Today we’d like to introduce you to Ken Fong.
Ken, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I moved to LA area in 1978 to finish my seminary degree. Upon graduating in 1981, I began serving as a pastor of historically Japanese American church in East LA. I helped lead it to becoming the first English-only, multi-ethnic, pan-Asian American church in the nation. About a dozen years before retiring in 2017, I led it to embrace and include AAPIs who identified as LGBTQ+ and Christian.
In 2015, I launched Asian America: The Ken Fong Podcast, hosting a weekly show featuring a bevy of Asian American culture-makers and -shapers. Doing this show the first two years is what inspired me to retire at age 63 from pastoring and teaching seminary. I loved a) for the first time in my career, being able to say what I’m really thinking without the threat of being censored or fired; and b) being able to make connections far beyond the narrow lane of Christianity and the church. We have listeners in 48 States and over 100 countries, are fast-approaching 300 episodes, and nearly half a million downloads. At the end of 2020, the Asian Podcast Network awarded Episode 275 a Silver Medal in a global competition for “Best Episode of the Year,” and the Asian American Podcasters Association gave me a first-ever Golden Crane Award for “Advancement and Achievement,” recognizing my pioneering role as an Asian American podcaster.
And the Asian Hustle Network (over 70,000 members worldwide) just recognized me as one of the Fifty Unsung Asian Heroes. UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center will be digitally archiving every episode because they believe that the stories I’m collecting have historic significance. And I am especially proud that our show has become a safe and fully affirming platform for AAPIs who identify as queer or trans (and even Christian) to tell their stories… We have also served as one of the corporate media sponsors for East West Players, the oldest ethnic theater group in America. .And we are now constantly sought out by AAPI authors, their publishers, and AAPI filmmakers and their distributors to help promote their work. This was one of our hopes when we first launched, so it’s immensely gratifying to experience this now.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
In regards to leading the church to extending equal worth and standing to queer and trans people, it was definitely a costly but worthwhile journey. We ultimately saw about 30% of the church leave, but we also saw nearly 100 AAPI queer and trans Christians join, along with straight allies and families. Despite my decades as a sought-after speaker/preacher at Christian conferences, those invitations dried up (which I knew was going to happen). However, I am now a nationally respected and recognized resource for pastors and churches that are exploring how to be fully affirming. When the podcast launched, my friend served as the director, co-producer, and editor. We also split the annual costs. In the fall of 2019, he had to bow out, but I brought on a new co-producer and editor even as I took on the role of director and absorbed all the costs.
But near the end of 2020, my new partner left, so I had to quickly learn all the technical sides that I’d been avoiding since the beginning. There have been some understandable technical hiccups since then, but as time-consuming as it is, I’ve enjoyed being fully responsible for the show. I was encouraged to start a Patreon account in January 2021, and it’s been so encouraging to see some listeners now become monthly patrons. Even though we are arguably the first Asian American-hosted and -focused podcast, we still struggle to see our audience expand, if not explode. If that were to happen, it would be much easier to book high-profile guests and to attract sponsors. However, compared to other AAPI podcasts, we are doing quite well. There are just so many podcasts out there now that it’s harder and harder for new listeners to find us.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Over the span of my career as a pastor, preacher, conference speaker, and adjunct seminary professor, I’m most known as a courageous, innovative leader in the realm of Asian American Christianity. My doctoral thesis centered on the future of Asian American ministries and my dissertation became “Pursuing the Pearl: A Comprehensive Resource for Asian American Ministries” (Judson Press, 1999) and is still a required textbook in some seminary classes. In it, I cite the inevitability of having to deal with the increasing assimilation and acculturation of the succeeding generations, something that most immigrant Asian churches refuse to face. I also developed an Asian American approach to preaching, one that is more narratively-structured and visually-compelling, rather than didactically-structured and solely auditory. I honed this approach in my own pulpit for years and eventually taught Asian American narrative preaching @ Fuller Theological Seminary.
This is a radical departure from the verse-by-verse approach that has been copied from white, western preachers. I am also widely recognized as a courageous, vision-based leader who’s been willing to name some of the adaptive challenges facing our society and churches and then dare to address them. One of the most significant and pressing adaptive challenges is the legalization of same-sex marriage and the widespread acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons by Americans today, especially younger ones. And from what the Trump presidency years revealed about America and the hypocrisy of Christian nationalism, I’ve continued to work on rebuilding credibility and relevance. Since retiring, I’ve utilized my podcast platform towards this end, both by interviewing AAPI guests who are great examples, and also by being an example myself of a progressive former pastor who isn’t afraid of working alongside all kinds of people and willing to tell it like it is.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Before the pandemic hit, I enjoyed hosting most of my LA-based guests in my home studio. It was great being across from each other while having a compelling conversation. But with the pandemic, I’ve had to do all my interviews remotely. At first, I was using an app that didn’t allow us to see each other, so making a human-to-human connection was much more challenging. Now that I’ve switched apps and we can see each other during the interview, it’s been a great reminder of how important it is to ‘be together’. I think being unable to attend worship services or to hang out at restaurants with friends has also been a good reminder that we humans were made for relationships.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.aapodcast.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asianamericapodcast/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/asianamericapodcast
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/asianamericapo1
Image Credits:
All photos by Ken Fong
