SOLA Network had the privilege of speaking to Pastor Owen Y. Lee, senior pastor of Christ Central Presbyterian Church in Centreville, VA. He is also a SOLA Council member.
Owen Lee spoke to Aaron Lee, social media manager at the SOLA Network. They discussed the importance of ethnic-specific ministries and how to encourage pastors who serve at immigrant churches.
Their conversation also included:
- How Asian American pastors should seek leadership roles
- Being thankful for immigrant churches that came before us
- Ways in which ethnic-specific churches excel
We hope you are blessed and challenged by their conversation.
Watch the interview on YouTube, listen to the audio on Podcasts, or read the transcript below. Please note the transcript has only been lightly edited and may contain spelling or grammatical errors.
Aaron Lee: Many espouse the need for multicultural ministry, but do you see the need for ethnic-specific ministries also? Can you explain why?
Owen Y. Lee: That’s a great question. I think every church, whether its majority, like white majority, black or multi ethnic or whatever it is, every church has, I think different opportunities, Kingdom opportunities, and I think, particularly the Asian American church has some opportunities that maybe other churches don’t. And I would say, at least four.
The first is, the Asian American church has the opportunity to provide a place where Asian American Christians can feel at home, right. So as I say, as Asian Americans growing up here, we have always felt like we’re minorities in someone else’s majority culture, right, Monday through Friday, when majority white culture whether at school or at work, and we know we don’t belong, we know we’re at a place we know. We feel like a minority. Right. And I think that’s a common experience for all minorities. But I think for Asian Americans even went like on the weekends when they go to their Asian American church. Or maybe for me, I went to a Korean American church at both a Korean speaking ministry and an English speaking ministry. Even in my church space, I felt like a minority because even in those spaces, the majority culture is the first generation Korean speaking Korean so you know what I mean? So they’re the ones that the senior pastor and the elders and, and they determine how things are done with the dominant languages and all of that. And so people like me, who are second generation English speaking Korean Americans that can’t speak Korean very well, even in that space, I feel like a minority in someone else’s majority culture. My parents feel like they belong. But not me. Right.
And I think churches like ours, which is like, English speaking Asian American churches, we have the opportunity to provide a place where people like me can feel like we belong, that we’re at home, right for the first time. So I hear this a lot at my church, when you have casual conversations, or membership interviews, I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, Pastor Owen, for the first time, I feel like I’m at home. And, and at first, when I heard that, like, Oh, that’s great, because you are at home, you know that, that’s awesome. But I would hear it over and over again. And I think there’s something here, and I would have some follow up conversations with some more thoughtful and articulate people. And I think what they began to share was, I put it this way, for the first time, they get to be a part of majority culture. And they’ve never experienced that before. Because they’ve always been minorities in someone else’s majority culture. And now for the first time, they’re in a room full of people that look like them. They’re, they’re part of the numerical majority. They don’t stick out. But more than that, I think it’s more than just a numerical majority. It’s about power and position.
And so for the first time, you look at a senior pastor, and he looks like you. You look at the elders, they look like you. And you begin to now see, wow, I think this is a place where I can lay down roots and raise my family and maybe even begin to serve.
These are folks, for example, if they went to they say, a majority white shirt, they can never envision that there might be an elder here. Or if they went to a Korean speaking church, because they can’t speak Korean, they would never see themselves as you know, jang-nong-nim. And yet for the first time that, Hey, someone that looks like me, that can’t speak Korean is they’re in significant positions of leadership. And their imagination gets brought in because they I can, this feels like home for the first time they feel like they fit in, in a way that they’ve never fit in before. And so I think the Asian American church has the opportunity to write a place where Asian American Christians can feel at home.
Another opportunity is contextualized ministry to Asian Americans. And as we all know, in the past several years, we’ve seen the rise of anti Asian racism, hatred and violence and, and Asian Americans like in our day are now being traumatized by racist encounters. Right? And who’s going to minister to them? Right. And, and it’s, I think we have the opportunity to pastorally address unique challenges and struggles that Asian Americans are going through.
