Sunny Kang was just 21 years old — a college junior in Wisconsin — when he accidentally founded his first church.
“No one said I wasn’t supposed to,” the Korean-American pastor, now 56, recalls with a chuckle.
It began as a bible study group with fellow students who felt out of place at other churches. Eventually, the meeting ballooned to some 50 members, held in someone’s living room, with Kang at the helm. A few months later, as part of that church, Kang founded a Christian coffee shop, which served as a community space for youth and low-income mothers.
In the following years, the young man would continue instigating community-based enterprises across Minneapolis, where he moved as a college junior to finish his degree in strategic management. He started an urban ministry with other young men to explore Christianity in the context of the 1980s. He then parlayed a summer job of painting homes into a full-blown cooperative and non-profit that trained unemployed ex-offenders to run their own painting companies.
Several years later, as the English pastor of a Korean church, he started the publication Korean Quarterly and formed a special ministry for adopted Koreans, whose population in Minneapolis tops any other city in the U.S.
Today, Kang — a short, bespectacled gentleman with a youthful demeanor — is easy to laugh, often at himself. His small, tidy office at St. Luke’s Presbyterian Church is just five minutes from his townhouse on the Hill. Across his desk sits a glossy acoustic guitar, which he says he plays “like a drum.”
The father of three, who last October stepped in as head pastor of the small church in Rolling Hills Estates, is credited for injecting a new energy into the aging congregation whose attendance has been in a steady decline for 15 years. A majority of the membership, some 60 people on any given Sunday morning, have attended the church for decades.
“It’s been pretty exciting,” notes Evelyn Chidsey, an elder who’s attended St. Luke for 42 years. “We were in a rut, and we weren’t reaching out to the community in an effective way. When Sunny came, he saw the possibilities.”
Under Kang’s leadership, the congregation feels a renewed sense of mission, Chidsey says. The church budget has increased by 20 percent, not particularly due to new attendance but because longtime members “are willing to invest in the church,” she explains. “They see that things are happening. A lot of people were feeling hopeless before.”
Kang’s parents, both North Korean refugees, met in the South after the war. The youngest of three, Kang was 11 when his father, a college professor, moved the family to rural Wisconsin after getting a job at the university.
He remembers being the only Korean family in the town of 10,000 — his mom dragged them to a Lutheran Church every Sunday despite understanding very little of the English sermons.
Today, he and Maryan, his wife of 25 years, have three children of their own: Taylor, 23, Mia, 21, and Elliot, 19. All three of them skipped their graduations at Peninsula High School to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock, an early-start residential college in Massachusetts.
“They’re official high school dropouts,” Kang says gleefully.
As part of Presbyterian Church USA, a national organization, he designed an anti-racism program, drawing from his personal experiences growing up as a racial minority. When he was pastoring a church in Duluth, Minnesota, he enrolled his three children in acting classes to build their self-confidence as half-Caucasian, half-Korean individuals.
In 2005, a producer saw the kids in an acting competition in New York and invited them to L.A. to work, mostly in commercials.
“The kids and mom moved to a small apartment in Irvine and after a few months, they said, nope, we ain’t coming home,” he recalls. “So I started looking for a job in Southern California.”
The family moved to Rancho Palos Verdes when a Chinese-American church in Torrance hired him as head pastor. He left after five years, citing differences. That same year, he was tapped by L.A. County Supervisor Don Knabe to serve on the county commission on Children and Families. He currently chairs the faith-based task force on the commission.
Kang, who has served nearly a dozen congregations in Minnesota, Miami, Chicago, says he has a specialty.
“Turning around churches,” he says. “I’d go into a church that’s in difficulty, going through conflict or downturn, and I’d come up with a way to deal with the issue and help them move forward.”
The first thing he does when going into a church, he explains, is to “assess the assets.” At St. Luke’s, what he saw was an underutilized facility ripe with potential for large, free community gatherings — Easter egg hunts, family picnics, summer garden concerts and parenting classes are among the church’s recent events.
The goal is to change the community’s idea about what we do as a church,” Kang explains. “Rather than being an institution that fights for legitimacy within the community, we just simply decided to say, this is not just a church but we are here to support the community.”
He’s currently planning a Saturday night worship service for young adults, slated to kick off late January. It will be nontraditional and heavily discussion-based.
“As a pastor, my hope would be to journey with them in the parallel process to help them ask questions, seek answers,” he says, “not from me but from God and their own experiences.” PP
