The SOLA Network is pleased to present an interview with Mitchel Lee, pastor at Grace Community Church, a multiethnic church in Fulton, Maryland. He is a friend of the SOLA Network and the author of a new book, Even If: Trusting God When Life Disappoints, Overwhelms, or Just Doesn’t Make Sense. Read SOLA Network’s review of Even If here.
In his book, Lee examines suffering, including his own, through the lens of the life-and-death decision of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to trust God and face the fiery furnace rather than bow down to the image of a pagan king. He concludes that trusting in God’s presence despite and through life’s sufferings will lead to a true and intimate relationship with God in which we acknowledge his glory.
SOLA Editorial Board member Moses Lee interviewed Mitchel Lee over Zoom about his book, as well as how he approached the book as an Asian American Christian. Watch their conversation, as well as read a transcript, below.
Editor’s Note: Below is a transcript of their conversation. It has been lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the audio here.
Moses Lee: Welcome to the SOLA Network. My name is Moses, and I serve on the SOLA Editorial Team. Today I have the great privilege to introduce you to today’s guest. He’s no stranger to SOLA, but here’s a brief introduction.
Mitchel Lee has been serving as the lead pastor of Grace Community Church since fall 2016. His formal theological education started in South Korea, followed by North Carolina for seminary, then to Chicago for further grad school. He’s married to Sarah, and they have five kids together from ages 4-14.
But today, we’re here to talk about Mitchel’s first book, Even If, which is due to be released in mid-August. So congratulations on your book. Even If!
Mitchell, we’re so honored to have you here. Can you just give us a brief overview of the book and what it’s about?
Mitchel Lee: Thanks, Moses. It’s fun to be able to talk about the book with a friend, and I’m just really excited about the things God’s doing in your life and your ministry as well.
This Even If book has a message that God has been writing in my heart for about 19 years. Like most things, God birthed this thing out of great pain, great disappointment, and I would even say disillusionment and a place of that wilderness where I thought I was done ministry-wise. I had to come to grips with who I believed God to be, even when my life didn’t really show it.
What I mean by that is the message of Even If comes out of Daniel 3. It’s this short encounter and exchange between Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and Nebuchadnezzar. You probably all know the story. Nebuchadnezzar gets this counsel that he should build a big statue, play a song, and everybody in the land who listens should bow down to it. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow. The uncomfortable and awkward situation is that they are some of Nebuchadnezzar’s royal advisors.
So he has this confrontation, he lights up a furnace, and he says, “If you will not bow to me, then I’m going to throw you in this furnace.” And their response is so crucial and yet so curious. They say two things in their response. They say first, “We don’t even really need to answer you in this matter,” to Nebuchadnezzar when he is the most powerful person on the planet at this time.
They said, “We don’t even need to answer you. But here’s our answer. Our God can save us from the fire.” And then this is where the message comes out: “But even if he doesn’t, we will not worship you or any other God.”
That right there, that little turn, that confidence in God’s goodness with the resolve to worship Him when that goodness doesn’t look maybe the way that they want it to look in their lives—that is the essence of the Even If message. It’s a declaration, so to speak, when life doesn’t go the way you want it to, when it’s disappointing, when it’s a weird turn, or when it’s unexplainable. Will you worship God in the midst of that? That’s what I really tried to unpack in the book.
Moses Lee: That’s something that all of us can relate to and probably have a hard time processing on our own. You write about the time early on in your ministry when you were let go from two churches. How did that affect you? And how did you determine to keep pursuing your pastoral calling?
Mitchel Lee: As I’ve reflected on it over almost 20 years of what that wilderness period was, I really thought I was done. I had gotten fired from my first church about a month before I graduated from seminary, and this is a church that was my home church for more than 20 years.
Shortly thereafter, I was fired from another one [because] I was in a very unhealthy state. I should not have jumped into that ministry. They were just lovely, wonderful people. But I was not in a healthy spot. And when I got fired from that second one, I really thought I was done.
When we face disappointment, there’s no shortage of explanations that we will be offered by other people or that we will come to ourselves. I must have done something [wrong]; I did something to disqualify myself. God’s passed me by; he’s no longer fit for ministry. I really thought I was done.
In fact, I ended up managing my mom’s deli for about a year and a half in that wilderness, thinking to myself—my pride. It must have been in my pride and my arrogance: That’s the reason why God has cast me out of this. I really believed that was it and that was the end of it because the circumstances didn’t match up.
It was at that time when I picked up this little book by Richard Sibbes, called The Bruised Reed, which is based on his meditations around Isaiah 42— “a bruised reed, he will not break; a smoldering wick, he will not extinguish.” It’s when I began to see: Wait a second. Who is God really? When I say God is good, what do I mean by that? Even if that goodness doesn’t look the way that I think it should in my life, my ministry or my work, will I continue to worship Him?
