About Maria Garriott
author, Speaker & coach
Maria Garriott worked as a school bus driver in high school, a park ranger in college, and in several other interesting roles since then. Shortly after her college graduation, she and her husband Craig moved into urban Baltimore in 1981 to plant Faith Christian Fellowship, a multiethnic, socio-economically diverse church, where they served until 2018.
She has a B.A. in English and speaks her native language fluently most of the time. She also has a M.S in Writing and worked in urban education reform at the Johns Hopkins University for 20 years.
In 2018, Maria joined her husband and Rev. Stan Long to start Baltimore Antioch Leadership Movement (BALM) to build cross-cultural disciple-making leaders for church planting and renewal. She is a certified coach and network leader for Parakaleo, a global ministry to church planting women. She is the author of A Thousand Resurrections, a memoir of urban church planting, and many other articles and essays.
The Garriotts have five adult children and seven grandchildren. If Maria is not at her desk, in her kitchen, on a nature walk, or with her family and friends, she’s curled up somewhere reading….possibly with a square of dark chocolate .