Psalm 107:1-9
I am a second-generation Chinese American born in Boston, the Cradle of Liberty in the shadows of Fenway Park, lived in the ghettoes of Roxbury, and became an American Baptist while growing up at the fourth oldest Baptist church in America founded in 1665. My existence was not my doing. I had no part in where I was born. But my parents did.
My father immigrated to America in 1930 after his father first arrived on the shores of California as early as 1910. When my father came to Gold Mountain, he and his brother arrived in Boston to assume the operation of a hand-laundry that their father started. During World War II, my father was drafted by the U.S. Army and served honorably in Germany. For his military service, the United States granted him citizenship. All during this time of being away from China, my mother and older brother lived in the village and waited for my father to come home.
But by this time, my father had founded a new country to which he wanted to belong. With the assistance of the First Baptist Church of Boston, he along with a number of other Chinese American war veterans sponsored their wives to immigrate to America. In 1949 is when my life began.
It has been known for some time that the American Baptist Churches is the most racially diverse denomination in America. There is now no majority group. I often wonder why this is so. Could it be that our Baptist polity welcomes all? Has the ABC just been at the right place or the right time to attract so many different groups? Or might the true reason for our diversity actually is the result of God’s blessings and we haven’t much noticed it?
After decades of record-keeping done by the NCCC, American Baptists continues to be the leading denomination in settling the largest number of refugees and immigrants ahead of any other denomination. When each congregation decides to sponsor a refugee or immigrant to America, this church is fulfilling the biblical mandate to “gather in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” so that there wouldn’t be anymore “wandering in desert wastes.” There will be no more hungry and thirsty or trouble and distress.
From Psalm 107, we see that the refugees and immigrants reached “an inhabited town.” People were already there but they were willing to welcome these refugees and immigrants in. In this inhabited town, God satisfied the thirsty and the hungry God filled them with good things. The inhabited town is the denomination known as the American Baptist Churches. They welcomed the newcomers and like my father, decided that they have founded a new home to which to belong.
Diversity in Christ for me means that God’s steadfast love and God’s wonderful works to humankind will continue to be evident in our denomination because we have been faithful to welcome the strangers, the refugee, the immigrant into our “inhabited town” known as American Baptists.