Samuel Chetti
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PASADENA, Calif. (ABP) — Samuel Chetti is the executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Los Angeles and Congregations of the Southwest and Hawaii — the most diverse region in the nation’s most diverse mainline Protestant denomination. During the recent American Baptist Churches USA Biennial meeting in Pasadena, Calif., Associated Baptist Press sat down with Chetti to discuss the joys and challenges of serving in such a ministry setting.
Q: In American Baptist life, you’re approaching the place where you’re a majority-minority denomination, if not already. I’m assuming that’s similar to the case of ABC of Los Angeles, if not already the case.
A: We are 62 percent immigrant congregations. We are at 120 countries represented — [the] gospel is preached in 48 languages in American Baptist Churches of L.A. I mean, I’m looking at ABC of Los Angeles, Arizona, southern Nevada and the Hawaiian islands. That’s our whole — it’s one region now. It’s about 280-plus churches and missions. Our youngest, newest congregation is of two [groups of] Karen refugees from Thailand — one in San Diego and one in Phoenix. They are all refugees — brand-new American residents who survived the persecution [they experienced in Burma].
And in the American Baptist life, we are … the most diverse region.
Forty-eight languages are spoken on Sunday morning — whether it is Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Armenian, Russian, Yugoslavian, Portuguese, English, Cantonese, Burmese — I mean, they’re all congregations.
Q: What percentage of your congregations are the historic Anglo churches?
A: I would say we have Anglos in every church, unless they are language-based. And I’d say 35 percent — 30 percent or so — are purely multi-ethnic congregations; they have everybody. Traditional Anglo churches become multi-ethnic. I can’t imagine one church that’s truly Anglo. I mean, they are dispersed among every community.
Q: So it reflects the part of the country we’re in?
A: Yes, it reflects very much Southern California.
Q: What is sort of pleasurable to you about serving in a context like that?
A: We call — I tell people, this is an asymmetrical congregational ministry development context. Asymmetrical, which means, all symmetrical systems that you have learned in seminary — church growth, leadership — don’t work here. You have to craft your own as you grow. It’s almost like constructing a plane, with passengers in it, while you’re flying it. The only thing that’s on the plane that’s working is the pilot in the front and the engine, and the rest of the thing you’re constructing as you go. Most of the time we don’t have books written, o.k. So we tend to sit down with elders, sit down with the … immigrant elders and say, ‘How will you address this issue? What does leadership mean to you? How does the second generation engage with the first generation without you losing them?’ So, what leadership changes you’ll have to make that you didn’t practice in Thailand or in Cambodia that you might have to practice here to sustain the second generation.
Q: I would assume that’s a significant challenge for a lot of your churches, is the second and third generations [of immigrant families] who grew up speaking English relating to their parents’ congregations.
A: Absolutely. And we have therapists that are from that culture that, that — well, we call them “bridging persons.” A bridging person is someone that can bridge both of these spectrums together without losing either one of them. We’re always creating third options. If there are three people, we create a fourth option.
Q: That’s very Baptist.
A: Well, yeah — but the options are there because they all agree there ought to be a fourth option. Because the three options are all far into one of the cultures — so, let’s create something that we all own, you know?
We have communities that come here that brought the traditions of their country. For example, we have here the Armenian Evangelical Baptist Church in Glendale. He [the pastor] is from Georgia and they are traditional Baptists — men on one side [of the church], women on one side. Very orthodox — very orthodox scripturally, very Eastern in church mannerisms, hierarchical. On the other hand, you have much more egalitarian Anglo, African-American congregations. So, it’s both sides.
Q: How do all these people get along in the same region?
A: We really don’t have — by the way, this region does not govern by caucuses; this is a vision of this region, that is, ‘No longer strangers and aliens, but members of the household of God and new humanity.’ So we’re always crafting, how do you define ‘new humanity’ in management? …. My board has at least 11 countries represented. But they’re not caucuses; they’re not black, white, Hispanic caucuses. We have Hispanic, we have Africans, we have Asians, we have other people. We’re there representing cultures, but we’re a non-caucus-managed region. We’re a household-of-God-managed region, without caucus representation….
