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RELIGION / JOHN DART : Women, Minorities Are Filling United Methodist Pastoral Posts

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Congregations with largely white memberships in Toluca Lake and Tarzana will welcome Filipino American women as pastors this month in a striking example of how women and ethnic minorities are increasingly filling United Methodist Church posts in Southern California.

Also, a Korean American associate minister will augment the staff at Northridge United Methodist Church. Two more white clergywomen will join pastoral ranks in the Valley, one replacing a male minister in North Hills and another going on the staff at Westlake Village.

“We have felt it is timely and crucial to bring in more women clergy and racial-ethnic minorities, especially in the San Fernando Valley,” said the Rev. Brandon Cho, the Chatsworth-based district superintendent. Cho oversees 62 churches, nearly half of them in the Valley area.

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The appointments, which were effective Friday, reflect the recommendations of Cho, a Korean American, and the final decisions of Bishop Roy I. Sano, a Japanese American who leads the denomination’s California-Pacific Conference, or region, from the Pasadena headquarters.

Under the United Methodist “itinerant” system of rotating ministerial assignments, a fair number of pastoral changes are announced each year.

Twenty of nearly 120 recent ministerial changes in the conference were “cross-cultural” appointments--those in which the pastor’s racial or ethnic heritage differs from that of the assigned congregation, Sano said.

“We can proceed in this direction because of the graciousness and openness of congregations to accept pastors from a different cultural background,” said Sano, who succeeded Bishop Jack Tuell two years ago.

The 8.7-million-member United Methodist Church, the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination, has worked for decades toward church-wide racial and ethnic diversification and opportunities for female ministers.

The trend is accelerating in Sano’s region, which covers Southern California and Hawaii:

Only one white male is among 22 candidates for full ministerial status. Of seven elders--the next step to full minister--three were white women, two were Asian men and two were African American women. Among 15 deacons, “only one is an Anglo man, four are Anglo women and the rest are Asian or Pacific in background,” Sano said.

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No current statistical breakdown was available for racial and ethnic ratios among United Methodist ministers in Southern California and Hawaii, but “we are catching up in our clergy ranks to reflect the changing demographics,” said the bishop.

The United Methodist Church has few Latino congregations in the area, but Mexican-born David Tinoco last month was the first Latino to be named superintendent for the Riverside District. Tinoco replaced the Rev. Willie Foreman, an African American minister who was named pastor of the mostly white St. Mark’s Church in San Diego.

The increasingly multicultural Wilshire United Methodist Church, which has always had a white pastor until this summer, began July with the Rev. Osmond Lindo, a minister with a black and Latino heritage, heading the English-speaking congregation. The Korean, Filipino and Latino congregations worshiping there have pastors of the same heritage while the Rev. Chang Soon Lee serves as Wilshire’s senior pastor.

At Toluca Lake United Methodist Church, the Rev. Lisa Reyes said she was excited about leading her first service Sunday at the 150-member congregation.

The daughter and granddaughter of ministers, Chicago-born Reyes was graduated from seminary in the Philippines, but returned to the United States because her family was here, she said.

Reyes was coordinating the Filipino ministry in the United Methodists’ Long Beach District when she was appointed to the Toluca Lake church, which has no Filipino members.

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Most female clergy of Asian background have found that they are accepted as pastors only in non-Asian United Methodist congregations because older Asian church members, male and female, often oppose the idea of female pastors, Reyes said.

“Earlier, I was supposed to go to a church which had some Filipino members,” Reyes said. But she said her appointment was stymied by the objections of an older Filipino woman on the church’s pastor-parish relations committee, which interviewed pulpit candidates. “She said she didn’t want a female minister,” Reyes said.

She said that Korean American female clergy face the same cultural obstacle to being appointed to congregations of their same ethnic background.

Cho agreed that Asian American female ministers have difficulty “dealing with the traditional male mind-set of Asian culture that is in fact oppressive to female pastors, and to younger pastors in general.

“There is a cultural gap here that needs to be addressed,” Cho said.

The Rev. Soomee Kim Hwang, 38, named as an associate pastor at Northridge, said that her previous church, the Pomona Valley Korean United Methodist Church, “really tried to open up to the idea of a woman minister--I have to give them credit for that.”

But she asked to serve in a non-Korean congregation because she trained for the ministry in California and is unfamiliar with the style of worship and church activities most immigrant Korean Christians bring with them to this country, she said.

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“I want to practice what I learned from seminary, the ‘American way,’ ” she said.

Another problem in ethnic ministries worrying church administrators is providing English-language services to attract the younger, U.S.-raised generations. To that end, Cho named the Rev. John F. Parker, a second-generation Korean American, as associate pastor to help the Rev. Kuh Chung Kim, pastor of the Korean congregation housed at Woodland Hills United Methodist Church.

Meanwhile, in Tarzana at St. Paul’s United Methodist, a congregation of about 120 members, the Rev. Afrie Songco Joye, a Filipino American clergywoman, will start her pastorate on July 10.

Previously an associate pastor at Hollywood United Methodist Church, Joye holds a doctoral degree from the Methodist-run School of Theology at Claremont.

Only a year ago the mostly white St. Paul’s congregation welcomed its first black pastor, the Rev. Paul Hill.

Cho said that appointment didn’t work out, partly because Hill felt that his calling was to minister in an African American congregation. As of Friday, Hill became an associate minister under the Rev. James Lawson, the senior pastor and civil-rights veteran at Holman United Methodist Church in the West Adams District of Los Angeles.

Two female clergy new to the Valley are the Rev. Mary Katherine Moran, who becomes pastor of Sepulveda United Methodist Church, which has an active social service ministry, and the Rev. Cathleen Donavon, named an associate minister at the Westlake Village church.

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