excerpted from : Transforming Asian Ministries:
A North American Perspective
EDMOND YEE

http://jimmoy.com/AAPI/viewtopic.php?t=18&sid=aa1f210e4a8153fe8360303c03bb84de

Community Involvement

Some years ago I became acquainted with an African American social activist in Oakland, California who insisted that I show him my sermons instead of preaching them. Taking what he said quite literally, one day I showed up in his office with a sermon in hand. He just laughed and laughed. "Dr. Yee," he said at last, "I mean get involved in the community, man. Don’t just preach it, do it." I learned a profound lesson that day.

Asian American Lutheran history has proven, too, if the staff and members of a congregation are involved in the community, the congregation will grow and the ministry will be transformed. For example, the core group of True Light Lutheran Church in New York City initially was relatively small at first. But within two decades after it joined the English District of what is later known as the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, it became the largest Protestant Chinese church in North America, with a membership approaching 1200. One of the reasons that explained the phenomenal growth of this church was the community involvement of its staff.

Bruce Edward Hall in his book, Tea That Burns, tells the story of the involvement of Miss Mary Banta, a staff at True Light, in the lives of the people. "Miss Mary Banta…seemed to have attached herself firmly to any Protestant evangelical organization over the past forty-five years that will allow her to keep fussing over Chinatown’s children. When Cousin Sooki was in the second grade she even came, unannounced, to his classroom at P.S. 23 and dragged him down to the hospital to have his tonsils removed. She had decided on her own that they needed to be taken out."(5) Well, maybe we don’t have to be that heavy handed in our involvement. But the challenge remains for us in our time and place, to get involved and don’t be afraid.

(5) Hall, Bruce Edward. Tea That Burns. New York: The Free Press, 1998. pg 231

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