Man, it changed it. It changed so much of the way I viewed pastoral ministry and it continues to do so in a couple of ways. Number one: For so much of pastoral ministry, we start with affirmation—you’re affirmed. Your ordination is a matter of affirmation: you know these things, you have the skill, you have the character. So much of that is all affirmations.
But then we all face these periods in our ministries where it doesn’t work the way we want—a relationship falls out; or we’re trying the best we can, but we feel like we can’t win or the results aren’t coming; or the success that we’re told and promised isn’t happening—even though we’re trying to be obedient to the Lord. How do we understand God’s goodness in there?
That wilderness period made me realize that so much of my trust in God was based on him doing what I wanted him to do. When I found myself in the wilderness, totally exposed, no longer serving at a church, I thought “Where’s my identity really going to lie? Can I worship this God?”
I was facing this furnace, and it was one of the most trembling declarations I had to make: that even if God never allowed me to be back in a church leading as a pastor, I would continue to worship him, I would continue to believe his gospel, and I would continue to believe that Jesus was enough. That declaration really set the trajectory for my ministry and for future decisions about where I would live or what kind of church I would serve in. All this released me to freedom—that I could worship God and leave the results and success or lack thereof to him.
Moses Lee: That got me thinking a lot about myself as a church planter. As an East Asian church planter, the scariest thing about East Asian church plants is failure and the shame that comes from failing. It doesn’t even have to be a moral failure but the fact that you closed shop. It’s a terrifying prospect that I definitely had to wrestle through, and I had to come to peace with that possibility that I could fail and I need to be okay with failing. But it’s hard. You think you’re over it, and then that temptation comes back.
Mitchel Lee: Totally. This “even if” declaration isn’t just a one time, “Hey, I made the declaration.” I try to use the illustration that it’s an “even if” tapestry that God writes through your life one thread at a time.
So just when you think, “Okay, I’ve got this ‘even if’ resolve now,” then the next support raising cycle comes. Now you think, “Wait a second. I’ve got to fight for people’s approval; I’ve got to prove to them that this endeavor is justifiable.” It’s so difficult that we as ministers of the gospel have to operate sometimes by proving our existence or proving that we’re worth the investment.
We can get locked into what I call the “counter ifs.” So it’s not “even if,” but we live by other things like conditionals such as “only if.” Only if God will do this will I worship him. Only if we have a successful launch or only if my kid grows up to be a certain thing.
The most subtle thing about the “only if” is that nobody comes to God with a strong condition right off the bat. It starts with a very sincere desire: If God would do, if God would heal, if God would provide, if God would move. Suddenly that desire turns into an expectation, becomes a need, and then becomes this demand of a condition—only if, God, you do this. Sometimes that rules our hearts.
Or, as I’ve been reflecting more on this, our regrets rule our hearts. So instead of an “even if,” we live an “if only” kind of life where we’re locked in the past. You can probably imagine this: Remember those golden ages? Those golden periods of ministry? It was so sweet, right? Then we face a new endeavor, and we can say, “Man, if only it was like that, if only I could go back. If only I could go back to that place where I was more passionate, I had more energy, I had more charisma, if only!” We can lock ourselves in this kind of nostalgic past.
Or maybe for some listening to this, you’re locked in a broken past where you have your regrets, the mistakes you’ve made, the shame you live in. And you say, “If only I can make up for that, then then God will be pleased with me.” So there’s kind of those kind of regrets as well.
But actually the most dangerous type of regret is actually the fantasy regret. John Bloom writes about this on a blog post on Desiring God, where he talks about these regrets that you can know because you use words like “I should” “by now” I should have a church that is x amount of people by now or I should be over that sin by now. I should, I should, I should. We’re constantly comparing ourselves with this life that we should be living.
Maybe there’s some people listening right now who are single and you’re like, “I should be married by now.” Your parents remind you of that, your circles remind you of that, your friends are all getting married or having kids. You think, “I should be, I should be, I should be.” We can lock ourselves in those regrets, and they keep us from moving forward.
So then you’ve got your “only ifs” and “if onlys,” and the third is the “what ifs”—your contingency plans. What if this doesn’t go [the way we want]? It’s our attempts to control and force the outcome that we want.
In my book, I talk about how an “even if” declaration, rooted in the Gospel, actually allows us to address each of these in honest and authentic ways. It’s not casting it aside but naming what the desire is and acknowledging the pain of not seeing that desire come to be. But it’s also renewing and resolving to trust God—that He is good and that what he’ll bring about might be different than what I want, but he’ll bring about something for His glory and my good.