And so like, for example, in the context of our church, we’re able to hold a night of lament, where Asian Americans who can come together and express their anxiety, their fears, their anger, their rage, their confusion, why is this happening? And for us to be able to apply the gospel to hurting people in a very contextualized way, right? And I think we have the opportunity to minister to Asian Americans that may be majority of white culture, churches or multi ethnic churches may not be equipped to do so. So I think that’s an opportunity for us.
Another opportunity I talked about as our leadership development and leadership opportunity.
At our church, all of our key visible leaders are Asian Americans or Korean American, and they’re amazing leaders. Right? But sometimes I wonder what they have these kinds of opportunities to lead if they were at a majority white church or even a multi ethnic church or, or KM church, right? Probably not. And yet, they’re amazing leaders.
And it’s, I think we give, so I think you guys know this, I see this, at our church all the time. Korean Americans who, in their workplaces are considered quiet, submissive, you know, they never seem to want Why so quiet at work. And yet, when they come to church, something flips and they’re the most loud, gregarious, amiable people, you know, it’s just like, they just don’t have the freedom for that side of their personality to come out in the workplace, for whatever reason, and they’re more fully alive, socially, at church.
And I think for a lot of our people, they like who they are, when they’re at church better than who they are, when they’re at work. Now, they’re the same people. But I think different contexts allows different sides of our personality, and maybe even our temperament to come out. And I, it just bothers me when people say, Oh, you Asians are just so quiet. You’re great helpers, but you’re not great leaders. No, we’re just not in the context where we’re given the opportunity to lead and we have amazing leaders in our church. But unfortunately, might not be seen as leaders in other contexts, but we see them as leaders, and they flourish as leaders at our church.
And I also talked about in terms of kind of the opportunity for lead senior pastors, right? Still, I think, in our day and age, it’s really hard to see an Asian American pastor be tagged as a, as a senior pastor in non-Asian majority church context, right? So usually, obviously, in a majority, white church, is usually gonna be a white guy, and majority black church is gonna be a black guy, whatever it is. And even the multi ethnic spaces, it’s usually going to be a white lead pastor with a supporting cast of assistant, an Asian American pastor, a black pastor, right? And I feel like, where are our gifted lead Pastor pastors? Where are they going to be able to use their gifts to serve the church, and I think the Asian American church has the opportunity to give them those opportunities to use their gifts to serve Christ in the Asian American church.
And then lastly, I would say, I think, just for effective mission to Asian Americans. Not going to spend too much time here. But I think, hopefully this is not a controversial statement, right? Asian American churches tend to be more effective at reaching other Asian Americans that are either dechurched or unchurched, right? It is, I’m not saying that they’re the only people we can reach. But we’re probably the best at reaching other Asian Americans. And vice versa, white majority churches are probably more equipped to reach other white people. And that’s not a bad thing.
It just tells me that we need all sorts of churches, because different churches reach different types of people. And I thank God that Jesus brings people into his pan-national church kingdom through different churches, right? We don’t all there are many different doorways into the kingdom. And each church is a doorway. And I think the more doorways we have, the more people can come into the kingdom. So I think the Asian American church has a unique opportunity to reach dechurched and unchurched Asian Americans with the gospel. And that’s a good thing.
Aaron Lee: Well said. Okay, let’s go. I heard a lot of talk about leadership in that. I know we can talk about KALI. But I want to know, like, what, how did you get interested in that in that leadership component? Like, what was it for you that said, you know, what we need leaders to be seen, was it something that happened at a young age? Were you like, oh, I want to aspire to that.
Owen Y. Lee: That’s a great question. Um, how I kind of got into KALI, which is the Korean American Leadership Initiative, which is a ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America and we were created to be able to minister to second generation Korean American teaching elders and ruling elders.
And here’s the truth. We’ve always had leaders. But many of our leaders were under resourced, isolated, struggling, never appreciated. But we’ve always, churches always had leaders. And unfortunately, many of our leaders were unhealthy. And we’ve seen some tragic and disastrous results because of unhealthy isolated, stressed out, burned out, overburdened under supported leaders.
