Story by Tiffany Doss
Two pastors from the Potomac Conference--Alex Barrientos (pictured below), pastor of
the Meadowbridge and Gloucester churches in Virginia, and Daniel Xisto, associate pastor of the Takoma Park (Md.) church, were ordained to the gospel ministry earlier this year.
“I first felt Jesus calling me into ministry during my sophomore year at Takoma Academy [in Maryland],” says Barrientos (pictured right). “Dunbar Henri, my Bible teacher, asked if I would like to join the school’s preaching team. One day he told me, ‘You’re going to be a pastor someday.’ He had no way of knowing that his words deeply impressed my early sense of what the Lord was asking of me.”
Some of Xisto’s (pictured left) earliest memories are of praying that Jesus would stay close to him. Raised in the Catholic tradition and sent to church school in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., Xisto learned to walk with Jesus from an early age. It was there, in the seventh grade, that he first sensed the call to ministry. High school and college, however, distracted him from that goal. He was introduced to the Seventh-day Adventist Church during his senior year of college and fell in love with the simplicity and beauty of the Church’s focus on Scripture and Jesus Christ.
Both Barrientos and Xisto hold Master of Divinity degrees from the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary (Mich.) and have a passion for connecting others to Jesus in a real and transformative way.