In her career as a hospital chaplain, Verónica Martínez-Gallegos witnessed many sacred moments. Caring for people and their families in the most difficult days of their lives, she carries with her memories both profound and life-affirming.
One memory stands out for a particular reason. It was early in her career — she was still working on her master of divinity degree — and she was standing in the hospital room of a 90-year-old patient near the end of her life. The patient listened to what Martínez-Gallegos had to say and then began peppering the young chaplain with questions about her ministry.
Martínez-Gallegos told the patient about the transformational experiences that had led her to chaplaincy. When she finished, the patient said to her, “I’m so proud of you for following your call. I had a call and couldn’t follow it.”
It’s difficult to imagine Martínez-Gallegos in anything but a leadership role. Her sophisticated silver hair and gold hoop earrings compliment a calming presence, and when she speaks — in English or Spanish — she speaks with authority. But like her nonagenarian patient, she’d come terribly close to missing her call entirely.
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Twenty years ago, when she was a Baptist minister’s wife in her early 30s, Martínez-Gallegos said, “I always had the idea that I was the appendage of my husband’s ministry.”
Like many Latina women in ministry circles, she felt her role was to be supportive and submissive. She had never been challenged, she said, to ask who she really was, to confront her identity or consider whether she might have a calling distinct from her husband’s.
She began to face those questions when she signed up for an intensive five-day institute through the Baptist University of the Americas (BUA) in San Antonio, Texas, offered by Christian Latina Leadership Institute (CLLI).
At that time, CLLI was in its second year as an innovative offering through the university. It was mostly curiosity compelling her to check it out, but those five days of nurturing her own gifts and thirst for knowledge, Martínez-Gallegos said, was a turning point in her life.
After completing the intensive, Martínez-Gallegos knew she wanted to continue her theological education. That led her to chaplaincy, where her bilingual skills were as much of an asset as her theological training.
She now trains multicultural chaplains from around the world through a hospital system in Dallas. She also serves on the CLLI board, where she has watched stories like hers unfold for 20 years.
Being able to pastor people in their native language during what are often the most profound and difficult days of their lives has been sacred, Martínez-Gallegos said.
Beyond gender and cultural scripts
Now an independent nonprofit institute based in San Antonio, CLLI has grown its training from a five-day intensive experience of reflection and theological inquiry to a two-year Certificate in Latina Leadership Studies. The curriculum aims to empower and transform women in their calling, whether that’s in formal ministry or by finding divine purpose in jobs outside the church.
Have you ever struggled to find your “distinct calling”? If so, what obstacles — internal or external — did you face?
Participants can enroll in English or Spanish cohorts. Their cost is between $395 and $715, depending on how many in-person or virtual modules they choose.
The real cost is higher, cofounder Nora Lozano said, but donors have allowed CLLI to keep the course affordable — a top priority for ministry professionals, especially those working with marginalized communities. Donors also help CLLI to offer scholarships.
For many participants, transformation starts by unlearning the harmful expectations they’ve been given about what it means to be women. This is particularly true for Latinas, who must see themselves beyond gender and cultural scripts, Martínez-Gallegos said. Once they are able to see themselves as God does, graduates said, CLLI equips them with leadership skills ranging from team communication to succession planning.
Identity-based spaces like CLLI matter because too often people are told that one part of their life — their gender, culture, disposition, or expression of faith — is “too much,” said Jessica Lugo, executive director of the Asociación para la Educación Teológica Hispana (AETH).
“In my personal case, ‘too church' for the academy. ‘Too academic’ for the church. ‘Too critical’ for some spaces, ‘too faithful’ for others. Over time, that pressure can lead people to fragment themselves just to belong. These initiatives create space for wholeness,” she said.
Organizations like AETH and CLLI belong at the “very heart of theological education, not the margins,” Lugo said. They exist, she said, because the church, and its supporting institutions, have not always been able to see Latino or Latina leaders rising through their own systems.
“In that sense, (identity-based institutions) are not ‘special interest' programs; they are spaces of faithful formation that help complete what traditional models of theological education often leave unfinished.”
The mix of personal development and theological study comes from the unique partnership between Lozano, a systematic theology professor, and her founding partner, Patty Villarreal, a licensed clinical social worker.
Do you or those to whom you minister grapple with gender or cultural scripts? What resources are available?
The two met in the early 2000s when Villarreal came to work at BUA. Lozano was assigned to mentor her, and the two soon found themselves commiserating over how being “tokens” in Christian education circles was taking up much of their time. They were frequently being asked to serve on panels and boards at other Christian education institutions and national nonprofits, to advise these groups on the “Latina perspective.”
As honored as they were, Villarreal said, their packed schedules were a sign that no one was actually doing the work of raising up more Latina leaders. So they decided to do it.
“Social workers and systematic theologians don’t really hang out,” Villarreal said. But that particular blend of perspectives gives CLLI some of its unique emphasis on both spiritual healing and capacity-building.
Lozano understands the art of teaching and quirks of academia, and Villarreal has a mind for systems and engaging the community. They model what they tell their students, Villarreal said.
“God puts people together who don’t make sense, and it becomes a movement.”
Healing from harm
As they designed the curriculum for CLLI, Lozano knew that for the students to explore their callings, many would first have to heal from teachings that had disconnected them from their vocations.
She knew firsthand how painful it could be. Lozano remembers the first time she realized that her gifts might not be welcomed in church. Raised in Mexico by a progressive mom and supportive dad, she’d never second-guessed her leadership and teaching abilities.
“I didn’t know that there were limitations for women,” she said.
Then, in 1983, at 21, she was in the running to serve as president of the youth group, a volunteer position that would have her working closely with the new pastor of the Baptist church where she’d grown up.