Moses Lee: That’s good, especially because a lot of people are coming out of this pandemic with a lot of regrets and fears. There’s a lot of “what if this happened” and questions about how to move forward. As people are thinking about next steps in their career, education, or family, what encouragement would you offer to those people who are anxious about what’s next? To those who are afraid of failure, especially in light of this pandemic season?
Mitchel Lee: This might sound so elementary, but one of the core practices of living an “even if” kind of faith is to remember, remember, remember. I’ve heard it said that the most repeated command in the scriptures is, “Do not fear” or “Be strong and courageous”—that sort of thing. But if you increase the semantic range, the command to remember or “do not forget” appears more in the Scriptures. God is very intent that we remember who he is and what he has done.
You see it echoed throughout the entire Old Testament. God is so intent that we should remember that he established feasts. Because he knows that we’re prone to forget, he attaches food to them and makes it an occasion and says, “This is what I want you to remember.” We’re losing very quickly the ability to remember.
As I was writing, I stumbled upon the difference between remembering and recalling. Recalling is about stringing events together. It’s what Facebook does for us. It gives us the timeline. Just as a note: How many times have you been surprised when Facebook shares a memory with you and you think, “I totally forgot about that.” Right. But the significance of why that touches you isn’t just, “I went there” or “We had that.” You remember what happened to people. The significance of that event is what causes you to go, “Oh, yeah.” That’s what I call remembering. We need to remember who God is and what he has done.
As you’re coming out of the pandemic, there’s still so much uncertainty. That uncertainty has always been there, honestly. It just took a pandemic to wake us up to it. We’ve got to recover the practice of remembering, remembering, remembering who God is and how God has been faithful and good to me.
If that data is too short or too foggy in your mind, this is where the historical data of the Scriptures is so helpful to us. Right now in my Bible reading, I’m reading 1-2 Kings and 1-2 Chronicles in step with each other and recounting God’s faithfulness in spite of their faithlessness. It’s doing something in me as I’m remembering, “God did that to them for them.”
I got to think about that for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Let’s just take it out of a Bible story for a moment. If we just think about their human situation, they’re saying, “Our God can deliver us from the fire, and even if he doesn’t, we’re not worshiping anyone else.” If you look at their life experience with God, we think, “What? How could they really say that?”
These guys were youth growing up in Jerusalem. Sure they hear the prophecy of Jeremiah. But they’re also hearing all these other false prophets saying, “Don’t listen to Jeremiah. He doesn’t know he’s talking about,” and then God hands the city over [to Babylon]. Then these three young men are literally trafficked to Babylon, given new names, acculturated, assimilated, and then they’re saying before this king who caused it all, “Our God can save us.” Like what? From their own personal experience, what were they looking to in order to say that?
Maybe they had some things where they could say it. But maybe they were also looking a little bit broader. Maybe they were looking at the way that God delivered them from the Assyrians before. Maybe they were looking at the way that God delivered their people from Egypt way before that. There’s a greater body of data.
At this moment in history, we have God’s revelation of understanding the cross, the gospel, all that Jesus has done for us, and that nothing can separate us from his love. We have this immense body of data to look at and say, “It’s not good right now, but God has been so good.”
There’s a lady in my church in her late 50s. Her whole life she has suffered physically. Yet she can say, “My savior loves me.” That remembering is my encouragement.
You’re coming out of a pandemic, and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do. You’re feeling a little fear or you’re anxious about kids going back to school—remember God’s goodness, remember his goodness to you.
I’ll add this little piece. This has been a new bit of learning since the book came out, but I just took this class on traditions of prayer. We spent a day in the class talking about night prayer or the prayer of examen from Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius offers this examen, and it’s so interesting.
It starts with recollection or recalling God’s presence with you, and then giving thanks for that. Then it goes to remembering the things of the day and how God’s presence was with you or how you ignored that presence. Then it leads to this resolve.
I thought, “That’s the formula!” That is the “even if” life summed up in this ancient practice of recalling, giving thanks, remembering, and then resolving, “I’m going to worship you.” That’s the encouragement I would give. I know that doesn’t solve and answer every life situation. But I think it’s a very important start.
Moses Lee: It’s like remembering is all rooted in the fact that God is unchanging and immutable. That is the basis for which we can say that he still continues to be the same God as He was in Scripture.
Related to my previous question about the pandemic, I know it’s been very hard for minorities in our country for the past two years. Asian Americans have suffered in different ways in more recent months with the rise of anti-Asian racism. It’s been difficult for a lot of Asian Americans to navigate the space of multiethnic contexts. I know you’ve been pastoring a multiethnic church for quite some time now. As a minority in a majority White space, I’m sure you have your own stories of challenges and the different ways that God has stretched you. How has that experience impacted the way you’re writing? With your culture and your heritage, how has that impacted the way you pastor, ministry, and speak into cultural issues today?
