Berkley Center

Andrew Brown: I have very distinct memories of my dad picking me up from school. Not taking me home, because there was no one at home. Just taking me to church, and he would do work in his office and be like, "Just hang out for a couple hours." So I would just run around in the sanctuary, and that made the sanctuary a less sacred place, I'll say, and I think that's indicative of something broader, where the more time you spend watching law and sausages get made—

Rebecca Ngu: Yeah, totally. Totally.

Andrew Brown: Yeah, it certainly made me more skeptical of at least organized religion. I don't know. How did this whole redefining process of traveling over and over again, uprooting in the name of the unquestionable authority of God... Which really when you put it like that, you got to do it, I guess. How did that affect what you believe? Or your own faith, which is maybe not quite the same thing.

Rebecca Ngu: The other thing, it's like we never had a physical building that was a church, because we were so-called pioneers. And so when we moved to these new places, we would rent out a community center or rent out studios where people practiced dance and stuff, but it was so funny. It would be a bunch of theater people practicing for their show or something, or just performing arts people, and then my family coming in with guitars and the communion, and—

Andrew Brown: I really love the image of people marching in with bread and wine and guitars, and other people marching out and they're just like, "Zip, zap, zop."

Rebecca Ngu: Yeah, so we moved around a bunch, and for a while also we had it in the home. And so it was always makeshift. For me, faith was constituted by my family, and then as I grew up, it also just became a very personal relationship too. The thing is, I guess, we were immigrants, but we didn't necessarily have an... We had an immigrant story, but with the cause being God told us so, which is different, which is a missionary kind of narrative.

Andrew Brown: Yeah. It's a recurring feature of every time we move, every time your church says, "Okay, we're no longer interested in having you as a pastor." The proximate cause tends to be pretty arbitrary. Things like, "We don't like that you decided to have chairs instead of pews. We don't like that you brought a guitar into this worship service. We don't like that you wanted to have your family dog in the parsonage." These are actual things that led to my entire family moving. 

I'm not sure that there are big reasons for any particular thing. Part of me says I hope, I want, I think maybe I believe in God, and then the larger part of me says but whatever these other questions are, they're secondary to all the institutions that I'm in, which are exclusive for its own sake, should be many times more accepting than they are. And that's something that I can actually get behind without too many qualms.

Rebecca Ngu: Yeah. But that is the Gospel, in many ways.

Andrew Brown: That's the part. That's like Christianity reduced to a nice sauce.

Rebecca Ngu: Yeah. Yeah, Jesus didn't have a building. He just walked and picked people up along the way.

Andrew Brown: As a pioneer.