Forefront Leadership Team Questionnaire: My Spiritual Journey

I wrote this essay in-response to the first question on the Forefront Leadership Team Questionnaire.

Please describe your spiritual journey

My spiritual journey has been about feeling at home in uncertainty and unknowing. It has been about cultivating a faith that welcomes questions even when no answers exist. Through involvement in different faith communities, I have found a home in Forefront, where I feel comfortable practicing this form of the Christian faith communally.

I was raised in a jambalaya of cultures. I spent part of my childhood in a Taiwanese immigrant church in an inner city suburb of Sydney in Australia. In the middle of the first grade, my parents moved us to China, where my formative years were spent in a predominantly American community in Beijing. By local law, foreign citizens were granted relative autonomy in worship so we worshipped at churches created by-and-for foreigners in China. I only realised after leaving Beijing that it wasn't normal for church greeters to be responsible for checking passports!

During my high school years, I started asking questions and I don't think the people around me were equipped to handle my inquisitiveness. At school, we were learning about evolution and I took it in stride, telling myself that I could parrot the talking points at school while my faith held the truth. The disquiet in my faith started bubbling when one day, my brother took me into his room and told me he thought he was gay. I gave him a pretty typical Side B response: That I loved him, but we all knew this thought was a sin.

I started dating someone in high school who was not a Christian amidst this spiritual turmoil. One morning in Sunday school, the youth pastor preached a sermon about how if God is love, then we can't love without God. Thus, non-Christians are incapable of experiencing and feeling love. That felt so blatantly wrong to me that I texted my then-girlfriend that I wanted to leave church. In my recollection, I left mid-sermon to see her and never looked back.

Somehow, despite avoiding universities with any religious affiliation in my college search, Haverford College slipped by my filter. I found myself a confused and angry first year on a Quaker campus. Despite being initially resistant to Quakerism, I quickly found myself enamored with long moments of silence to quiet the soul. The unprogrammed form of Quaker Meeting was very odd but made a lot of sense to me. After all, religious authority had preached harm, so a world in which we just spoke to each other as Friends without titles felt safe.

In my first year hall, I met people from denominations I didn't know existed. Episcopalians, Unitarian Universalists and Methodists spoke about how important their faith was to them. It wasn't until the a Quaker woman next door to me started hooking up with another woman on our hall (and very loudly) that I really had a conversation for the first time with them about their faith and learned that being Queer and being Quaker had never been in conflict for them. I felt this profound jealousy at the fact that they'd never experienced this tension I felt.

College went by very quickly and during my final semester of my senior year, I started talking to people who had taken Religion classes. All of a sudden I felt a profound sadness that I had not gotten a chance to examine religion in a secular setting. I started hearing terms I'd never heard before like "Liberation Theology" or "Queering Jesus". One night, I got really drunk and screened Prince of Egypt and cried and said something resembling "God is Liberating!" before passing out. A friend saw me in this journey and invited me to a Reconstructionist Jewish Seder, which I found profound beauty in.

My first job after university was as a software engineer at Facebook in the San Francisco Bay Area. The wealth inequality in California was incredibly stark and all of a sudden, the faith I was raised in started offering answers where nothing else did. As I walked by levels of homelessness incomprehensible to anyone from where I was raised, I was reminded of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. As I played a small role at a multinational conglomerate, I started thinking about Zechariah the Tax Collector and what it meant to be an agent of the Empire. At a gala, I first heard of an organization called the "Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity", a nonprofit that equips churches to be sanctuaries for refugees and undocumented people. I figured that any church that tried to do this must be good so I picked the one closest to me, a Presbytarian Church, and started attending.

Through the grapevine, I learned of a Facebook group called "Progressive Asian American Christians" (PAAC). Through the vast wealth of knowledge in this group I started learning about terms like "Affirming" and what it meant to discern whether I could be part of a church family. In early 2020, I went to a local Bay Area meetup and learned that most of them attended an affirming church in Oakland called OakLife Church. The timeline is hazy, but in some combination, I ended up moving to Oakland and attending OakLife regularly.

I spent the pandemic attending OakLife online and then moved to Taiwan to be with my family for a year. During that time, I started exploring the Taoist/Folk religions that most of my family hold sacred. I wrote some of my learnings from this process down in my Baptism Statement on my personal blog. Much of that time informs my Christian practice today.

In 2022, I spent a summer in the city running the hackNY Fellowship. Through PAAC, I learned of a church called Forefront. I was enamored by the worship and how nerdy many of the sermons felt. Pastors Venida and Josh spoke so eloquently about everything from the Wesleyan Quadrilateral to the history of the early church. Every Sunday I'd look forward to Kinship Café, where I felt like maybe I was scratching that itch of the Religion Minor I never did in college.

That summer went by quickly and when I returned to Oakland I found myself wanting to return to New York City. I made the decision to move to the city the following year. OakLife was the first affirming church I felt at-home in, so I made the decision when leaving for them to baptise me. I was baptised on a beach near Oakland on a windy, sunny, NorCal day with my friends and family present physically or dialing in from all over the world.

I moved to New York City. I found an apartment walking distance from Forefront and started attending. To be honest, it took a long while for Forefront to feel like a home church. It wasn't until Venida tapped me to help run the BIPOC Small Group that I started forming deeper connections with folks in this community. I was uncertain if I wanted to do this. I didn't even know if Asians counted as BIPOC and so I spent a long time asking around until someone was like "You know your pastor wouldn't tell you to run this if you weren't a BIPOC right?" Running the BIPOC group has led to being on Prayer Team which has led to feeling comfortable hanging out with church folks outside of church. Forefront is such a deeply philosophical, curious and welcoming community that now forms a very core part of my being in New York City.

I'm so thankful for this spiritual journey. It's taken me across faiths, across denominations and across continents. While I don't have nearly enough answers to my faith, growing up, if I could have silenced the part of me endlessly questioning it I would have done it without a second thought. It's strange the part of me I wanted to excise is now the bedrock of my faith. I wonder if that kid angrily demanding something better of the faith he was raised in would feel proud of where he's been and where he's going. I hope that he would be.