Bautista de Waco.
Although Baylor extended the invitation to Primera Iglesia Bautista de Waco, the university does not dictate the content of the chapel, according to Johnson. However, Johnson said Hispanic culture will likely be a part of the service as it is central to the identity of the church.
“Being able to have churches that will bring that culture and that tradition, it’s an opportunity … for those who decide to come and to be a part of it; it’s an opportunity for them to see and experience that. To learn, perhaps,” Johnson said. “In that learning and that exposure, that is where … diversity is fostered, that is where that growth can begin to occur.”