And so KALI was really started to, to stop the bleeding, if you will. Because we believe that when, in our context, if a Korean American church has healthy, spiritually vital, thriving growing leaders, then that’s going to be good for the church. So we serve the church by serving the leaders of the church. And so if the leaders of the church are in community with other leaders, and then they’re experiencing, you cannot survive in ministry without friends. If you’re isolated, and they’re stressed, and you add time, that is just a recipe for disaster. It is just a matter of time before something very unfortunate happens.
Ministry will always be stressful, but it becomes more bearable when you do it with friends, and with colleagues. And so we want to see Korean American pastors, instead of being so territorial, and competitive, and suspicious of one another, hey, we’re all on the same team. We’re not competing against one another, we’re complementing one another, we’re called to collaborate, because we need each other so that we can our ministries and our churches can thrive together. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about your church, or my church, or your brand, or my brand. It’s about King Jesus and His Kingdom and His Church. And if you want to serve the kingdom, we have to do it together. We can’t do it alone.
And so we’re very intentional about encouraging relationships and friendships among pastors, but also resourcing them with culturally contextualized ministry training. You know, for people like me, we grew up attending all these great conferences, which is usually led by who? By the white experts, right? And things they may not know, but they speak from their own context as well. So what do we have to do, we go and we take, we get this amazing content, and we’re like, man, it doesn’t really apply to my church situation. And so you have to kind of contextualize it. And you have to say, Oh, this, this works, but this doesn’t really work. And then you have this like Frankenstein thing, and then you apply to your church, which is okay. But what if we had the opportunity to now bring in wise, experienced, gifted Asian American church leaders. And who can give contextualized training so that it’s a direct download, if you will, you don’t have to contextualize anything because it already comes to you contextualized by an older brother or sister that’s done ministry in your space, and they know the challenges and opportunities of your ministry and they’re able to speak to that, I think more clearly and more relevantly. So that’s what we’re trying to do.
SOLA Network: I think one of the things that I know happened to me and a lot of people that are in Asian ethnic churches, yeah. Is there’s this feeling that you can’t invite non Asians to church. But for me, over time, as I’ve been doing that I realized it’s actually one of the selling points for a lot of people, right? Like I had a pair of black friends that were part of our church. Later on they were like, they they got burned by black church. They weren’t gonna go to a white church. You said you went to a Korean church. They were like, what is that? I’m intrigued. In your experience now embracing that. What are some of the cultural things that Korean American churches excel at, that are uniquely appealing even to non Asians?
Owen Y. Lee: Wow, that’s a great question. That’s a great question. And hopefully, I can give a thoughtful answer.
Maybe I can call it strengths or advantages of maybe at least my context of Korean American church. I think one is, we do friendship and community very well. There’s a thick community. And so I think there’s the opportunity to show the world what an alternate community shaped by the gospel, as experienced by Asian Americans can look like. You know, I think as, at least at our church, we’re not just a church that just gets together once a week on Sundays just to be in the same room to worship together. No, no, I mean, during the week, we’re in community groups together. There’s friendships of people golf together to eat together, they do life together. Because church is not just a spiritual place. It’s also a social and cultural place, at least for us.
And I think we want to celebrate that and I don’t think we should be apologetic that your best friends are people that you go to church with. In fact, we want that right. And so I think we have the opportunity to do that. I think there’s just so many wonderful things about the Korean American church.
I think another thing is this understanding that I think it kind of comes to this is what we learned from our first generation Korean American churches. The idea that when you serve the Lord or require sacrifice, you don’t just serve when it’s easy or comfortable or convenient. But this willingness to, to suffer and to sacrifice for the sake of the ministry is something I think that’s beautiful. Now, of course, it can be abused. But if it’s motivated by the gospel for the glory of Christ, and not for man’s applause, or whatever it is, I think that’s a beautiful thing that we can steward and to show Jesus is worth sacrificing for. Jesus is worth inconveniencing ourselves for.
