2024 Harvey Lecture with the Rev. Daniel Robayo
Knapp Auditorium
Please join us for the Harvey Lecture facilitated by the Rev. Daniel Robayo, with a reception to follow.
The lecture will begin at 6:30pm and will be live-streamed below, at the ssw.edu website, and the Southwest Facebook page.
“The Harvey Lecture committee is very excited to welcome the Rev. Daniel Robayo to be our Harvey Lecture speaker for 2024,” the Rev. Teri Calinao, senior student committee member shares. “One of the topics that our Harvey Lecture survey revealed was that there is great interest in the topic of multicultural ministries. Father Robayo was formerly the Missioner for Latino/Hispanic in the Diocese of North Carolina and now serves as the Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene/Sta. Maria Magdalena, a bilingual, multicultural parish in Manor, Texas. He has a passion for community organizing and we feel that he will bring an important lens of the work being done in multicultural ministries in further the mission of Christ.”
The Rev. Daniel Darío Robayo Hidalgo and his wife Nancy Urrecheaga Robayo live in Manor, Texas, where he has been serving as Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church since October of 2022.
Daniel earned undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Social Sciences at Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, a small liberal arts college founded by the Evangelical Free Church, which is the church family in which he grew up in Venezuela before coming to the United States at age 16. His walk in the Christian faith—his camino de fe— led him into the Episcopal Church in his twenties. Following graduation from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1987, he was ordained deacon and subsequently priest in the Diocese of Virginia. He was assigned his diaconal year to serve in what was then the Hispanic Ministry of the Diocese of Virginia, assisting in the care and development of a couple of congregations that later were admitted to Diocesan Council as missions. As a priest, he was the first Hispanic to serve as Rector in English-speaking parishes in Virginia. From that platform, he supported the work of Hispanic congregations as well as participating locally in the life of Hispanics/Latinos around his churches. As Rector of Emmanuel Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia, he was also a community organizer involved in immigrant rights, poultry workers’ rights, local politics. He was also a volunteer police chaplain.
Before coming to Texas, Daniel served four years on the staff of the Diocese of North Carolina as Missioner for Hispanic/Latino Ministries. He supported the work of both Hispanic and Anglo congregations, helping to build bridges in their communities. He also served on the board of Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, a joint ministry of the dioceses of North and East Carolina.
St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church is a recent plant of the Diocese of Texas, intentionally established as a bilingual, multiethnic and multigenerational church. His dream is to see St. Mary Magdalene flourish as a church that not only represents the wide variety of people who live in Manor but one that rejoices in the particular cultures that form it, highlighting their diversity to enrich their unity as a community of faith that shares Christ’s transforming love with the larger communities of Manor.
He is amazed and grateful that he gets paid to do what he loves, and he delights in the life he shares with Nancy, who once upon a time was his high school sweetheart. Between them, they have 5 children and 6 grandchildren (some living in the Austin area). In his spare time, Daniel’s passion is to ride his motorcycle and to learn Italian.
The student-led Harvey Lectures were conceived at Seminary of the Southwest as a way of honoring the late Dean Hudnall Harvey, who died unexpectedly in 1972, after serving as the seminary’s dean for just five years.
During Dean Harvey’s tenure, following some institutional turbulence during the 1960s, the seminary had begun rebuilding: in terms of enrollment, financial strength, and earning back the trust of many dioceses through the church.
The seminary community established the Harvey Lectures an annual series that would be overseen by student leaders and that would address the relationship between pastoral leadership and contemporary issues confronting the church.
Over the years, these Lectures have become a lasting and vital resource for the seminary, bringing important and diverse theological voices to our campus.
