Keep swinging for the fences
My decades of church life have been full of the stuff one might expect from a place that promises God and only sometimes delivers.
(Century illustration)
People keep pooh-poohing the church, but I think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. People talk about the church with this great sense of disappointment, as if it has dropped the ball in some unforgivable way. But if you’re disappointed, what were you expecting? The church is made up of people, people doing their best to be better together than they would on their own. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t. When it works, no one does it better. When it doesn’t, when the church fails to do what it says, the results are as bad as you’d expect when people swing for the fences.
I might ask, what’s the alternative? When my family came to America, it was the church that took us in, just like it did for tens of thousands of other Vietnamese war refugees. No one else was doing this, not at that scale and scope. When my six-year-old brother was killed in a car accident, it was the church that wrapped its arms around my family. Neither I nor my family stuck around for long, and the church never once complained, never kept receipts when we left without so much as saying goodbye.
Years later a different part of the church—this time, the Chinese Baptist Church of Orange County—took me in as a young adult looking for meaning and community. CBCOC welcomed me with open arms. It gave me a place to belong and offered me, through pastor William Eng, a picture of what it looked like be an Asian American man who led and loved. Growing up without a father, I had never seen that before.