CLLI’s co-founders discovered a need to raise up Latina leaders and decided to meet that need. What needs exist in your life and community? Could you meet those needs?
Right before the vote, the head pastor walked into the room where the young adult group was meeting and stood in front of them. He was holding an open Bible, Lozano remembers, with his finger on 1 Timothy 2:11-14. He read the verses aloud:
“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner” (NIV).
He slammed the Bible shut, Lozano remembers, and said nothing directly to her. In fact, he barely even looked at her when he said to the group, “Do whatever you want.” Then he walked out.
Lozano declined the nomination immediately, sensing that his hostility would make her service nearly impossible. As humiliating as it was, the pastor’s interruption and the Bible passage he used set her on the path that would become her life’s work.
Four decades later, Lozano and her partners in CLLI have given over 1,000 women the tools they need to carry out their missions with confidence — whether in pulpits, hospitals or board rooms.
“That experience marked my life and sent me on a search for what was going on with the Bible,” she said.
Learning the skills to succeed
Gabriela Sánchez was already a rising star in the banking industry when she enrolled at CLLI. The hybrid model of online and in-person meetings several times per year made it possible for her to study without taking time away from her finance job.
Almost immediately, she said, she could see how the program’s holistic approach to leadership — caring for the leader herself as well as giving her skills — would help her thrive in her work and use her financial expertise to bless others.
Is there Scripture that you’ve struggled with in your ministry? How do you approach those difficult passages?
So many topics are taboo in Latino families, Sánchez said, including money. By learning how to talk about finances as part of ministry, she said, it helped her understand what money could do when stewarded well. She now helps others think about giving and generosity. She encourages her clients, friends and family see their money as a resource to be carefully cultivated with the intent to share and bless others.
“The reality is that God teaches us to give,” she said. “To plant seeds wherever we can.”
That includes planting the very garden where she grew. At 33, she’s the youngest member of the all-alumnae board. She wants to help CLLI grow, she said, so it can do for others what it did for her.
Lozano and Villarreal want CLLI graduates to have the kind of institutional know-how that helps them succeed in a world of budgets and administration. Many Latinas don’t have access to executive coaching or the kind of institutional mentorship that their white male counterparts often have.
Equally important, especially for those who will go into vocational ministry, is for CLLI graduates to have a ready answer for those who still interpret the Bible to say that women should not be teaching or leading in churches. The CLLI path to empowerment doesn’t circumvent or dismiss tough passages in the Bible, like the exhortations from the Apostle Paul that women stay silent and submissive. Rather, CLLI addresses those passages head-on, following in its founders’ footsteps.
The 1 Timothy passage haunted Lozano for years after the pastor had derailed her hopes to lead the youth group. She enrolled at what is now Palmer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, hungry to learn but unsure where it would lead her, since preaching was off the table. There she took a class on hermeneutics and biblical interpretation. The list of passages students could select from for their final paper included 1 Timothy 2.
Lozano decided it was time to reckon with her wounds.
She found her way forward with the passage through historical context and exegesis. The reason the women were told to stay silent, she learned, was because of a lack of education. They had fallen in with false teachers because those were the only ones willing to teach them.
The way Lozano teaches it, 1 Timothy 2 is part of Paul’s larger argument that women be taught and trained up in the church. Not to do so was a liability to the then-fledgling religion.
The peace that Lozano ultimately found with the passage in Timothy — the very one that had been used against her — opened the door to peace with God. Before, she said, her desire to teach and lead “felt like a bad joke from God.” Once she understood the passage in greater context, she felt the world open up to her.
Discovering a true calling
That’s exactly how Martínez-Gallegos feels about her time with CLLI — like her life can be divided into before and after. Shortly after she attended the institute, she moved back home to North Carolina with her husband and started working on a master of divinity degree at Campbell University. It felt like she met countless women in North Carolina who would benefit from a program like CLLI.
That day in the hospital room with her 90-year-old patient, she felt, was her true ordination day. This was the day she knew her true calling as a chaplain — and her calling to equip other women.
She pitched the idea of a second CLLI site to Lozano and Villarreal. In 2013 the first North Carolina cohort launched, and with it, the vision for meeting women — who often don’t have the option to pick up and move or travel across the country multiple times per year — where they are.
Thirteen years later, cohorts run through seven sites in Mexico, Colombia and the United States. The leadership has adapted the delivery model as well. During the pandemic, Villarreal said, they realized that the online and asynchronous learning models might be a helpful resource even after gathering in person was possible again. The institute has continued to offer a blend of online and in-person sessions to reduce barriers to participation.
Gabriela Sánchez wants to help CLLI so it can help others as it helped her. What organization has helped you? In what ways could you give back?
Many graduates’ roles may not change as dramatically as Martínez-Gallegos’s did. Some will continue to support their spouse’s ministries, albeit with more attunement to their own gifts.
Others, like Sánchez, will continue on their rise in their own industries, but with ample attention to their personal spiritual, physical, and financial health. Nearly all CLLI graduates experience the subtle shift in how they see themselves, and the way that affects how people treat them.
For Martínez-Gallegos, who thought she’d be forever “the pastor’s wife,” she’ll never forget the day her husband came to visit her at work.
As he came down the hospital hall, she recalled hearing one of the nurses say, “That’s the chaplain’s husband.”
Questions to consider
- Have you ever struggled to find your “distinct calling”? If so, what obstacles — internal or external — did you face?
- Do you or those to whom you minister grapple with gender or cultural scripts? What resources are available?
- CLLI’s co-founders discovered a need to raise up Latina leaders and decided to meet that need. What needs exist in your life and community? Could you meet those needs?
- Is there Scripture that you’ve struggled with in your ministry? How do you approach those difficult passages?
- Gabriela Sánchez wants to help CLLI so it can help others as it helped her. What organization has helped you? In what ways could you give back?
