APA Month Worship Service Testimony
By Gloria Chan
Co-Coordinator of Member Care and Fellowship
I’m excited for today’s special service, and see lots of new faces. Can you wave your hand or share a reaction if you are a new visitor? Let’s take a moment to greet you and recognize you. Thank you for joining us!
It’s so special to be celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, to be seen and heard. As many of you know, our community has suffered a lot this year. With the rise of Anti-Asian Hate during this pandemic, we’ve had our fair share of violence and attacks against our communities, racial trauma, and grief.
After shootings in Atlanta, I gathered the Asian American women in our congregation for fellowship and support. What was beautiful about it, was that we didn’t spend much time on issues of Asian hate. Instead, we spent most of that hour sharing our life journeys with one another, moving across oceans, continents, growing, learning, working, raising families across the country. On the one hand these stories were certainly racial stories, immigrant stories, and Asian American women’s stories; but on another deeper level, these were very human stories: stories of adaptation, triumph, and struggle.
I started to think about what it means for us as a church to hold the space of radical welcome in a racially charged and traumatic world.
What I always think about is the concept of liminality which Pastor Matt often preaches about. Liminal spaces are the spaces in between, in between transformation and change. The spaces where we have to be in paradox together — like the space in between a very racial reality and the possibility of universal love where we can be fully human, present before one another, beyond race. Living during these pandemic times, we certainly are going through this period of change, discomfort, and of transformation.
As the new Co-Coordinator of Member Care and Fellowship at CCC, this invited me to ponder what makes our church so special. I reflect on when Pastor Matt checked in with me after the Atlanta shootings, how Pastor John welcomed our family into the church when we first came, and my many discussions with Rev. Aubra Love about how we can walk the talk as a beloved community, how diversity, outreach, and radical inclusion is woven into the fabric of our church, and ingrained into what we mean by Member Care and Fellowship.
I think about our epiphany dinners and gatherings that we’ve facilitated to honor women of color, about how our Coordinating Council deliberates as an inclusive body to ensure that our decisions reflect our values and covenants as a church, all the way down to how our Sunday worship services are put together. All of these ways we walk the talk make me feel really proud of who we are and who we are becoming.
To honor that this APA Heritage month. I wrote a poem I would like to share called “Beloved Community.”
My Beloved Community
My Beloved Community knows that my identity isn’t to be celebrated or acknowledged only during heritage months.
My Beloved Community embraces me,
Knows that my landscape comes with its hills and valleys, beautiful power and sore spots.
My Beloved Community knows how to lure me into safety and facilitate spaces for equal sharing where no one voice dominates, where our stories, voices, songs matter.
My Beloved Community engages in committed action, appreciation, and active intention. This is the work of radical welcome.
My Beloved Community knows how to deeply connect with my humanity, gives me space to move through struggle, do the dance of life, to love and hate myself as long as I need or want until that struggle turns into the sweet surrender of peace, love, and ease.
My Beloved Community knows that I’m not just my sores. I’m not just a victim. It doesn’t delight in my wounds. It knows that I’m not here to share my refugee and immigrant scars for white gaze, but gives me space for my own celebrations and definitely for feeling good.
My Beloved Community knows how to melt defensiveness and sweetly listen to my soul’s whispers and shouts, that offer guidance, clues on how to soften me and my hardened tinman shell.
My Beloved Community knows that at the end of the day, the whole point of a beloved community is to love, to be transformed by love, and to feel good.