Would you turn down a chance to work with Tim Keller? For many pastors, working with the founding and senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City would be a dream job. But not for Abraham Cho. When he first was asked to consider joining the staff, he turned it down. But a year later, when a similar opportunity presented itself, Cho joined Redeemer as an assistant pastor and moved his family to the city.
But Cho’s story didn’t end there. As Tim Keller began to prepare for his retirement, Cho became the senior pastor of Redeemer East Side, where he continues to pastor today.
This article is a partial transcript of an interview conducted by Richard Lee with Cho on the podcast, “The Pursuit with Richard Lee”. Richard Lee currently works with International Justice Mission as the Global Director of Public Engagement, and he has a 20-year career in pastoral ministry. In this episode, Lee interviewed Cho to talk about his call to ministry, the struggles and joys of being an Asian American, and his journey to and at Redeemer.
We encourage you to check out the entire podcast episode here, as we are publishing just snippets of their great conversation. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length.
Abraham Cho’s Childhood
Cho grew up as the child of Korean immigrants, but his journey differed from many in that his father was a professor at several American universities. This colored his experience as he saw firsthand the pressure to assimilate to American culture.
Richard Lee: What was it like growing up in America? Many immigrants and second-generation Korean Americans don’t grow up with parents who are in academia.
Abraham Cho: In my experience growing up, my parents didn’t know the American educational system. We had to teach them and say, “This is how it works.” But your father’s in the system. How was that?
Abraham Cho: He definitely understood the system, and we had a clear path that he wanted us to take. One thing that I do remember about his struggles in the academic world was that he was very self-conscious about the fact that he was the only Korean immigrant in the business schools where he taught. That was probably why he worked so hard at his English, but he was even very careful about the foods we ate because he didn’t want to be smelling like Korean food every time he went to the office.
There was a lot of cultural assimilation because he felt the need to be able to fit in and thrive in this academic environment. It raised questions [in me] about what do we do with the Korean American identity in this predominantly white context. That was probably the most unique element to that because he was right in the middle of that very educated world, wrestling with what it means to be a Korean and Korean American in that context.
Abraham Cho’s Ministry Journey
During college, Cho felt called to pastoral ministry, and he went straight into seminary after graduating. He also met his future wife, and they got married. After receiving his M.Div, Cho became the pastor at Citylife Presbyterian Church in Boston.
Richard Lee: How did you end up in New York City?
Abraham Cho: My time at Citylife [Presbyterian Church] was the first time that I’d ever done ministry outside of a Korean American context. I was really being stretched to say, “Are you going to be able to pastor someone who’s older than you and who is white?” And so I had to be working through that ethnic identity stuff and working through what it means to be in a cross-cultural situation. A lot of that was already beginning at Citylife.
But we never thought in a million years that we would ever go to New York. We would say things like, “We would love to visit New York from time to time, but we would never want to live there.” And on top of that, we had had our first child, who was a year old. Not only would we never go to New York City to live, we certainly wouldn’t raise a family in New York City. It was the last thing on our mind.
Then I got a phone call from a friend of mine who said, “Hey, we’re looking for an assistant pastor. I thought you might be a good fit. Would you be interested?”
We actually came down for interviews and made some connections. After all of that, we came to the conclusion that this was not the right thing. So we actually said no the first time around. I still remember hanging up the phone, looking at my wife, and I’m like, “We just said no to Redeemer. Does that happen?”
But God was really using that to prepare us to even consider this as a possibility. And so about a year later, I got another call because another pastoral role has opened up: “Would you consider this time around?” And at this point, my wife and I thought, “Look, lightning doesn’t strike twice.” Clearly, there’s more here for us to consider as far as God guiding us than maybe we initially wanted to admit.
The second time around, we did start to get pretty serious about it. Now we were pregnant with our second child. So we specifically asked to spend an afternoon with a family that was raising kids in the city. And I think just in that intervening year, God had been preparing us to be open to this. So that second time around that was when we accepted the role.
My daughter was a year and a half and my wife was eight months pregnant with baby number two. The very first things we did was look for an apartment in New York City and find an OB — those were number one and number 2. Those first years at Redeemer was a new job, new church, new city, new baby, all stacked on top of each other. So it was a big blur. It was probably way more than what we ought to have taken on, but God was still good.
Ministering as an Asian American Pastor
Richard Lee: You had mentioned earlier about needing to sort of prove to yourself that you could minister to someone who is older, and someone who is white. Coming to Redeemer, how have you sort of grown in that understanding?
Abraham Cho: I would say that’s one of the main areas God had to grow me in the first few years that I was at Redeemer. In a lot of ways, both explicitly and implicitly, growing up a minority in America, there are many ways in which you end up feeling inferior because of your ethnic background.
Whiteness is normalized and whiteness is the gold standard. If you go back to my father’s vision for cultural assimilation, it was us learni
ng to adjust to a white reality, and the skill to which we are able to do that would determine our success. And so, there’s a sense in which there’s an aura about white culture and the white-dominant culture that would make you feel insecure, ashamed, uncertain, and self-doubting because of the fact that you were an ethnic minority. There was a very real intimidation factor that went into it.
One of the ways that I try to very succinctly describe this to people is this: Before my ministry here at Redeemer, the only time I ever sat across from a middle-aged white man was when I had done something very, very wrong. There was no other situation in my entire life growing up where that would happen, apart from that kind of conduct where there’s something wrong that brought me into the principal’s office.
