Juan Carlos La Puente was invited by newly elected Bishop Laurie Larson Caesar on August 1, 2019 to join the Oregon Synod Bishop’s Office Executive Staff. Currently, his role as bishop’s associate for strategy and mission bridges spirituality, leadership, congregational vitality and collaboration among ministries to shape and implement the Oregon Synod`s strategic direction.
Since 2014, La Puente has accompanied lay and ordained leaders across Oregon in developing healthy faith communities, providing spiritual lenses to nurture community organizing and co-creating leadership development and spiritual growth opportunities. Much of his work has focused on the work of collective theology, discernment, transformation and ritual. His work has encompassed ecumenical efforts, including reckoning with racism, transformational transitions, developing congregational capacity and racial repair, as well as helping ministries improve their collaboration on these efforts. Juan Carlos has been journeying with two grassroots and international networks that he helped foster from their inception — Spiritual and Theological Mutual Accompaniment and Re-existing: The Spirit Crossing Peripheries — which explore new ways of walking together across nations, languages, cultures and traditions at the intersection of social change and spiritual life.
Born in Peru, Juan Carlos previously held senior leadership roles in prominent international organizations. As executive director of Amnesty International in Peru in the early 2010’s, he guided the organization through significant structural growth, positioning it to influence national policies on Indigenous consultation, torture prevention, and protections against enforced disappearance. In Colombia, he directed Peace Brigades International and served as advocacy director for Oxfam Great Britain, supporting human rights defenders and Afro-descendant communities. Earlier, after a career in the financial sector, in 1996 he joined the Dominican Friars, a religious Order of Preachers, and lived for several years in contemplative communities in Latin America. He was ordained a priest in 2002, and for almost three years served as justice and peace promoter across South America.
Juan Carlos holds a master’s degree in theology with a focus on Latin American liberation theologies, a Master of Business Administration degree, and a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering. He is the author of works on spirituality, theology, and social transformation, most recently: Mutual Accompaniment in the Divine Ruah: On Discernment and Spirituality in Uncertain Times (2023); Hospitality and Friendship: Gleams of Collective Vocation (2022); Acts of Resistance: Messianic Force of Divine Anarchy (2020).
One of his favorite Bible verses is John 15:15,
“I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what their master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all the things that I heard from ABBA, I have made known to you.”
Juan Carlos finds his heart full when he has the chance to cook, savor a glass of coffee or wine, and engage in a good conversation with friends, mainly about unlearning in life and the traps or patterns we didn’t see in time; laughter comes easily that way.
