By Jonathan Kwon
T
he long forgotten racist and untold legacy of Detroit remains fresh in the minds of the events collaborators and hosts. We’ve just met face to face for the first time since the onset of COVID and have recently visited the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History together to learn how people of all colors can unite together to fight against systematic racism in our city. On Wednesday evening (3/24), Andrew Kim, Samuel An, Peng-Li Liu, Jimmy Yang, Nathan Cole, Jonathan Kwon, got a call, “Hey. Do you want to join other cities across the nation to ask God for healing on Sunday afternoon?” Of course the answer was “yes!” But how? There was an unequivocal silence on the phone, undoubtedly because all of us knew we would have to act swiftly and nobody had the time to run the logistics for it. We had to do this well. We had to do this safely given the dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases in our area. We also had to do it collaboratively.
Friday morning (3/26), 10am: a plan is in motion. Logistics are ready to roll, materials have been procured, a social media strategy is in place, and a program is to follow suit. Leaders of the event represented men and women from City on a Hill Church, InterVarsity USA, Kensington Church, Metro Detroit Chinese Christian & Missionary Alliance Church, New Hope Church, and Woodside Bible Church.
Sunday morning (3/28), 8am: the forecast is forbidding. There are high winds and lots of freezing rain. Some doubt sets in. Will anybody besides the collaborators and their families come? We push that fear to the said. “It doesn’t matter. We have to continue.” So we all attend and lead our respective community church services that morning and then head over to our rally location at Kensington Church in Troy, MI.
Sunday afternoon, 3pm: We arrive at Kensington Church’s west parking lot and set up. Meanwhile both the winds and rain dissipate. I begin to think, “maybe God is shining on us and this rally.” We then pray together, beseeching God to do his will here on earth as it is in heaven. We ask God to forgive our own racism and racist hearts and minds. We ask God to move mightily in the hearts of the people across the nation to do something that the leaders of this nation can’t: change the hearts of people who are far from him.
Sunday afternoon, 3:40pm: the winds pick up and the freezing rain starts to fall from the sky. Will the people of God come to pray? Slowly but, steadily, one car after another enters the parking lot. The people of God have heard the call to pray and so they come, not alone, but with their families, and their friends. It’s not just Asian Americans. It’s people of all colors and all walks of life. They come together in the freezing rain to stand united with cities across the nation.
Sunday afternoon, 4pm: about 80 people have gathered so far. We start passing out flyers and digital programs, and singing corporately. We initiate the livestream. Then the weather gets worse. The weather must be mirroring our troubled hearts because we pause and take a moment of silence, to pray for the victims of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across our nation, and you can feel the winds whipping the microphones left and right in anguish, sorrow, and sympathy for the victims in the Atlanta massacre. The hard pelting of freezing rain confirms the tempest groaning within our souls for all of the victims of racist attacks during COVID. What a day for lament!
Sunday afternoon, 4:30pm about 40 more people have arrived. The weather is still relentless, but we continue praying. We are using Psalm 13 as our guide to lament and pray corporately. We pray in English, Hmong, Chinese, and Korean. Native speakers hear and respond in their languages as a call to lament. It’s a true Acts 2 moment. People prayed and were cut to the heart, but their faith in God was also reconfirmed and their minds refreshed.
The prayer rally in Metro Detroit was a mixed gathering of diaspora Asian Americans, unifying on the basis of their Christian faith. Jesus was at the center of our rally. The world he created, however, rejected him. He was rejected by his own people. If our savior was rejected by his own people, then that gives us hope here in Detroit and across the United States. It gives us hope because Jesus knew that he’d be received into his kingdom by his father. That’s our hope. We, as Asian American Christians, are not second class citizens. We are not marginalized. We are not irrelevant. We are heirs of the living God! That’s the Good News for all Christians, regardless of race.
We close our prayer rally with this thought from Jeremiah 29:4-7 (ESV): “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
Sunday afternoon, 5pm: we close the rally with prayer and disperse back to our communities to act in accordance to our calling as Christ followers in a corrupt and broken world. Faith without works is dead. So we must act. We committed to pray and care for the welfare of our cities and our people, Asian and non-Asian alike, because we are God’s people.
Jonathan Kwon is an Executive Pastor at Woodside Bible Church in Royal Oak, MI. Jonathan moonlights as a government and corporate consultant in his free time. Previously, he spent 15 years serving as a bi-vocational pastor working in government and then as a management consultant. Jonathan is passionate about proclaiming the Gospel through community development, social justice, preaching, and empowering churches.