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[PCUSANEWS] League of nations


From PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ECUNET.ORG>
Date Tue, 22 Jun 2004 14:10:03 -0500

Note #8284 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

04298
June 21, 2004

League of nations

Seattle Presbyterians praise the Lord in a host of languages

by Jerry L. Van Marter

SEATTLE - Five worship services on one Sunday - in Farsi, Spanish, Kikuyu,
Vietnamese and Swahili. None in English.

	Such is Presbyterian ministry in Seattle Presbytery, where no fewer
than 13 new immigrant churches and fellowships have sprung up in the past
five years.

	Some of their stories:

Persians

"Peace is seeing a sunset and knowing who to thank"

	Mansour Khajehpour was a committed foot-soldier in the Islamic
revolution that swept through his native Iran after the fall of Shah Reza
Pahlevi in the late 1970s, a devout Muslim "ignited by the fire of Ayatollah
Khomeini."

Khajehpour and his gang of true believers gladly followed the Islamic ruler's
instructions, harassing and threatening Christians and burning down churches,
sometimes in broad daylight.

	Khajehpour had a "Damascus road" experience in the eastern Iranian
city of Mashad in February 1981. Riding a bus, he spotted a cross atop a
building that turned out to be an Evangelical (Presbyterian) church. He
hopped off, knocked on the door, and told the youth pastor who opened it to
him that he was going to burn down the church.

	"The pastor responded by handing me a New Testament and inviting me
back to discuss it," Khajehpour recalls. "I read it in three days, and was
both fascinated and offended, particularly by the story of Jesus turning
water into wine." (Devout Muslims shun alcohol).

	When his curiosity led him to return for worship - "Muslims honor
Jesus as a prophet, so I agreed," he says - he found "a lot of heresies, like
women with their heads uncovered and the congregation singing," but also a
disconcerting sense of peace and welcome.

	"Three nuns who worked in a local hospital and couldn't be kicked out
of Iran because they were citizens were humming quietly, and it was very
touching emotionally for me," Khajehpour says. "Then, after worship, I was
served snacks, and was given a warm welcome - I first thought it was just
advertising, but then I came to know that it came from the heart."

	It was that spirit that converted Khajehpour.

	"Unconditional love, which is not in the Koran, is the key element of
Christianity that converts Muslims," he says.

	Three months after threatening to burn down the Mashad church,
Khajehpour was baptized there at age 18.

	While a student at the University of Tehran, Khajehpour was ordained
an elder at the Presbyterian church in the capital, and "evangelized for
Jesus with same zeal I had once dedicated to Khomeini."

	Six months after Khajehpour got married, he and his new wife, Nahid,
were arrested for "anti-revolutionary activities." Prosecutors sought the
death penalty, but Khajehpour was sentenced to prison, and was released after
just 12 days - on condition that he quit evangelizing.

	"Of course I couldn't do that," he says, "so when the next wave of
persecution came around, in 1997, I was advised to flee my country."

	He and Nahid intended to go to Germany, where she had relatives, but
they wound up in Greece, where they lived for six months and started a Bible
study group that met weekly and soon had 150 participants.

	"We never dreamed of coming to the United States, so we had no
sponsor," Khajehpour says, "but we were only in Greece temporarily, and when
our visas there expired we learned we'd been assigned to Salt Lake City as
'free case' refugees." They became members of Wasatch Presbyterian Church
there. "We could not be very active," he says, "because we were working at
least 65 hours a week."

	When Khajehpour heard about a conference of Iranian Christians to be
held in California in the spring of 1998, he and Nahed invested their life
savings of $2,000 in a ticket for Mansour. During the conference, a friend
from Iran now living in Seattle - Esmaeil Goltapeh - urged him to move there.
In June 1998, he and Nahid arrived.

	Now Mansour - along with Nahid and Esmaeil - leads the bustling
Persian Presbyterian Church of the Good Shepherd, which is housed at
University Presbyterian Church near the campus of the University of
Washington. While a praise service attended by several hundred young people
makes a huge racket downstairs in the sanctuary, two dozen Farsi-speaking
Christians worship far more quietly in a small chapel a couple of floors up
in the sprawling building.

	The Persian church started with Bible study and support services for
Iranian refugees, which Khajehpour describes as "giving a cup of cold water
to a thirsty brother or sister in the name of the Lord." Now the ministry is
changing. Since 9/11, the flow of refugees has "stalled," he said, so the
church's ministry is moving to providing Christian education and nurture
resources for Seattle's stable Persian community.

