Roberto Miranda, pastor of Lion of Judah, prominent Boston church, has died

(RNS) — A distinguished Boston Hispanic Pentecostal pastor, identified for his church’s social packages and conservative educating, has died, based on his church.

Pastor Robert Miranda’s dying was introduced Sunday (Might 22) throughout companies at Congregation Lion of Judah in Boston, which was streamed on-line.

“So a lot of these of you who’re becoming a member of us watching this and listening to this for the very first time, we’re simply merely letting them know that our senior pastor, beloved of all of us, Roberto Miranda, has graduated,” stated Brandt Gillespie, who was main the service at Lion of Judah.

“He has gone. He’s within the presence of the Lord.”

The announcement got here after the congregation at Lion of Judah, a bi-lingual church often known as Congregación Leon de Judá, sang “It Is Properly With My Soul,” a preferred hymn with lyrics written by Horatio Spafford within the 1870s, after his youngsters died in a shipwreck. The story of the music’s writing had been instructed throughout a sermon on the church the earlier week.

Gillespie led the congregation in singing a chorus of the hymn and instructed them it was alright to grieve their beloved pastor.

“It’s going to take a protracted journey to come back to grips with this,” stated Gillespie.

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Miranda, who was born in 1955, grew to become pastor of what was a modest Hispanic congregation of about 60 folks after incomes a doctorate from Harvard. He had hoped to turn into a professor of Romance languages however gave up his goals of educating for the pastorate.

Below his management, Lion of Judah grew to a congregation of about 1,000 folks, which pulls folks from 30 international locations. The congregation runs social packages to minister to immigrants, serve the poor and assist folks overcome “something that stops folks from turning into what God supposed them to be,” Miranda instructed Faith Information Service in 2019.

He additionally didn’t draw back from addressing sizzling button points from the pulpit, together with his help for pro-immigration insurance policies and his opposition to same-sex marriage. 

“Folks felt that I had a type of suicide advanced,” he instructed RNS in 2019. “To undertake these points from the pulpit was type of harmful, inflammatory and frightening … However I felt in my coronary heart that I wanted for folks to know the way I believed and the way I felt about sure points.”

Miranda was born within the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the US as a toddler to hitch his father. Academically gifted, he graduated from Phillips Academy, a distinguished prep faculty whose alumni embrace presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and later attended Princeton and Harvard.  

“He’s out of the demographic of most Pentecostal pastors,” Arlene Sanchez-Walsh, an skilled on Latino Pentecostalism at Azusa Pacific College in Los Angeles, instructed RNS in 2019. “The bulk are both self-taught or come from Bible faculties and evangelical seminaries.”

Miranda was additionally identified for believing that a lot of his work concerned religious warfare.

“I’ve delivered folks from demonic powers proper the place you might be sitting,” he instructed an RNS reporter who was seated on a sofa in his workplace in 2019. “I’ve engaged in exorcisms over time many, many instances.”

Even after three a long time of ministry, Miranda was nonetheless trying ahead to the long run.

“I see myself as a soldier, put in a lonely outpost, fulfilling an order and awaiting the following transfer,” Miranda stated in 2019. “I’m undecided what it’s. However I do know it’s on the market.”

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