In this episode of the Revitalize My Church podcast, host Bart Blair interviews Pastor David Hsu from West Houston Christian Church. Pastor David shares his story of immigrating from Taiwan to the United States at age 14, working as an electrical engineer after college, then feeling called to ministry and attending Dallas Seminary.
In 1993, Pastor David joined a new Chinese immigrant church plant in Houston called West Houston Chinese Church. He started out doing youth ministry and working with second generation English-speaking adults. In 2000, at just age 35, he took over as senior pastor when the founding pastor retired and passed the baton to him.
Over his 30 years at the church, Pastor David has led the congregation through a cultural shift as the surrounding community has changed. When he first joined, services were predominantly in Chinese except for the youth. But over time, they developed an English-speaking adult ministry and saw more intermarriages. Pastor David had a vision to grow the church beyond just a Chinese immigrant congregation.
However, when he first proposed the idea of a name change to remove the ethnic label about 10 years ago, he was surprised by significant pushback, including from some non-Chinese members who felt the Chinese identity was core to who they were. Realizing he needed to lay more groundwork, Pastor David pulled back at that time.
In the following years, even though a name change was not the immediate goal, the church went through a process of clarifying its mission, vision and values. Working with the Auxano consulting group, they developed a vision frame and landed on a new mission statement: "Welcoming sojourners home to the joy of following Jesus together." This provided a biblical foundation for their identity as a church of immigrants seeking to welcome all.
They fleshed out a three-part vision of expanding their "tent" through 1) Spiritual formation 2) Identity maturation in understanding their Kingdom mission and 3) Missional multiplication through church planting. When Pastor David presented the name change in the context of this broader vision, he found overwhelming support from leaders and the congregation. A 2022 membership vote affirmed it with 99% in favor, a dramatic turnaround from a decade earlier.
Pastor David emphasizes that becoming a church that welcomes all is an ongoing journey, not an overnight rebranding. A name change may open the door a little wider, but people will ultimately stay based on the church's hospitality, missional living and community. He describes how a visitor to West Houston Christian today would still find a predominantly Asian American congregation, but one that embraces its diversity with multiple languages used in services. The warm culture is expressed in weekly lunches together after service, which amazingly they still manage to pull off for their 800-1000 weekly attendees even after scaling back from an in-house kitchen ministry to catering.
In terms of advice to other pastors seeking to lead change, Pastor David counsels that vision must be rooted in relationship. Rather than a leader pushing their own genius ideas, they need to walk with others so there is collective ownership. He has found that clarifying mission and values provides a unifying framework to move forward amid differences over worship style, outreach methods or other potentially divisive issues. He also recommends bringing key leaders to visit other churches that have gone through revitalization to catch a vision for what the Holy Spirit can do in their own congregation.
As influences in his own leadership, Pastor David cites the Leadership Summit in earlier years, and more recently Exponential's resources on church multiplication, which have shifted his focus from just growing his own church to adva...
