What kept this front and center for me was the deep scars of remembering how Mom didn’t fit in the church. I thought about this all the time. I was motivating myself to turn her pain into a purpose. To let my pain become a platform to empower people like Mom. My pain would become a gift to connect me to others who maybe wouldn’t relate to my successes, but would certainty relate to my suffering and confusion. Eventually, this pain would guide me to passionately care about people like my mom, who needed a community who would love her just as she was.
I thought that through Newsong, maybe I could create not only a home for me and my family, but a place where those like my mom could be at home. It would be a place for both young and old. Koreans and Americans. Black and brown. Poor and rich. Love would guide us more than laws. It would be more about the spirit of the law versus just the law itself.
Rebecca was pregnant with our fourth child, Megan, and the three others were preschool or kindergarten age when we moved to California to start the church. We launched with small beginnings, mostly Becca, my kids, and a couple of friends who believed in this vision.
Then Newsong took off numerically. We became one of the fastest-growing churches in America. At one point, Newsong was one of the largest second-generation Asian American churches in America. Over the years, we would meet at a variety of places—multiple hotels, a football field, a conference room, a park, an Elks Lodge, and even a nightclub. We continued to grow as many next-generation Asians started to hear about this new place for misfits like them.
Internally, I had second thoughts about starting this church as soon as we arrived in California. But I believed in my vision and had a strategic master plan to go with it. A vision to start a movement where the hub church would be in Orange County, but would help launch spiritual communities all over the world. I could feel the beginnings of what I saw in the Black church with the Asian church in America. There would be Asian Americans and an emerging third-culture people influenced by the church (positively and negatively) who would become the next generation of creatives, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Their church experience, if like an X-Men academy, could launch them into their dreams.
My pre-launch plan was to seek the blessing from some of the well-known influential churches in Seoul, South Korea, and in the United States. I didn’t want Newsong to be seen as rebelling or antagonistic toward our homeland or the ethnic churches that already existed, but honoring and appreciative of our elders’ sacrifices. I remember reading this quote from someone unknown: He who forgets the past is not fit to be a pioneer. It’s similar to the well-known statement from George Santayana, a Spanish-born American philosopher and one of the most important thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, who said: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
The support came in not only from well-known Korean pastors like Pastor Hah Young Jo from Onnuri Church but also others. A set of mostly first-generation Korean parents from my home church in Maryland banded together to promise me monthly support to work on this vision. They collectively donated every month to help with our dream. When I arrived in Southern California, one of our biggest supporters and answers to prayer was Bob Shank, the lead pastor of South Coast Church, which is now called Mariners Church. South Coast was a nondenominational megachurch congregation in Irvine with thousands of churchgoers, but very few members of the Asian population. Bob Shank offered to partner with me and share their resources with us.
“Dave, I can’t give you any money, but I can give you something better than money,” Bob told me. At the time, I didn’t know what could be better than money. When I asked what that was, Bob told me to go home and pray about it, then come back to him with a list. So I did as he suggested. When we met again, I knew what to ask for.
“What if we had a place to meet at your church on Sunday mornings?” (Mornings are prime time for churches.)
That wasn’t the only thing I asked for. I also asked if we could have offices at his church and if we could interact with and be led by his all-star staff. Then I asked whether we could have the kids from our community blend into the children’s programs of their church, because we wouldn’t have a lot of people ready to serve. My wife looked at the list and said, “Dave, that’s a lot. Don’t ask for so much.”
With fear and trepidation, I gave him my list of about ten bold requests.
Bob quickly scanned each request, looked up, and surprisingly said, “No problem, Dave.”
When Newsong held its first service in a small conference-size meeting room at South Coast Church, we had close to a hundred people gathered together to worship. The majority were young Asian adults, mostly Koreans and Chinese Americans. We quickly filled the room they gave us to meet in. As we grew, they kept opening up bigger rooms for us and moving their mostly white congregants from those rooms into other spaces. And they allowed us to meet during prime time on Sunday mornings, not some random time in the afternoon when most people wanted to be outside in the large playground we know to be Southern California. Where else in the world can you both snow ski and surf on the same day?
We were on our way to creating this home for the misfits, and largely because a generous group of mostly white Christians treated us like family.
A decade later, I found myself in the packed Anaheim Convention Center, right next to Disneyland, with thousands physically streaming into our service. It was Easter of 2004. I stood watching the worship band playing and the choir singing. Electric guitars wailed and drums pounded through the space. Lights bounced off the stage while piped-in smoke drifted over the surface. It felt like being at a rock concert.
