Building on the Gospel of Inclusion

The Rev. Ken Fong is doing what he and many other church leaders once thought was impossible: making a historically Japanese American church look more like multiethnic Los Angeles in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley.

Since March 1997 when the third-generation Chinese American became the senior pastor of Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles in Rosemead, Fong has been working toward a church model that reflects the wider community.

The result is a thriving congregation that is 20% African American, Latino and white, 4% multiracial and 75% or so pan-Asian, composed of 17 Asian ethnicities including Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Burmese, Cambodian and Laotian.

“Asian immigrants are intermingling splendidly with second-, third- and fourth-generation Asian Americans, not to mention white Americans, African Americans and Latino Americans,” Fong said with enthusiasm.

The church rolls have more than doubled: from 300 to nearly 700. People come from as far away as Santa Barbara and San Diego to participate in the life of the church, whose three core values, Fong said, are hope, humility and hospitality.

Fong, whose doctorate from Fuller Theological Seminary is on church growth, says God deserves the credit.

“It’s not our crazy idea; it’s God’s crazy idea,” said Fong, who is married to a Japanese American banker, has a 2-year-old adopted Chinese American daughter, and will turn 47 on Dec. 29.

Evergreen Baptist Church was founded in 1925 by first-generation Japanese immigrants at Evergreen and 2nd streets in Boyle Heights.

That church has had several offshoots. In 1988, one moved to Rosemead, following members to the suburbs. Nine years later, that congregation split amicably.

Senior Pastor Cory Ishida led a sizable group--Evergreen Baptist Church of the San Gabriel Valley--to La Puente where it continues its original mission to English-speaking Asian Americans. Fong’s Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles in Rosemead has focused on reaching Asians and non-Asians.

Fong’s ministry is receiving national attention. Last year, he was the main Bible expositor at Urbana 2000, a gathering of 20,000 Christian student leaders in Urbana, Ill., sponsored by the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. In August, he was the first nonblack to be citywide youth crusade leader for Sardis Missions Church in Birmingham, Ala.

Fong acknowledges that having such a variety of ethnicities in the same assemblage can seem unwieldy--at times even uncomfortable. But, the diversity offers “ample opportunities” for everyone, including him, to learn and grow.

That was evident the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when Fong led his congregation in an unusual worship.

A Different Perspective on Sept. 11

During the service, the Rev. Samuel Chetti, an influential Indian American Baptist theologian who was verbally assaulted in Pasadena that morning by a stranger mistaking him for an Arab, gave a stirring biblical and historical overview of Arab-Jewish relations. A Palestinian American student congregant shared his family’s travails of living in the West Bank.

“We needed to sensitize our congregation to the Palestinian Arab American experience, especially because this is historically a Japanese American church,” Fong said.

A longtime church member, Kathi Nakasuji, a Japanese American, agreed.

“It was such a privilege [to hear his story] and pray for this Arab brother,” said Nakasuji, who spent the World War II years in an internment camp.

Still, turning over the microphone to the Palestinian American upset some white, Latino and black church members who thought the emphasis should have been on mourning American losses. Right now we want to be angry and grieve, and you’re telling us we should be ashamed of being angry because in the eyes of God we are all sinners, they told him.

“As an American, I reference what happened on Sept. 11 as a gross, atrocious, evil act,” Fong said he told them. “I share your anger and grief. But as a nonwhite American, I am also sensitive to nuances that you might not have picked up.”

Using Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as a case in point, Fong asked: Did white people feel shame for what McVeigh had done? Did white people as a group come under suspicion?

“As an American of color, I need to let you know that I could have the biggest flag on my street, I could be singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ every five minutes, but if next week the North Koreans bombed some American military base, I am going to be looked at with suspicion too,” he said.

Later, reflecting on the mixed reaction, Fong concluded that maybe the timing of the Palestinian American’s comments was premature.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven,” he quoted from Ecclesiastes 3. “There is a time to hate and a time to love. [In this case], we all needed to go to the funeral.”

These are painful conversations but they need to take place, Fong believes. “I don’t know where else [than in a church], you can do it,” he said.

Fong is keenly aware that dominant groups can unintentionally make smaller groups feel as though they are not contributing to the corporate identity of the church culture.

To avert that scenario, Fong and his three associate pastors are careful about using “insider” ethnic words and jokes in their sermons.

For example, such Japanese terms as monku (complaint) and omiyage (memento) are an integral part of the Japanese American vernacular--even for those who don’t speak Japanese. In the context of the church’s history as a primarily Japanese American congregation until the early 1980s, pastors who may still use such expressions are careful to explain.

Multiethnic Church Requires Care

Fostering a multiethnic congregation is very complicated, Fong said. “We have to be intentional,” he said.

It’s a lesson he learned as a seminarian taking a class on systematic theology at Fuller.

His professor, noting that 11 a.m. Sunday is the “most segregated hour in America,” said ethnic churches in this country are “an abomination” and proclaimed: “We should all go to the same church.”

But when Fong approached the white professor later and asked if he was going to start attending Fong’s Asian American church, the professor replied: “Why, no. I meant for you to come to our church.”

“This fine Christian gentleman and world-class theologian could clearly imagine the cultural peculiarities of our church, but was blind to those of his own,” Fong wrote in his 1999 book “Pursuing the Pearl: A Comprehensive Resources for Multi-Asian Ministry.”

His family album sums it up:

With intermarriages and adoptions, it includes Korean, Guamanian-Filipino, black and white heritages.

Last Chinese New Year, as his daughter and her biracial cousin sat in adjoining highchairs learning to use chopsticks, he couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that the future was already here in the Fong home.

“The future is rapidly upon us, and it keeps changing,” he said. That goes against the grain of most institutions, especially churches where stability means everything.

Will his vision of a 21st century church model be realized in his lifetime?

“No,” Fong said, “but I want to live as if it would [come true] because, then, I am part of that dynamism.”