I wish I had some better answers to that. But I think there are no, don’t get me wrong, there are some really problematic things about the Korean American church that we need to reject. Right? And then there are some things that we don’t do very well. But we need to redeem. I think there’s so many things that that we do do well, that we can celebrate. Right? And I think we want to be thoughtful because not everything in the Korean American church is good. Some things need to be rejected.
SOLA Network: And as we move kind of into the second, third, fourth generation, Korean Americans church. You know, one of the things that I think happens is we kind of forget that the Korean American church existed before us. Everyone feels like they’re doing it for the first time. What are some of the stories of the Korean American church from like, the 60s 70s 80s, that you began to learn, where you are like, wow, I wish we taught, I wish we celebrated these. I wish we remember these things to form your identity now of what Korean American church is.
Owen Y. Lee: We’re gonna be able to edit stuff like this. These are some great questions I wish you would have given me some lead time. I’d love to give some more thoughtful answers. That’s a great question. I’m not very good at thinking on my feet here. But um, gosh, that’s a very humbling thing to realize that you’re not the first on the scene. But even when we’re here, we’re standing on someone else’s shoulders, right? And it would behoove us wisdom would behoove us to say, hey, we need to learn from our spiritual fathers and mothers who have gone before us, right?
Gosh, their commitment to prayer, dependence on God in a way that I think the immigrant generation had, like a palpable, existential need for God to survive. And I think for those of us who are second generation, we don’t experience that quite as much because we were educated. And, and we have so many of the benefits and advantages of knowing the system where I feel like our parents came and they didn’t know the language, they didn’t have relationships with families. And yet, they survived. And I think when you’re in that situation, there is like a purity and an earnestness of faith. That’s a beautiful thing. And I think sometimes for us, we do far more planning than trusting, right? We know how to plan and we tried to have contingency plans. And so we think we have like a foolproof plan that things should go well, and in our faith functionally is more in our planning than in our God. Right? And so I think there’s something about that kind of radical faith that we can learn from our spiritual forefathers and foremothers and man. I wish I could think more about this question. I want to give you a thoughtful answer. I’m sorry, I can’t do it. It’s a great question.
Aaron Lee: We’ll get an article for it. Well, I think we have time for one more.
Owen Y. Lee: Give me a softball bro.
Aaron Lee: What would you say? What would you say to Asian American leaders who are in immigrant churches, American churches who feel that their ministries are a little less than because it’s not majority culture or multicultural for that matter?
Owen Y. Lee: Yeah. Man. That’s a very personal question, because that’s something that I struggled with for a long time. There was a time when I believed that serving in an Asian American church or my Korean American church was somehow what I would call Junior Varsity. But you know, serving at a white church, white mega church for that matter would be Varsity. For example, my dream job was one day if I could work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church with Dr. Tim Keller, then I know I’ve made it. Right?
And this over elevating and overvaluing of white majority churches and, and at the same time and undervaluing of the minority church and, and I would just say, your church that you serve at is not less than anything. Your church is beautiful, and precious to Jesus, he bled for your church. And how dare you view this Church that Jesus loves so much as somehow less than right?
In Genesis one we are told when after God created all things after God created humans in his own image, in his own image, he said, It is very good. And what that means is when we look at another human being, who are creating the image of God, no matter what the color of their skin is, no matter what their ethnicity is, we ought to say, we must say it is very good. And, and what applies to individual humans applies to a community of humans, which is what a church is and say you are very good. And we need to be able to say that about every church, right? White churches, black churches, Hispanic churches, Asian churches, multi ethnic churches, they’re all very good. And so we don’t want to go to the other side, and start to believe that our churches are superior to other churches. That’s the other side of the mistake here. But we should never ever feel like we’re somehow less than. God created us with our skin color, with our ethnicity, and God did not make a mistake. It’s something good to be celebrated.
Aaron Lee: Thanks, Pastor Owen, thanks for your time.
Owen Y. Lee: My pleasure.