The crowd of mostly twenty-somethings stood watching this spectacle. As I stared out over them, waiting to deliver my Easter message, I couldn’t help thinking how mammoth and surreal this gathering looked. This was almost every pastor’s secret dream, but I realized that I didn’t know if it was mine.
What am I doing?
These unspoken feelings had been growing within me for a while. Now more than ever, I couldn’t let them go. Like the rising volume of the music, the tension continued to intensify. I knew God was in this place, but watching it all now, I wondered if this was how He wanted us to use the gifts and resources people had sacrificed. This service felt more like a Disney fireworks show than a worship experience.
Newsong was in the midst of fund-raising for new property that could adequately accommodate our growing numbers of mostly young adults and families. We had built this dynamic community for ten years, climbing and inspiring our people to go for it. It was always about the “next level.” We had laid everything all out on the line. I tried to soak it all in. This was like getting to the top of Mount Everest, from a professional perspective. This was what success had looked like to me when I’d first envisioned a church.
The dream for Newsong had been to convene diverse, misfit people together to listen and to understand each other’s story and to provide access to quality resources from our flourishing community. And for the first ten years, we did bring people together. With an enviable average age of twenty-eight, we were unique in the diversity of young people, mostly Asians at the time, who were coming.
That first decade was a blur. We were all hustling. From the outside perspective, we had this meteoric rise. We were off the charts in the classic metrics of growth. But a weariness was setting in. I felt that we were growing larger, but not deeper. The more I thought about this, the more unsettled I became. There was this growing anxiety that maybe I was climbing the prescribed ladder of success only to realize the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. Because of our numerical size we looked successful, but gathering a large crowd doesn’t mean success. A large crowd can just be a spectacle. A fireworks show with a lot of colorful lights, sounds, and designs, but few enduring transformational qualities.
I had a growing sense that I was perpetuating an illusion of success but no deep change was taking place. Perhaps we were big vertically, but we weren’t expansive in helping people live out a healthy life outside the four walls of our church.
Perhaps globally we were faring better. We launched economic incubators like fish farms in Thailand, and we even built schools for children who didn’t have access to quality education. Yet locally our focus was mostly internal programs. I started reading verses in the Bible about how God isn’t impressed with our singing and prayers. That real worship is loving the widows and the orphans. And in another passage, I read:
He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8 NKJV)
I don’t think I was doing this type of merciful work effectively. I concluded that to be a person of justice was to do the hard work of love. Doing the work was more than an inspiring talk or one special Sunday focus.
Just before I stepped out to deliver my message to those thousands that Easter morning, the crowd that had gathered was caught up in the energy of all the people and in the show produced that day. I had the Michael Jackson wireless microphone meticulously taped to my ear and wrapped around the back of my head when I heard a voice.
Is this it?
I didn’t know where the voice came from, whether it was God’s voice or mine. But yeah, is this it? Is this what I had envisioned as success when I thought about serving God while I was in high school?
Earlier, the church had discovered a large stretch of land for sale off Interstate 5 in Orange County. During the campaign to raise money for our new home, the mantra I had been using was, It’s not about the building; it’s about what happens inside the building. I had purchased a pastor’s financial campaign kit that shared this hack to help you to raise capital for a building initiative.
We ended up raising millions of dollars. But something still felt off inside me. I should have been more excited. When we put in a bid to the local real estate developer in Irvine, California, we had eight campuses globally (Paris, Mexico City, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Fullerton, Irvine, Pasadena, and Dallas) and helped with two other successful church launches, but this building would be the main hub or the global headquarters. We were ready to build a premier destination site for all to see. The land was just off Interstate 5, which runs not only through Southern California, but all the way up the West Coast. Hundreds of thousands of cars would pass our future site every day. This would be the crown jewel especially for Korean Americans and other Asian Americans when it came to church. It was only fitting to have the church in one of the most publicly visible locations in Southern California.
But then we got a call. The real estate developer said, “You can’t buy the land.”
I said, “Why not?”
It turned out Kia Motors Corporation was allegedly offering $1 million more than we could offer. My own Korean brothers and sisters! We had to let the property go. And with it, I had to let go of the dream. I had no idea how I could keep growing the church without this large physical hub.
I went into a funk. Now we had been denied the opportunity for a new building. I wasn’t sure what to do next.
Grieving the loss and all the effort in trying to acquire this land, I think I heard God’s voice this time.
