A pastor’s witness to Asian American pain and a Gospel that refuses to look away
For the last four years, on January 15th, I have walked with Michelle Go’s family into the Times Square subway station to remember her—to retrace the steps she took before she was pushed onto the tracks. We descend the same stairs. We stand on the same platform. Every year her family shows up to grieve and to remember, and every year I show up to stand with them. Honestly, I’m not sure I have words for what that is like.
A week after Christina Yuna Lee was murdered, I was at the vigil in the park across the street from her apartment in Chinatown. AAPI churches came together to remember her. There were no candles. Instead, people drew on the ground with chalk, filling the pavement with art as a way to grieve together, to heal together. I have never forgotten that. A community was on its knees, making something beautiful in the place where something terrible had happened.
Yao Pan Ma was a 61-year-old grandfather who collected cans in East Harlem to help support his family. He was beaten and left with critical injuries. I briefly crossed paths with his family. It was a short encounter, but long enough to see the grief on their faces. To the world, he was a headline. To them, he was dad and grandpa.
He did not survive.
I live here. I pastor here. I walk these streets and ride these trains. And I have heard so many other stories that never made the headlines. People in my congregation share them with me quietly, and people in my neighborhood have just kind of accepted that the world doesn’t always stop for their pain.
That is part of what I want to talk about. Because I really don’t think the Church can afford to be a place that doesn’t stop for others’ pain.
How we respond to another’s pain teaches our teenagers too. Whether intentionally or not, it can form how they think God responds to the pain and injustice in their lives. It also demonstrates that the gospel isn’t confined to Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights. It impacts all of life.
A Wound That Keeps Getting Reopened
What we are living through is not new. That is the first thing I want you to understand.
Asian Americans have been scapegoated in this country since the moment they arrived. Most of us were never taught that the largest single mass lynching in United States history was committed against Chinese Americans in Los Angeles in 1871. We were not taught the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Japanese American internment. We were not taught about the ways that generation after generation of Asian Americans were told—sometimes with laws, sometimes with violence, sometimes just with silence—that they were guests here and not neighbors.
So, when a pandemic arrived, and public figures started pinning it on people who looked Asian, it was not a new script. It was a very old one being read again. And the people in my city paid for it with their safety—some paid for it with their lives.
What grieves me is that in 2026, the temperature has not cooled. It has risen. The rhetoric has shifted from a virus to immigration, but the target is familiar. I talk to people in my congregation and my neighborhood who are afraid to travel certain routes alone. They think twice before speaking their language on the subway. They started making themselves smaller, quieter, and less visible. It isn’t because anything has changed about who they are, but because the world around them has made visibility feel risky.
That is not a statistic. That is a person. That is someone made in the image of God, learning to hide.
What the Silence Costs
I have to be honest about something, and it is not easy to put into words.
I have not addressed this from my pulpit. Not directly. Not in the way these stories deserve. I have walked into subway stations with grieving families, stood at vigils, crossed paths with people whose loved ones were fighting for their lives, and I have not yet brought any of this into my own sanctuary and named it plainly before my own congregation.
I am still sitting with why that is. Some of it is the reality of pastoring a diverse congregation in which not everyone is ready to hear a hard word on a topic like this. Some of it is my own uncertainty about how to say it in a way that opens people rather than shuts them down. And honestly, some of it is probably just the quiet comfort of not paying the cost that comes with saying something true out loud.
I don’t fully know how that lands. I’m not writing this because I have it figured out. I’m writing this because the tension itself is worth naming, and because I don’t think I’m the only pastor sitting in it.
What I do know is that when I choose what to address from my pulpit, I’m telling my congregation what I believe matters. Not what I say I believe, but what I actually believe. And our people are perceptive. They know the difference. Barna’s 2021 report Beyond Diversity found that 50 percent of Asian American practicing Christians believe the Church should be actively teaching how Scripture calls us to care for those on the margins, compared to only 34 percent of white Christians who said the same. That gap didn’t come from nowhere. It was shaped slowly through years of omission.
There are brothers and sisters who have learned not to bring certain wounds to church because through its silence, the church told them those wounds aren’t really welcome. That should break our hearts. It’s breaking mine. And I think this article is, at least in part, me trying to figure out what comes next.
What the Gospel Says
In Ephesians 2:14, Paul writes this about Jesus: “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.” This is where I want to land, because this is where everything changes.
I have preached that verse more than once, and I’m only starting to feel the full weight of it. Paul is not speaking metaphorically. He is describing something Jesus actually did on the cross in bringing Jews and Gentiles together. The hostility between peoples—the walls we build, the ways we decide some lives matter more than others, all of it—was put to death at Calvary. Not managed. Not reduced. Put to death.
The Gospel is not just a personal escape plan. It’s not something that only deals with what happens after you die while leaving everything else unchanged. It is the announcement that the King has come, that death has been defeated, that a new humanity is being gathered right now across every line we have ever drawn. We need to show our teenagers how the gospel affects all of life. It should change how they deal with the divisions and hostilities in their schools, among their friends, or in their youth group.
Every single person bears the image of God. The grandmother on the subway, the grandfather collecting cans, the woman who thinks twice before speaking her language in public, each one of them bears the image of God. And nothing—not hatred, not rhetoric, not policy, not silence—can take that from them.
The Church should be the loudest voice in the room saying so. Bearing witness to the dignity of image-bearers is a theological position. It is what it means to follow a Lord who crossed every boundary, touched every untouchable, and died in the most public, humiliating way possible so that no one would ever be beyond the reach of His love.
God so loved the world. The whole world. It’s not just the portion that looks like the majority culture. It’s not just the people who arrived the right way or the ones who have already proven they belong. The world. A church that is actually formed by that love cannot look at Michelle Go, or Christina Yuna Lee, or Yao Pan Ma, or the neighbor who is afraid to leave her apartment and just turn the page.
We have to stop. We have to look. We have to say out loud that they are made in the image of God. They are our neighbors, and we will not be silent about what is happening to them.
This is not activism. This is the gospel, lived out. Nothing more, nothing less.
To help your teenager see other ways that the gospel impacts the unique challenges of identity, culture, and family in the Asian American community, pick up a copy of The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School: Asian American Edition. Hear from twelve authors sharing their testimonies about growing up Asian American in high school and how Jesus makes a difference in those struggles.
