Meet Pastor Wayne Lee

We’re beginning a new blog series featuring leaders of churches in our PRN church network. Drop in often to find out how church leaders in the Philadelphia region are facing challenges and sowing seeds of faith, hope, and love in the name of Christ. 

Today I’m interviewing Wayne Lee, who pastors Chinese Christian Church and Center, a congregation in Chinatown. I mainly spoke with Wayne about what it’s been like pastoring in the midst of ongoing public debates about the construction of a new Sixers arena in the center of Chinatown. 

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JOHN: Hi Wayne! Can you give me a sense of how you first started engaging this issue as a pastor, and how you first started thinking that you wanted to lean in a little bit more to this conversation about the arena in Chinatown.

WAYNE: If you asked me six months ago, I wouldn’t have expected to be involved in this at all. I'm more reserved and introverted, and so I don't really like being in the public eye very much. And in the early years of my pastoral ministry here, I was not very engaged in the broader Chinatown community—I wasn’t sure how to get involved. To be honest, I came out of seminary and just wanted to teach the Bible. And I did, but I was really not engaged in the community at all.

But I had recently been feeling a certain responsibility as a Chinese pastor in Philadelphia to be a part of the bigger race conversations that are going on nationwide. You know, the voice of Asian Americans has often not been as heard…sometimes we even feel like we're on the sidelines looking in, and feel like we should probably join the conversation. I was listening to national conversations that made me think that you know, in my role as a Chinese pastor, I should branch out a little bit you know, to get to talk to people.

Anyway, last fall our church got an email inviting a pastor to an initial meeting to discuss the arena, so I chose to go, and then I just decided to keep going to meetings to see what happened as I slowly got to know people.

JOHN: How has it impacted you being in these spaces with city leaders, Chinatown leaders, and various faith leaders, with different opinions being voiced?

WAYNE: It was challenging for sure. I hate conflict. You know, fortunately, I've been trained in conflict over the past 10 years, a lot. I won't go into all of it. Even though we are a Chinese Church, there are several different Chinese cultures represented within our church, and cultural differences make it difficult to understand each other at times…It’s taken me a long, long time to get here, but I feel like I'm comfortable with who I am so as of now, I can say, “Okay, you disagree with me, but that's fine. I'm okay sitting in a space where you don't, we're not 100% aligned with one another.” This took a really long time. I mean, there's a lot of stories I can tell of little ways that I got here.

I think a lot about where to draw the line in terms of being faithful to what I believe in, versus working together with others. It has opened up my perspective and other people get to see how I see the world. It’s very different than just my my own little circle that I've been mostly in my whole life. I think it becomes more difficult from a theological standpoint, when those issues are being discussed…

JOHN: As you think about the the situation with the arena, I don't know if you have a good sense, but what percentage of Chinatown residents are for the project versus against?

WAYNE: So we did a couple of surveys, over 1000 residents were surveyed. And well over 90% were against the arena. In one of them, it was high-nineties.

JOHN: I wonder, in terms of the issue of the arena, are the conversations still ongoing? And what is the process, and what does your involvement look like at this point in those conversations?

WAYNE: Ongoing. So there are two committees. One is just called the Chinatown Committee, which is the one that I'm on. The other one is called the Save Chinatown Coalition. The latter spread their reach as far as they could — I mean, they have partnerships with national organizations and their reach is really broad.

But I'm part of the Chinatown Committee and we try to be mainly just focused on Chinatown. All the members of the Chinatown Committee are leaders in Chinatown of various organizations. There are restaurant owners, a few residents, members of the local RCO…it's Chinatown focused. And we're probably going to continue to meet after the arena stuff is over, no matter what is happening, you know, just a committee meeting together trying to do what's best for Chinatown.

JOHN: What do you pray is the outcome of your involvement in all this? I mean, you’ve shared how this stretched you personally, in terms of your tendency to be insular. And I know your heart’s desire has always been to teach the Bible and pastor a congregation and help people come to faith… But what further fruit do you pray comes from this “faithful presence” that you are demonstrating in the community?

WAYNE: So I'm pretty influenced by Tim Keller, and he wrote a book called Every Good Endeavor, in which he discusses the way in which the Church is intended to work for the common good in the broader community. So I think that our role has a community church includes promoting human flourishing for all people around us…one of the things I realized is that there are a lot of people in Chinatown that don't have a voice. I mean, we have a lot of immigrants that feel very uncomfortable. They may not speak English, you know? And others are very uncomfortable speaking out — you know, part of that is also from our cultural background, because in China political engagement is just not an option in the same way. 

So I think my role as a pastor, you know, is representing Christ in this way as well, serving them. It's funny because like, most of our neighbors don't get to talk to many pastors. But I think it's helpful to have a gateway as a conversation topic to kind of talk about faith. I can get to explain to them why we do what we do.