11/26/2025
From Pastor Elazar's Pastoral Announcement: https://mailchi.mp/goodtroublechurch/pastoral-announcement
Beloved community,
I write to you with a heart full of gratitude and deep trust in the Spirit that has carried Good Trouble these nearly 6 years. At Family Life last week, I shared with our congregation that after much prayer, discernment, and listening to the wisdom of my own body and family, I will be transitioning out of my role as Pastor of Good Trouble Church.
As the founding pastor of this remarkable congregation, I have always been committed to being with our community until GTC was ready to carry the work forward without me, and until God said otherwise. In recent months, I began to feel the winds of change stirring, and the Spirit whispering that a new time was coming for Good Trouble and for me. It’s very clear to me that the people of Good Trouble Church are deeply rooted, and ready to carry the work forward.
My last day as pastor will be December 19. As difficult as it is to think of being away from Good Trouble, I do know that it is the right thing, and that God will be with us through it. While my heart breaks to say goodbye, there is also the gift that after long months of living separately, I will be moving to New Haven, where I am overjoyed to be able to join my spouse Emily.
Evolutions
Though significant, this shift does not mean I am leaving Good Trouble. For the coming season, I will remain connected in a part-time capacity as Vision Holder. From New Haven, I will support Good Trouble’s leaders and help guide the arc of our becoming, continuing to weave the Spirit’s invitation into the life of this movement. I’m planning a visit next June, and I’ll be back before then to work with the Council and check in on everyone.
With every loss there comes opportunity and opening, too. My transition is making way for beautiful evolutions in our structure. We will be elevating core leaders into new staff roles supporting Leadership, Liberation, Community Care, and our grounding in Sacred Ceremony. We will also be hiring a new Movement Steward to help carry the work forward sustainably. Finally, God is calling someone beloved and known to the community to step into the role of Healing Guide and Interim Pastor. A few details are being finalized; more to come on all these exciting evolutions in the coming weeks.
Honor and unspeakable joy
Serving as the pastor of Good Trouble Church “A Way out of No Way” has been the great honor and unspeakable joy of my life. Every Monday on the lot, every healing circle, every vigil, meals cooked and shared, every free market, workshop, baptism and resurrection ceremony and freedom song and team meet and Village work day — I have loved every minute of our ministry here. Sharing joy, grief, struggle and hope centered in Christ, we have built something rare and holy.
Our congregation made a place outside of the barriers and harms of the institutional church — literally and figuratively — where we could turn the world upside down and bless each other before God. In the sacred moments we created together, we have witnessed unbelievable things, and we have been empowered to create the world as it should be on our blocks. The movement of the Holy Spirit in this community and through our lives has been unassailable, and is unmissable. All one has to do is to come and see, what goodness the Lord has given us. What made it all possible was how it all began, and what continues to enable all of Good Trouble’s remarkable work: our gathering together in a circle in holiness and grace-filled solidarity before God.
Another thing’s for sure: as we’ve worked to bring the realm of heaven closer in our neighborhood, we’ve all been transformed in the process. None of us are who we were when we started this, and the leaders I see before me today at Good Trouble Church are leaders who are changing the world.
This is the church that called me, and made it possible for me to be ordained in the fullness of my self — becoming the first known nonbinary and transmasculine person of color ordained in the ELCA. And it was because of Good Trouble that I was able to become who I am, and come home to myself — undoing the legacy of colonialism and indigenous erasure. And I end my pastorate as one fully embracing their holiness and wholeness — as trans and Two Spirit, woven of indigenous Mexica, Basque, and European lineage — finding healing, releasing old wounds of assimilation and erasure, reclaiming my ancestors, reconnecting with their sacred ways, and lifting up the stories that history tried to silence. I could only do this because the people of Good Trouble and I have been undertaking this holy remembering, doing it together, claiming our profound holiness and our wholeness, and calling our ancestors back in to guide us.
As a worshipping community we have created a vibrant, Spirit-filled, Afro-Indigenous rooted liturgy that is pushing the bounds of what church can be. I believe this work has been not only to decolonize but to reclaim and remember, in the words of Mama Itihari Touré, to “restory” — to claim again those gifts, experiences, and ways of knowing God, ourselves, and our world that white religion had unbelievably deemed "other” and labeled “unchristian.”
As we have awakened to the powerful presence of the Egun, this year, we began to invoke the Orishas to join us on the journey. And so as Good Trouble again sails out into the deep, we know that Jesus will be there to pull us up, but we will also go knowing that while Jesus is with us in the water, Yemaya and Oshun are the water, living powers, who hold us, protect us, and give us life.
Our founding verse comes from the prophet Isaiah, who shares the promise of God making a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert for a people living in exile who saw no way forward. Good Trouble has always been about the Spirit moving through a community committed to liberation and sacred imagination like we see in Isaiah. Over the years, again and again, we have witnessed God making “A Way out of No Way” in our community and through our ministry. And today, God is making a new way. I trust the path unfolding before us, I trust the anointed ones rising to lead in this next season, and I trust God to be there on this journey.
I carry endless gratitude for the way this congregation has shaped me and the way we have all shaped our community together. Looking back, I see all we have accomplished through the power of the Holy Spirit breathing in and through us, and I simply bow in gratitude to each one of you for being a part of this beautiful adventure. And – I know it’s not over! I love you all and want to thank you for your trust and partnership along the way, and for all the ways you have contributed to bringing the realm of heaven close through Good Trouble Church. It has been such an honor walking with you.
We are here. God is here, too! Amen and ashé.
Humbly and with deep gratitude,
Pastor Elazar
P.S.
Good Trouble, Good Trouble!!
📸 by Ash Esposito, Philip Muriel, Jess Gallagher
