Elazar Zavaletta (he/they) is the founding pastor of Good Trouble Church. From a big familia en la frontera of South Texas, Elazar spent most of his adult life in New York City before moving to Baltimore in 2018. His heritage is a coat of many colors, primarily Tejano, Mexica/Coahuiltecan, Swiss, and Basque. He was the first known transmasculine and nonbinary person of color to be ordained in the ELCA. His call is to place forgotten and rejected peoples into the center and raise up leaders from the margins.

He was born to Suzy and Joe, a nurse and a doctor — their deep faith, commitment to healing, and concern for the persecuted have been a part of his story his whole life. Before he was ordained, he was wrapped in a handmade prayer shawl by now crowned priestess of Yemoja, Rev. Dr. Renée Hill and Rev. Dr. Mary Foulke, bearing the images of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, and the Hebrew Aleph. He hopes one day to be deserving of that lineage. He has been in recovery for 11 years and was ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 2021 in the outdoor lot where the community of GTC formed and continues to worship. At his ordination, he was consecrated to his name, Elazar, Basque of Hebrew origin, meaning, “My God has helped.”

With 10 years of parish experience including training as a hospital chaplain and community organizer, he works to support the most vulnerable people in our city to find belonging, work for justice, and achieve their dreams for themselves and their community. His life experiences of being marginalized from the church due to his gender identity, the spiritual violence of being told he was an abomination in the eyes of God by the conservative charismatic faith community of his upbringing, and his experiences of the trauma and suffering of addiction led him to envision a community where people who are despised by this world can come together and partake in sacramental community to bless each other before God.

Central to his journey through life and embodiment of his call is the ongoing nature-based rites of passage work and ceremony he began in 2016 at Wild Mountain with guides Roo Wharton and Pedro McMillan. From the positionalities of being both white-assumed from a background of privilege, and of mixed ancestry, he works to create liberated and liberatory structures for people on the underside of power. Calling upon his trans/queer and indigenous ancestors to interrupt whiteness and imagine futures for the people of God that are liberated, loving, and just. His work at Good Trouble Church takes seriously the decolonization of the church and Christianity, and seeks to bring forth the sacred histories, practices, and spiritual legacies of BIPOC communities. 

Zavaletta previously served at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York, where he was Pastoral Associate. At St. Mary's, he co-directed Food Programs and started a monthly Wisdom Circle for elders. He completed his internship at Amazing Grace Lutheran Church in East Baltimore, the congregation which served as the “incubator” for the early GTC. He graduated a Distinguished Scholar from the University of Texas at Austin in English Honors and Philosophy. His thesis used Wilde, Deleuze, and Butler to imagine the queerness of becoming as an ontology of subversion for liberation. He holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where he was a Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellow, and completed a thesis on the Other that, relying heavily on the work of Levinas, argued for a necessary redemption in the tragic gap between the ontological and the phenomenological, especially vis-a-vis trans bodies. He holds an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he was a Hispanic scholar.

He lives in Baltimore with his spouse, Rev. Emily M. D. Scott, the light of his life. He loves hiking and exploring the world with Emily, time with family and chosen family, walking their dogs Milo and Frankie, petting Henrietta their amazing fluff of a cat, sourdough bread, alebrijes, the Alps, and Bread and Puppet.