	This has led the Persian church straight into the technological
revolution. The church has a growing ministry of translating English
materials into Farsi and develops audio and video resources. Soon Khajehpour
will begin recording a series of seven-minute meditations to be broadcast
into Iran by Trans World Radio.

	And the Persian church is going "global" with a new Web site that
Khajehpour calls  "a wonderful, wonderful opportunity for us to minister with
people all over the world." The site is www.kelisa.org.

	Khajehpour, who received Commissioned Lay Pastor Training through
Seattle Presbytery, is now pursuing a theological degree. But the heart of
his ministry is Good Shepherd, which he wants to be as welcoming as the
church in Mashad that took him in.

	Worshipers know he speaks from the heart when he says in the
benediction, "Peace is seeing a sunset and knowing who to thank."

Vietnamese

"If you stop learning, you stop leading"

	Ta Huy Truong stepped into the pulpit of the Vietnamese Presbyterian
Good News Church and greeted his 40-member congregation - a group of
Vietnamese immigrants and a smattering of Laotians, Hmong and Cambodians.

	Truong is accustomed to such diversity. That's why a screen on one
side of the chancel flashes most of the liturgy and the outline of his sermon
in English while he speaks almost entirely in Vietnamese.

	But this Sunday there's a new wrinkle. A half-dozen members of a
brand-new congregation of Ethiopian immigrants that nests in the Good News
building (once home to the Anglo Brighton Presbyterian Church, which closed
several years ago) have decided to attend Truong's service. He smiles,
unflustered, and says, "Today we welcome our Ethiopian brothers and sisters,
and it's no matter - we worship God in spirit and truth and we have both
spirit and truth here, even if we don't understand English or Vietnamese."

	Nothing seems to faze Truong, whose family came to the United States
from Vietnam in 1994. "I always had a call to be a minister, but it was hard
- because the church in Vietnam is underground," he says. He got his start in
preaching when the pastor of his congregation in Vietnam was thrown in jail.
"There was no one to care for the church, so I got a lot of experience," he
says.

	Truong's family settled in southern California. He got his first
formal theological training at the Vietnamese Theological College in Los
Ranchos Presbytery. After graduating in 2000, he came to Washington as
associate pastor of a large Baptist church in Tacoma. He was let go three
years later when the church decided to build a new facility and could no
longer pay an associate pastor.

	"I prayed to God for the chance to be a pastor, and to go to more
theological school," Truong says. "There's an old saying in Vietnam - 'If you
stop learning, you stop leading.'"

	About this time, the founding pastor of Good News church, Binh
Nguyen, resigned to work with the Mercer Island Presbyterian Church and
Seattle Presbytery on international mission work - and a door opened again
for Truong. He's now pastor of Good News church, and this fall, with
scholarship help from Seattle Presbtery, he will enter a Master of Divinity
program.

	The Good News church's outreach programs are simple - prayer groups,
youth groups and day care for young children.

	"The most important ministry is prayer," Truong says. "When a church
prays, it grows." He says youth programs are important, too, because, "If you
keep the kids, you keep their parents."

	That theory was put to the test last fall when Good News church
decided to keep young people off the streets on Halloween by throwing a
party. "We had never done this before, so we didn't know what to expect,"
Truong says. "We prayed for 40 kids, but when the party was supposed to start
hardly anybody was here. Then they started showing up,	and by the time we
finished, we had way more than 40 kids. And they were Vietnamese, Cambodian,
Lao, black and white."

	That's the vision of Good News church, to be truly multi-cultural.
"The key is the youth," Truong says, "because they are united by being Asian
and by speaking English. An English-speaking Asian church makes them the most
comfortable."

	Good News church isn't self-supporting yet, but Truong is confident.
"Seattle Presbytery is very good," he says, "but more than money, we need
prayer and spiritual support. We know God will use me and this ministry to
bring more people to Jesus Christ."

Latinos

"Never stop praying - it's like eating and breathing"

	Jay and Astrid Ostos never intended to become pastors of Iglesia El
Buen Pastor (Church of the Good Shepherd) in Auburn, at the southern end of
Seattle Presbytery. Married in 1990, Jay, a Mexican, and Astrid, a Colombian,
moved there in 1997 to manage a drug-, prostitution- and gang-infested
apartment complex.

	In the course of cleaning up that mess, they became leaders of a
booming Latino community - which has quadrupled in size between 1990 and
2000.

