John Garland is the pastor of the San Antonio Mennonite Church in downtown San Antonio, which runs run a hospitality house that has hosted thousands of asylum-seekers from Central America and Central Africa over the past few years. He is the director of the Semillas, which does trauma-healing work on a small ranch outside of town with asylum-seeking families who have fled extreme violence. He is the recipient of Duke Divinity School’s Traditioned Innovation Award for the way the church community has expressed its Anabaptist theology into healing hospitality. His church is also the recipient of the Impact San Antonio award allowing its history & building to be renovated into an Incubator space for peace and reconciliation non-profits.
After graduating from Baylor in 2003, Garland became an Americorps volunteer on the Texas-Mexico border doing community development in Colonias near the river. He became the pastor of a small, Spanish-speaking Anabaptist church. Always as a bi-vocational pastor, Garland, over the last decade, started a vegetable farm, directed a public school nutrition program, and taught middle school science on the border. While at Baylor, Garland lived on the World Hunger Relief Farm.
He married Abigail Morton (’03), who is a high school principal in downtown San Antonio. They have two daughters, ages 7 and 9.
