#11: Jeya So: Loving the Church You're Starting

In today's episode, Nick Warnes has a dialogue with Rev. Jeya So, one of the founding co-pastors of Anchor City Church - a Third-Culture community - in San Diego, California and is also a coach and cohort leader of new church planters for PCUSA's 1001 NWC and an online cohort director for Cyclical PCC. She loves learning about and being in spaces of new church dreamers and innovators and seeing new ways in which the ancient message is being expressed in current contexts. Her newest dream is starting a food pantry for Asian-American seniors. To find out more about Jeya So you can visit anchorcity.org. Her IG and FB is anchorcitysd.

Here are some quotes from today's interview:

• "I said, 'I can't talk bout things I hate anymore...I want to talk about things I love and dream about.' And that made us realize [church starting] was something we were being called to."
• "We felt like we didn't fit the profile [of church planters] at first."
• "God has placed dreams in your life for the corporate life of the church."
• "You get to have a voice in what happens...you get to determine what the life of the church will be."
• "We didn't see the exponential growth people expected... but that was never the dream. There were a lot of things that were becoming possible with just 50 to 100 of us."
• "As an Asian-American church, we always wanted to be a place for people outside of the church."
• "They kept saying, "Why can't we just hire someone?" Finally, we said this is just the way that it is."
• "As much as I thought this work was for other people, it was so formative for myself.

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There's a lot more going on at Cyclical, including our upcoming conference. Virtually every church around the world has been impacted by COVID-19 and we are all now in various stages of it. It can be hard to trace the threads of how to understand the church and your role in it and what kind of priorities we should be paying attention to right now. We are gathering a group of ecclesial innovators from across our international network for a conference called Faithful Innovation: Beginning a Conversation for a Post-Covid Church. When you register, you'll get the book too: 11 chapters to help you reflect on this unique moment, and make sense of what it means to be church after COVID-19. Register today at cyclicalchurches.com/events.