I still remember one of the first lunches that I had with 40 community group leaders [at Redeemer]. One of the very first appointments was with a middle-aged white man who was fairly high up in one of the major banks here in New York City. Somehow, I had to be his pastor, and it was just so jarring for me. I was nervous. I didn’t know what this person thought of me, I didn’t know what the expectations of me were, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to behave. I felt like I was going in blind, and I remember saying, “Okay, I’m just gonna have lunch with this person and see what happens.”
But that was a really big adjustment. Part of what happened was wrestling through my own ethnic identity theologically. I began to realize my ethnic background was not a liability, per se, but it was actually a very important asset that God had given me to steward. This is not to say that simply because I was a minority that somehow I was superior to people who are of the white-dominant culture, but it merely was to say that there was something unique about my experiences, and my perspective — the very things that I thought of as liabilities were actually Kingdom assets, if I could just allow myself to embrace who God had made me to be.
It took me years of really wrestling through that to say, “Is there really something that I had, because of my ethnic background that my white brothers and sisters actually need from me?” Wrestling with those kinds of questions is ultimately what led me to say, “This is who I am and it is an asset to ministry. Am I going to be able to steward it well, for the good of others?”
The reality is I’m probably still working through it now in inheriting this role, where I’m now running one of the Redeemer churches. There’s a lot of that stuff that continues to rattle around the back of my head, “Am I doing the right things? What are people expecting of me or my instincts?”
Transition to Lead Pastor
Richard Lee: Your transition to the lead pastor role of East Side preceded Tim Keller’s retirement by a few years. Was that path of succession seen down the road? Also, was your assumption of the lead pastor role a no-brainer for you?
Abraham Cho: We definitely wanted to create an overlap where Tim would be able to formally and informally pass the mantle on to the next generation of leaders. As far as my stepping into the lead pastor role, it was anything but a clear decision for me.
Three or four years leading up to that decision, I actually had experienced pretty severe ministry burnout and had been diagnosed with depression. So during those years, there were long stretches where I really questioned my call to ministry. I said to myself that if I had developed any other marketable skills, I would be out of ministry today.
For about 4-5 years, it was a really, really hard stretch. I was put on medications, which I’m still on today for depression. I started seeing a counselor very regularly. What the burnout basically boiled to was that [I felt] I needed to be the best pastor people have ever had. You know Redeemer is a big church, and a lot of people feel like they don’t really know their pastors. So I had to be the one pastor that was really personal and who was accessible.
For the first five years here, I basically was just killing myself trying to exceed people’s expectations on those fronts. But Redeemer was able to give me some time off just to sort through some of these things. And for two years or so it was kind of a slow return to health where I was able to set new boundaries and prioritize my own personal health spiritually, emotionally, and physically. I was able to find a much better balance between life and ministry. And so when the question about this East Side, lead pastor role came up, I was still just coming out of that depression.
So not even clearly out of the woods yet. And then they offered you this position.
Definitely not. I was still feeling very fragile and feeling like I had come to a new, healthier equilibrium, but also feeling like at any moment I could go spiraling back down.
And they were like, “Do you want to take over for Tim Keller?”
*Laughs* That’s right. And so Tim reached out right around that time, and I told him straight: “Tim, I think that would be the worst decision in the world for me. I think it would be the worst decision in the world for East Side. They need stability, they need somebody who’s going to be there for a good stretch of time and given where I am now, I just think that’s a terrible idea.”
What did he say?
Somehow he talked me into — “Don’t say, ‘No,’ just yet.” So I said, “Okay, I won’t say ‘No.’ I’m not going to preempt. But, boy, if I had to put numbers on it, it’s like 99% “No.”
I went through the entire process, and I felt this way right up to my decision point. I still remember that I had a deadline for a Wednesday, and I had to decide by this date. That Monday morning [before], I thought, “Yep, this ain’t happening. It’s gonna be a ‘No.’” The whole time, my wife and I had been praying, “Lord, we don’t want to do this. We don’t think this is the right thing. But if this is what you’re asking us to do, we need you to make it clear. And if you make it clear, we will trust you and we will do it.”
And right up until that Monday morning, I was like, “Nope, nothing is clear. I don’t think this was the right thing.” Then that afternoon, I went into a counseling session with my counselor, and I think if you were to talk to him, he wouldn’t know exactly what happened there either. But there was something about that counseling session where all the themes that I had been exploring for months and months leading up to that somehow just pulled together. Suddenly, I felt like I understood my depression and understood some of the roots of it. And therefore, I understood how to identify it and prevent it. It just kind of pulled together in a way that felt miraculous.
So I walked out of that session, and immediately the first thing I did was I called my wife, and her response was, “Well, we’ve been asking God to make it clear, haven’t we? And that seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah. 11th hour.”
For all that to come together, for me to understand my depression for the first time, I felt like I could manage it. Maybe it’s not going to go away and not going to solve it or cure it,
but at least know well enough to be able to manage it. And so by the time Wednesday came around, I think everybody was utterly shocked that I said, “Yes,” at all.
But it goes back to the kindness of God to me in ways that I certainly don’t deserve. There are just those times where he makes things so clear. I’m almost four years into the role, and it has been one of the hardest leadership roles that I’ve had to step into, far beyond my sense of what I can accomplish. As hard as it’s been, I think one of the things that has helped us to continue on and just to keep showing up to be faithful has been that God made it really clear that this is what God is asking us to do right now.
For more on Pastor Abe Cho’s childhood, ministry experience, and the future of his church, check out The Pursuit with Richard Lee’s episode on Abraham Cho here.
Special thanks to Richard Lee for providing the podcast. Subscribe to his podcast here.