BEGINNINGS...
Michael J. Clingenpeel, January 2002
Note to the Reader
Almost three centuries ago, Isaac Watts wrote that “time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away.” Long before time claims its sons and daughters, it erodes their remembrance of events.
Memory, like all things human, is fallible and finite. But memory, at its best, is gracious. Over time our minds brush away details and smooth over wrinkles, leaving a portrait of the past that is accurate, even if occasionally selective.
I say this for the reader to understand the following. My memory of the founding and early growth of the Ann Arbor Chinese Christian Church is not based on meticulous research of the congregation’s founding documents, minutes of the Packard Road Baptist Church , interviews with members, or my personal notes written at the time, the latter of which there are none.
Rather, this brief account comes from my current memories of events that transpired two decades ago. Some of these recollections cause me to chuckle; others baffle and amaze me. All of them deepen my awareness that God’s Spirit runs ahead of human plans, God’s power dwarfs human achievements, and God’s work outstrips human expectations.
I was certain then, and the reflection of two decades has not altered my opinion, that the founding and growth of the Ann Arbor Chinese Christian Church was an authentic work of God.
The Planning
In May 1979 my wife, Vivian, and I arrived in Ann Arbor , where I began my tenure as pastor of Packard Road Baptist Church . I set to work armed with a newly-inked Doctor of Philosophy degree, a birth certificate showing I was a year shy of my 30th birthday and a conviction that pastoral ministry involved equal quantities of biblical preaching, pastoral visitation, interpersonal relationships, sociological insight and sheer effort. Every item in this repertoire was beneficial, though experience tells me that more prayer and personal devotion would have tied me more directly and intimately with the vast resources of God.
During the first year of my ministry, the congregation, with my urging and involvement, began a process of long-range planning. The notion of “long-range” planning is no longer feasible in a culture of planned obsolescence and gigahertz-speed change; it is more realistic to conduct “strategic” planning. Then, we clung to the grandiose idea that we would cast a vision for our ministry at least five years into the future.
We asked many of the important questions – who are we as a congregation? Where do we want to be five years from now? What should we be doing for God that currently we are not doing? We used tools of sociological analysis like census tract data and projections from urban planners in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County .
In the Baptist State Convention of Michigan, then as now, the prevailing emphasis was on personal evangelism and church planting. The strategy du jour was to launch a mission congregation based upon an accepted principle of the church growth movement that new churches grow more rapidly than existing churches.
The long-range planning committee wrestled over whether to recommend that Packard Road Baptist Church begin a traditional, Anglo church-type mission in Ann Arbor or contiguous communities. For two reasons the committee decided against this.
First, we did not believe that Ann Arbor and the surrounding communities were under-churched. Each of the small towns around Ann Arbor had an evangelical, and in some cases Southern Baptist, witness already. North Prospect Baptist Church in Ypsilanti had begun a mission in Saline. South Lyon Baptist Church had started a mission in Brighton . North Ann Arbor did not have a Southern Baptist church, so we considered a satellite congregation in that area, but Huron Hills Baptist Church functioned as a strong Baptist witness near the University of Michigan North Campus .
Second, and perhaps more important, we believed it was unwise to dissipate the human and financial resources of Packard Road Baptist Church at a time when the church could not sustain these losses to its attendance and offerings. The church still paid about $15,000 annually toward indebtedness on its building which, at the time, was almost 15 percent of its annual budget.
Of greater concern was the depletion of membership that a mission church would require. A critical mass of Packard Road members would be needed to form a new mission, and the size of our membership and regular participation levels in worship and other programs was not sufficient to sustain this drain. At the time about 150 to 200 people were in worship during the September to May cycle. We opted to strengthen our ministry base rather than multiply our assets.
This ministry strategy did not preclude us, however, from starting a new church. Study of the early results from the 1980 census verified what we sensed from observation – that Ann Arbor was blessed with a diverse racial and ethnic population. From other sources it confirmed what we guessed – that several national or ethnic groups did not have an evangelical witness in their language or targeted toward their cultural and ethnic identity.