	They also became religious leaders. They started a Bible study group
that met in the laundry room of the complex. When the group grew too large,
they took a Sunday drive to find a home for their fledgling fellowship.

	How they became Presbyterian is a story that calls to mind the Old
Testament chronicle of Joshua and the battle of Jericho. "We found White
River Presbyterian Church and knew immediately that this was where we wanted
our congregation to be," Jay says. "So for seven days we drove around the
church in the parking lot, praying that it would happen."

	One Sunday, when an ecumenical coalition conducted a prayer march in
Auburn, Jay met Jim Erno, a Presbyterian lay minister at Wabash Presbyterian
Church, who offered his facility to the new congregation. However, the
Ostoses said the rural location was too distant from the Latino community. He
mentioned the White River church.

	Erno contacted Boyd Stockdale, the executive of Seattle Presbytery.
Stockdale contacted White River, and with the support of interim pastor Chet
Gean and Elder John Kopp, the new church was up and running.

	"We spent six months getting the groundwork laid, brainstorming ways
to get this thing going," says Stockdale, "and there were tears in my eyes
when Jay and Astrid were elected elders of White River with the purpose of
making them Commissioned Lay Pastors of an Hispanic Presbyterian
congregation." Jay and Astrid Ostos were commissioned as lay pastors last
September.

	"It's gonna be fun," Kopp says. "The key is to tie the leadership
together, to provide an umbrella for the leadership of both congregations.
... The synergy here is wonderful and we've got the right pastor
(newly-called Arleigh Champ-Gibson), who was attracted to this place because
of what Jay and Astrid are doing and the impact it's having on the White
River congregation."

	Jay confesses that he "didn't think at first the White River
arrangement was going to work." But in May 2002, the Ostoses were given the
keys to their new church home.

	Jay, who converted to Christianity in 1979, said he believes "God put
all of us together for the benefit of the community." And he means the whole
community.

	In addition to worship and Christian education, Iglesia El Buen
Pastor offers homework and tutoring assistance for students, classes in
parenting and in English as a second language, free dental and eye clinics,
emergency financial and clothing assistance and free childcare.

	Iglesia El Buen Pastor also sponsors city-wide "clean-up days," and
in December 2002, with six gallons of cooking oil purchased at a local
supermarket, spent seven days anointing every street corner in Auburn "for
the Lord." The congregation has since announced its intention to anoint every
corner in all of Seattle.

	"The key to success," Astrid says, "is to never stop praying - it's
as important as eating and breathing." The congregation prays together for
one hour every night, Monday through Thursday, from 6 to 7.

Taiwanese

"They need something spiritual in their hearts"

	Since its inception in September 2002, Seattle Presbytery's Taiwanese
Fellowship has been a wild scramble.

	The 60-member congregation, which nests at Mercer Island Presbyterian
Church, has not had pastoral leadership since its organizing minister, Mai
Chen Lai, returned to Taiwan in the summer of 2003.

	"We invite all different speakers for Sunday services," says Elder
Roger Wu, who came to Seattle 12 years ago from Taipei, Taiwan's capital. "We
are happy because we have a retired pastor, the father of one of our members,
coming for six months in July. ... People come here because they sense this
is a Taiwanese gathering spot. From there, they learn the religious aspect,
and gradually join as believers."

	Wu notes that the Mercer Island fellowship is the only Taiwanese
congregation on Seattle's east side, although there are two Taiwanese
congregations downtown (neither of them Presbyterian).

	Evangelism and faith-sharing are key components of the ministry, says
Elder Andrew Kuo, "because the percentage of Christians in Taiwan is very
low. We started the fellowship because they didn't come here as Christians,
but we think they need something spiritual in their hearts."

	Pastoral care is provided by a team of six or seven members who meet
every Tuesday night. The fellowship conducts Bible study on Fridays, and
worship and Sunday school on the Sabbath - all in Taiwanese, although Wu
notes that "most of them understand English pretty well."

	The focus is on first-generation Taiwanese immigrants.

	"The second generation, we push into Mercer Island, because for them
English is no problem," says Kuo. "Our feeling is that we're part of the
Mercer Island family. We just have our own Taiwanese language services and
programs."

	Once every quarter the two congregations worship together (in
English), and there are frequent fellowship events where the Mercer Island
members can learn more about Taiwanese culture.

	Wu and Kuo long for a permanent pastor. "We need help to get
ourselves a little better organized, to be more effective and more
efficient," Wu says. "We are small and young, but we have great potential."