In the writing and the pastoring in my context, I have become okay and even proud of our immigrant heritage, not just in a way that flaunts it. I love this about the musical Hamilton—“immigrants, we get the job done”—and they throw these lines in there. It’s not so much that it’s a pride thing, but the immigrant journey has something to contribute for the health of the overall church. I don’t mean just along the lines of race—I mean for the life of the church.
I was writing, and somebody who was reviewing the book for me, they noticed that. I didn’t even notice it because this is actually just who I am. Whether you’re a majority or whether you’re a minority, you can actually learn something from this experience.
I realized that much of the immigrant church was driven by this “even if” faith without the words. We’re gonna suffer. We’re going to face setbacks. But we’re going to continue to worship God. Now it’s not always as noble as that. Let’s be honest, right? There’s always the underside of all of that, but I just see the beauty of that.
My encouragement to other Asian Americans, no matter what space you’re in—because let’s also not make multiethnic space, something more glorious and glamorous than ethnic churches—is that we have something to contribute beyond race. We have something to contribute about the way that we think about ecclesiology, pastoral theology, and how a pastor relates to a congregation.
That’s what I’m hoping “Even if” will demonstrate on a larger scale—that Asian American pastors have more to say to the church overall than just matters of race. I don’t want to minimize racism. That’s a hugely important thing. But I don’t want Asian American pastors to think that the only thing that we’re good for in the church is to speak about race.
I think we’ve got lots of things to say about generational dynamics, which is something I know that you’ve been observing and really commenting on as well. We’ve got things to say there. We’ve got things to say about how the church can run and work and how to engage with suffering—a theology of suffering—which I think our majority church is not really good at. They’re not really good at grasping that. That would be my encouragement.
Moses Lee: You’re absolutely right. Sometimes people of color can feel like we can only speak into one particular issue as it comes to our immigrant or or minority experience. But there’s so much more we can say I think your book embodies that.
It’s amazing to see an Asian American do that, where you’re speaking into just broader issues that the American church faces and not just on race. It’s something to celebrate, and it’s definitely a win for all of us. I’m so happy that you wrote this book, and I’m just really excited to learn from your brother.
Mitchell Lee: Thanks, man. I’m super grateful for it. You know, I got the hard copy right about when the publisher sent it to you. And it was always a dream in the back of my mind like 15 years ago to write down this message for someone else. I never really thought I would have the bandwidth or the space or the ability to do it.
Each step was just a step of obedience, and each step was a step of “even if.” When I wrote the proposal and we sent it out to 6-7 publishers, my safety publisher declined. I thought, “Oh man.” There was a moment of “even if there” where I thought, “Okay, Lord, I’ve been obedient. You are good. And even if I have to sell this book in the back of my trunk in a parking lot at Walmart, I’m going to worship you. I’ll do it; I’ll be obedient to you.”
Let me just add that the “even if” won’t just help you endure suffering when life doesn’t make sense. If we can embrace an “even if” kind of faith where we worship God and it’s not contingent upon the circumstances or what’s in it for me, it will allow us—I believe and I’m praying—that it will release churches and Christians to take the next steps of risky faith. I talked about risk in the book, and not all risk is the same, but risky faith to attempt things.
Growing up I was always asked about passion: “If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you attempt to do?” You’ve heard that leadership question. But I think that’s actually the wrong question. It should be: Even with the possibility of failure, what’s so important that you have to try it anyway? Passion is not about zeal. It’s about what you’re willing to suffer for and what you’re willing to carry a cross for.
That’s what I’m praying for—that “even if” will not just be a comforting message, but it’ll be a challenging one for those who are stuck in fear or paralyzed. That you can say, “Even if, God, I’m going to worship you, because you’re worthy of this. We feel like you’re calling us to take the step, so we’re going to take that step and leave the results to you. And if it doesn’t go the way we hoped it would, we’re still going to worship you.” Can you just imagine what that would do? What we would attempt? That’s what I pray would happen.
Moses Lee: A very fitting way to end this conversation. Thank you for that takeaway from your book. Once again, I want to congratulate you so much on this book, and we just can’t wait to get this in people’s hands. I hope we can do this again, sometime. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
Mitchel Lee: And I’d love to connect. I pride myself on trying to be accessible. So the easiest way to connect is to go to mitchellee.com. There’s a connect form there, and I take that very seriously. I would love to connect and offer any encouragement or further insights. Thanks for the opportunity, Moses.
Read a chapter of Even If for free! Click here.