Among the principles of the church growth movement spawned by Donald McGavran at Fuller Theological Seminary was “the principle of homogeneity.” Likes attract likes. We believed it was a fair application of this principle to begin a non-Anglo congregation, preferably a non-English language mission. Hispanics attract Hispanics; Chinese-speakers attract Chinese-speakers, et cetera.
The Serendipity
I live with an unshakable conviction that God’s revelation comes through empirical methods, such as sociological analysis, as much as through serendipitous moments. For most people, however, revelation through reason is not near so compelling as God’s presence in events and experiences of intuition.
On Sunday morning, October 26, 1980 , the work of reason ended and mystery of serendipity began.
That morning I preached a message which I titled “Joining the Giraffe Society.” The message was prompted by the founding of a group called the “Giraffe Society” and announced in an article in the arcane journal Quest. The organization honored 271 Americans, past and present, who had the courage to “stick their necks out” for the good of our society. These citizens, including a clergyman who had stimulated several hundred churches to sponsor refugees, refused to knuckle under to fear, apathy, mediocrity, and inertia. The goal of the article, of course, was to jar the reader out of complacency so that he or she would take risks to achieve some worthy goal for society.
What is the church, I asked, if not a religious version of the Giraffe Society? At our best, followers of Jesus are a fellowship of believers who risk their hearts and lives to incarnate the presence of God, to gain followers for God’s Kingdom, and to pursue the will of God regardless of cost. Faith in Jesus is a noble risk, I said, in which we release ourselves into the trustworthiness and love of God.
I described how all of life’s common ventures involve risk and how risk is the only means by which we learn the limits of our potential. But I concluded the message by exhorting the congregation that no life staked upon God is a failure.
My text was John 12:24-25: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
Following the service Pichai Chongsawangvirod, a UM graduate student and member of Packard Road , met me in the hallway and substituted the casual affirmation that accompanies much worship with a pointed response to my message. He wondered aloud whether God might be asking him and others at Packard Road to start a church for a growing Chinese-speaking population in the Ann Arbor area. The time had come, he said, to “stick our necks out” and risk this new venture.
Christians arrive at an understanding of God’s will in a variety of ways. One way is to let reason and common sense leads and wait upon some event or experience to confirm or reject the direction. In this way the promptings of one’s mind and heart are corroborated by a person or event outside us.
Pichai’s understanding of God’s Spirit served as an independent verification of what the long-range planning committee and I already were discussing. I promised Pichai this was under consideration, but my penchant for organizational process caused me to respond with deliberation to Pichai’s suggestion.
Weeks, perhaps several months, later I was in Detroit for the pastors’ conference of the Greater Detroit Baptist Association. Following the meeting Dr. Larry Martin, Director of Missions for the GDBA, and I went to lunch in Detroit ’s Chinatown , a favorite of both of us. Larry was a friend to Packard Road during his tenure in Detroit . He always championed our autonomy as a congregation, even when some of our congregation’s decisions did not meet the approval of numerous other Southern Baptist churches in Southeastern Michigan .
We talked shop. I told Larry about our desire to begin a Chinese-language mission, and we agreed that the first step would be to locate a Chinese pastor who could undertake the task. At that time Packard Road had made no formal, monetary commitment to the mission, though as I recall our long-range plan endorsed in principle the idea of starting a language mission church. Our lunch ended with no plan of action, but my request that Larry keep us in mind if he learned about a person who would consider helping us to begin a Chinese-language church.
The Phone Call
The second week of June, 1981, Vivian and I attended the Southern Baptist Convention in Los Angeles . One morning that week I was jolted awake at 6 a.m. by the dogmatic ring of our telephone, a sound most pastors associate with dreadful news when the call comes so early in the morning. When I heard the voice of Janet Crook, our Packard Road church secretary, I knew the call was not routine.
“Mike,” she said, “the Chinese pastor is here to start the Chinese church and wants to know what to do first.”
More than the early hour left me speechless.
“What Chinese pastor?” I mumbled into the receiver. “I recall talking with the director of missions about starting a Chinese-language church, but I didn’t authorize him to secure a pastor for it,” I added.
Jan, always unflappable, was persistent: “He’s standing here in my office and wants to know what to do first. What do I tell him?”
