“So are you the youth pastor or the college pastor?”
Whenever I meet someone new and they learn I’m a pastor, this is the question I get asked the most. The question makes sense! I serve in a church with three language congregations—English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese—and in a cultural context where age tends to be valued highly. As a thirty-something young man, I don’t fit the typical senior pastor profile. Then again, the story of how I became a senior pastor wasn’t very typical, either.
In the summer 2015, I was finishing seminary in Kentucky when our former pastor in California called us. He’d been serving as the senior pastor for over 20 years and was thinking about the future. His proposal: come back and serve at the church, and he would slowly transition the senior pastor position to me. My wife and I were very humbled by the proposal, and after much prayer and counsel, we decided to say yes.
We initially planned for a 3–5 year transition, but the Lord had other plans. In 2017, our senior pastor received an amazing opportunity to serve overseas that more or less required him to leave immediately. As a result,
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