Kenyans

"This is our family, because our real brothers and sisters are far away"

	Community life is central to Kenyan culture. That's one reason the
Kenyan Community International Church was formed in December 2000.

	"We need each other, but instead of coming together, we were getting
further apart," says Charity Kamau, one of two Commissioned Lay Pastors
serving the 60-member congregation.

	Stephen Maina was a deacon at Westminster Presbyterian Church when
Charity's congregation, Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church, offered the
Kenyans room to grow.

	"There's a new generation of Kenyans and other Africans in this
country," Maina says. "We didn't want them to lose their identity and
culture. We want to hold onto our cultural heritage. There must be a starting
point for building character and values so our young people have a solid
foundation."

	Language and culture present problems. "The elders don't know English
and the youngsters don't know Kikuyu," Kamau says. "So blending worship is
tough. We even try Swahili, because some who don't know either English or
Kikuyu know Swahili."

	Worshiping at 4 p.m. on Sundays is also problematic. "Many teenagers
would rather go to the mall than to church on a Sunday afternoon," notes
Edgar Kanjabi, chair of the congregation's youth committee.

	In such an environment, Kamau says, the Kenyans in the congregation
consider themselves missionaries. "Our focus is on children and youth,
because churches that don't have children die," he says.

	According to Kanjabi, the Sunday School is "taking off nicely." One
Sunday each month is "youth Sunday," when the church's young people lead the
service.

	Another Sunday each month is designated "women's Sunday" to develop
and highlight the leadership of women.

	And the Kenyans haven't forgotten the folks back home. At the moment,
a 20-foot container of supplies is en route to Kenya, donations for children
orphaned by AIDS. It includes 100 quilts knitted by the women of the Kenyan
and Rainier Beach congregations.

	"We're trying to partner with as many others as we can, because the
needs there are so great," Maina says. "AIDS is ravaging Kenya left, right
and center."

	With so much going on and so much to do, the Kenyans have launched a
fund-raising campaign and hope to acquire their own building. "Rainier Beach
has been very good to us; it's not about dissatisfaction," Kamau says. "We
have this vision, and it may not make sense but we're going to obey. We have
to accommodate our community."

	The small congregation raised $40,000 last year and hopes to raise
$100,000 this year. "We know God is faithful, because here we are three years
later," Maina says. "You may not know what you can do, but God knows."

Indonesians

"It's the church's responsibility to provide a Biblical anchor"

	The Rev. Kolinus Buntaran came to Seattle in 1994 from San Jose, CA,
where he pastored the Indonesian Evangelical Church. It was there that he
came in contact with Stockdale, now the Seattle Presbytery executive, who at
the time was serving three presbyteries in northern California and Nevada
from a synod office in Sacramento.

	In Seattle, Buntaran initially served an Indonesian congregation
nesting at University Presbyterian Church. He says that church dissolved in
1999 after its parent denomination "veered toward Chinese, not Indonesian."

	Buntaran veered toward Stockdale. He was accepted as a minister
member of the presbytery in 2000 and in 2001 the remnant Indonesian
congregation was chartered as the Indonesian Presbyterian Church. "Through
Boyd, it seemed like God opened the door for us to be PC(USA)," Buntaran
says.

	He has overcome the historic tension between native and Chinese
Indonesians by establishing two worship services, one in Indonesian and one
in English. "Many of our older members understand Mandarin (Chinese) better
than English, so we've started a Mandarin-language fellowship, too," he says.

	Such is life in a multi-lingual culture. Buntaran is beefing up the
English-language ministry at the 150-member church, which nests at Wedgewood
Presbyterian Church in Seattle's north end. "The second generation is trying
to become more American, so the transition to English-speaking ministry will
be difficult," he concedes. "But it is very important, because it is the
church's responsibility and challenge to provide a Biblical anchor for their
values."

	Two years ago, the Indonesian church established a fellowship in
Everett, an industrial city north of Seattle that has a giant Boeing plant.
"Lots of Indonesians are moving there for jobs," Buntaran says. About 35
Indonesians attend the twice-a-month Everett services.

	The church's relationship with Seattle Presbytery is a genuine
two-way street, Buntaran says: "The presbytery helps us find resources and
equip leaders for the Presbyterian wa, because we are new Presbyterians and
want to become more mature."

	In turn, Indonesian Presbyterians "will add a different culture to
the presbytery and will bring a community- and family-oriented emphasis to
the presbytery," Buntaran says. "We bring strong faith - in Indonesia,
Christians are persecuted - to pull people together with the spark of Jesus
Christ."

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