Scale

Durango (‘18) came to the University of Colorado from a high school with a graduating class of just over thirty students. The sheer scale of the university population was a shock for him, and the culture was very different from his hometown. “I was looking for a church community,” he remembers, “[and] I needed a place that felt like it was more manageable to make friends and connections.”

He got connected to Bread+Belonging through his Episcopal parish and soon started coming to Tuesday night dinners. A home cooked meal outside of the dorms was a real gift, as were the friendships he found around B+B tables. “To this day some of my closest friends are from campus ministry,” Durango says, “and many of them are people that I met that [first] year.” The friendships he made within Bread+Belonging gave him a consistent and caring community to explore big questions about faith and identity. He recalls a spring retreat during his first year that explored the spirituality of dating and relationships. “Actually having the conversation about how to order your life and these important parts of our lives from a Christian perspective,” he reflects, “was very valuable to me.” 

The rich relationships he formed through Bread+Belonging shaped Durango’s theology of belonging and his call to ordained ministry. The conviction that we belong to God first, that was so much a part of his time with B+B, centers his faith and his work in the church today. Now serving as an Episcopal priest in Brooklyn, NY, Durango looks back on his experience with Bread+Belonging as the most formative part of his college years. It gave him a community of supportive relationships where his faith was taken seriously and he was able to explore deep questions of identity, vocation, and theology that remain at the center of his life and work.