Because what we’ve discovered [is], when you bring caucuses into the picture, you create a very uneasy tension — who’s got the power and who doesn’t. I decided to remove the entire structure out of there, so the anthropology and the church management, region management, comes out of Ephesians, ‘no longer strangers and aliens, members of the household of God and new humanity in Jesus Christ.’ That’s it.
Q: So, ethnic diversity, theological diversity — do these produce tensions in meetings?
A: We have tensions when we have conferences — because about 30 percent of our congregations are charismatic. And the rest of them are various levels of — shades of evangelical openness, to one church that’s very liberal. We tolerate, we’re together. When the issue of homosexuality came, we took a very strong position. However, we didn’t have any fights. We had a very civil discussion about it. And we left in the end — those who agreed, those who disagreed — that the region’s policies were [we were] not going to do ordinations, we will not do marriages [for gays], and that’s it. The rest is, “They can do what they want.”
Q: What is it like to have the entire denomination meeting here, in your back yard — despite all the hard work for you, obviously?
A: Number one, they have never met in Los Angeles. They have met in San Diego and San Jose. And so this is the first time they’ve ever met in Pasadena, which is a very compact little city; everything is right here. So they can just walk to the restaurants, the convention hall, the plenary sessions are in [a] 3,000-capacity [auditorium] … so this was chosen primarily because we wanted to create the closeness of worship, of connection and expose them to a multi-ethnic feast tomorrow. If you’re here, you’re welcome to come. It’s going to be, here’s a group from Hawaii. All African Americans. The first African-American hula team…. All the way to a classical Italian-Argentinean opera singer.
And so we wanted to give all American Baptists that which they dream all the time to experience, and that is that we are multi-ethnic and, honestly, this region, I am very fortunate — this region has the least amount of troubles for me.
Now, there is a normal chaos — this is a background noise for me — it’s just a general chaos; chaos in management styles, chaos in levels of understanding what time you show up to meetings, chaos in communications.
But these are what I call asymmetrical, in the sense that we all use symmetrical patterns of communication, symmetrical patterns of theology, systematic theology — that doesn’t exist for us. So, I have to make asymmetrical normal. And that’s the way we function, you know? Otherwise, I’ll go crazy — because I have to change my paradigm in my head. I am in an asymmetrical system, which will allow me to come up with a new way of looking at things.
Q: Do you think that sort of presages what the entire church will be faced with very shortly here?
A: Yes. In my estimation, what we are dealing with — look, we’ve been here 103 years. This is the first [region] which is a mission of the ABC. A hundred years ago, when the film industry started, with silent movies and all that, they sent these railroad cars that would come and bring [the] gospel here — what they called “chapel cars.” From the beginning, this convention has always been inclusive of black, Hispanic and Asian. When the Japanese were interned [by the federal government during World War II], the convention executive, my predecessor, Dr. [Ralph] Mayberry used to go to preach [the] gospel to them in the camps. We wrote letters to Congress [opposing the internment]; always we’ve been in this multi-ethnic milieu.
Rarely we use the word “black” here. Now, from the beginning it was “African American.” I was so surprised; I went back [to the] 1941 minutes, it said “African Americans.” Which is a surprise; it was not used in those days; they called them “colored” churches and all that. I’m proud of that — proud of the heritage of this group. They exercised a kind of maturity that allows me to function as executive in an atypical manner. Any other place would be hard, you know.
So, I love what I do. I’m energized by the creativity. We do what we call “fusion worship.” Fusion worship means that we sing the same different hymn in nine different ways — jazz, salsa, tango, calypso, classical — what’s the other one? Reggae. So, by the time the song is over, you see all these different people jumping on the floor. It’s touching somebody on that floor.
We’re increasingly creating fusion worship, fusion theological understanding, conversations. Which is helping us not to lose touch with the various traditions that are part of it…. There’s a lot of things we do out of necessity; we have to craft it carefully. Otherwise we won’t be in business here.
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.
Related ABP story:
News Analysis: American Baptists celebrate, struggle with diversity (7/21)