Methodists Aiming for Diversity in the Pulpit

Congregations with largely white memberships in Toluca Lake and Tarzana will welcome Filipino American women as pastors this month in striking examples of women and ethnic minorities 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.

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 who was named pastor of the mostly white St. Mark’s Church in San Diego.

The increasingly multicultural Wilshire United Methodist Church, which had 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 Hispanic congregations worshiping there have pastors of the same heritage, and the Rev. Chang Soon Lee serves as Wilshire’s senior pastor.

“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.

The appointments, which were effective July 1, reflect the recommendations of district superintendents such as 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 about 120 recent ministerial changes in the conference were “cross-cultural” appointments--those in which the pastor’s racial or ethnic heritage was different 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 churchwide 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.

At Toluca Lake United Methodist Church, the Rev. Lisa Reyes said she was excited about leading her first service last 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.

Most women 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 women pastors, Reyes said.

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

She said that Korean American women clergy face the same cultural obstacle.

Cho agreed that Asian American women 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,” he said.