At one point in her life not too long ago, Perla Flores wanted to be an immigration lawyer.
Having grown up on the edges of church life—and on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border—often spending childhood summers with her then-pastor aunt Maria Santa Cruz (who has since become the Pacifica Synod’s Assistant to the Bishop for Latiné Ministry), Flores was drawn to faith before stepping away as she graduated high school and embarked on a college career that would be focused on immigration law.
"When I left for college, I drifted away from faith for a few years,” Rev. Flores said, “but God found a way to bring me back in the midst of challenging times again, and that’s when I truly felt a sense of calling, that God wanted me to do something greater in the world and to help the vulnerable.”
It was this calling that led the Flores first to seminary and then to accept a newly created position as a Pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in San Diego and the Director of the Welcome Center, a new initiative of the Pacifica Synod that exists primarily to meet the needs of those coming into the United States across the border.
“Back when I was elected bishop in 2022, there were a lot of people coming across the border, and there were a lot of efforts to figure out how we meet this need,” Bishop David Nagler said. “They need everything you can think of. There are folks with zero money, they need to figure out how to be here legally, how to connect to the wider community. And it’s not just Spanish-speaking people—it’s people from all over.”
That led Bishop Nagler and the synod to answer a larger question: “The whole world is coming to our synod, so how can we welcome them?”
It’s a question that’s long been asked by Santa Cruz. “The Welcome Center was one of my dreams when I got into this position,” she said. “We have the right person as a leader. Perla Flores is young and smart and very energetic to start meeting with the leaders of other organizations that are already doing work with immigrants and refugees.”
“When I first heard about the Welcome Center and I was asked if I might be interested in being part of it and starting it up, I was truly honored and felt really happy that the synod had this vision to help families,” the newly-ordained Flores said. “The focus is really, especially in these times, toward helping immigrants and refugees, nd that hits close to home for me. It’s something I’m very passionate about.”
“The current administration is not letting up on trying to be cruel to immigrants,” Nagler said, “so we need to have the opposite effort to be welcoming and hospitable and loving to people. it’s not about ‘harboring criminals,’ it’s about helping people who are our neighbors legally find a way forward.”
Everyone agrees this focus will require a lot of listening and on-the-ground learning.
“There are never enough resources, and that’s the work that needs to get done,” Santa Cruz said. “And not to repeat what other organizations are doing. We have to ask, ‘What else do we need?’ How can we share?’”
“We want it to be more of a community organizing model, where we listen to the community first before we decided our response,” Nagler said.
The Welcome Center is hosted at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church and there is a plan to have it be a space for Word and Sacrament ministry, but the intent is for that ministry to be an offshoot of a larger worldview.
“Our hope for this Welcome Center ties back to that sense of belonging, and who we are as a community in Christ,” Flores said. “A lot of people are of different faiths, different denominations, but in the end, what we do share is the need to belong and the need to feel loved. That’s the main message for this Welcome Center is that they do belong here and there are people who love them and who want to help them simply because they’re human beings and children of God.”
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