Rarely glib at 6 a.m. , I gave her a simple suggestion, tinged with sarcasm: “Hand him the Ann Arbor phone book and tell him to call everyone with a Chinese name and invite them to church this Sunday.”
That is precisely what Joshua Wong did.
The First Year
Twelve people, if I recall correctly, showed up for church that Sunday afternoon in mid-June, 1981, for the inaugural service of the Ann Arbor Chinese Christian Church.
Every Sunday afternoon they met for worship at 3 p.m. in our sanctuary on Packard Road . Afterward they produced a meal in the kitchen and fellowship hall. In only ten weeks, their number had increased to about thirty, many of whom were graduate students at UM.
In August their pastor, Joshua Wong, appeared in my office one day and told me he was returning to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth , Texas for his final year.
This caught me off guard. For whatever reason, I assumed he had decided to forgo his studies until the church plant was stable, or at least would wait until a new pastor could be found. Joshua was confident he would return with his wife, Ruth Ann, when he completed his degree in church music the following spring, and he was equally confident that the fragile mission would flourish under the supervision of Packard Road .
God clearly had a life wish for AACCC, because the young congregation not only survived, but thrived until Joshua’s return. I preached once or twice a month at the Sunday afternoon services, through an interpreter, of course. I quickly learned that a twenty minute message in English stretched to forty minutes when translated, so I trimmed my Sunday morning sermon to the Packard Road church and delivered it on Sunday afternoon to the Chinese brothers and sisters. A retired missionary to China who lived in north Ann Arbor preached on many other Sundays. During the year, I officiated at more than one wedding of couples in the Chinese congregation.
The highlight of that first year came on Easter Sunday, 1982. On Sunday afternoon, about 90 people attended the worship service of the AACCC. I baptized ten Chinese adults, and we celebrated communion during the service. It remains one of the highest privileges of my ministry in Ann Arbor .
The Church Starts to Mature
When Joshua Wong returned to Ann Arbor to resume his duties as full-time pastor, the church continued to provide a niche in the churched community of the city.
There were occasional issues that challenged the young church’s fellowship and, while they created considerable debate, they did not undermine the congregation’s survival.
One issue was the acceptable mode of baptism. Joshua, being educated in a Baptist seminary and serving in part under financial support from a Southern Baptist agency, advocated baptism by immersion for believer’s only. This represents the historic Baptist understanding of this New Testament practice, though other Christian denominations practice baptism by a different mode and timing.
Some in the Chinese congregation preferred the mode of sprinkling, based largely upon the translation of “baptism” that appeared in a Chinese edition of the New Testament translated by Presbyterian missionaries, as I understand it. I don’t recall exactly how the matter was resolved, and I believe the mission church may have lost a few members over the controversy, but it did not destroy the fellowship.
The other issue was more practical and involved the Packard Road Baptist Church . As the Chinese congregation grew and became more active under the ministry of a full-time pastor, scheduling conflicts were created with activities of the Packard Road congregation. More than once a group in the Packard Road Church arrived to find that the Chinese congregation had not vacated the room or space they were slated to use. When it happened on Easter Sunday, 1983, a conversation between members of both churches resulted to ensure that future schedule conflicts did not exist.
A Human-Divine Work
In retrospect, the existence and growth of the Ann Arbor Chinese Christian Church is, like most works of faith, both human and divine. Any church is, after all, a hybrid institution throughout its existence.
One factor that accounts for the success of this young mission church was a committed, capable lay leadership among the Chinese Christian community. Many of its founding members were bright, winsome men and women who assumed responsibility for the essential functions of the church – worship, evangelism, fellowship, education and ministry. Without this, the church would not have survived and thrived during its mostly pastor-less first nine months of life.
A second factor was an unshakable conviction among the Chinese congregation that such a church needed to exist in Ann Arbor . Without this clear sense of mission they likely would not have persisted.
A final factor was the unmistakable hand of God upon the process. This invisible, yet always palpable, presence gave the movement its energy and endurance. From its beginnings the Ann Arbor Chinese Christian Church was “a God thing.”