Hi everyone! My name’s Ray, and I’ve lived in New York City for over 15 years ever since I began my undergraduate studies at NYU. I studied mathematics, but shortly after my freshman year I began feeling the call towards pastoral ministry. This was largely due to my own transformative experience with my youth pastor when I first started exploring faith as a teenager, as well as my passion for working with people. By the end of college, I had discerned that God was calling me into vocational ministry.

I received my Master of Divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, though I was still going back and forth between Boston and New York because of my love for the latter. After graduating, I moved back to New York and began serving at various churches. For much of my spiritual journey I had been shaped by Asian American Christian settings, but this changed when I went on staff with an LGBTQ+ faith-based nonprofit and began ministering to queer people from a variety of ethnic and denominational backgrounds. It was there that God really began to shape my heart towards culture-crossing, boundary-breaking work.

In much of my experience working with people, I recognized a kind of tribalism in every extremity — whether inside or outside a church setting, whether in progressive or conservative spaces — causing us to decide who was “in” and who was “out.” The result was a very fragmented society that divided people by political, ideological, and socioeconomic boundaries. Technology also pushed many of these conversations online in the form of interactions that felt very impersonal (as they weren’t between people who knew and understood each other’s backgrounds) and also impractical (since they weren’t happening at the local level, even the pursuit of “truth” didn’t answer questions of how to live out our convictions in our specific contexts). And most of all, the result was that I wasn’t seeing people on either end of the extremes engaging meaningfully with the poor and the oppressed in the radical and intimate way that Christ called us to.

This led me to plant Embody Church, a Third Way space that invites dialogue and disagreement over a variety of issues while still holding to the centrality of Jesus and the invitation of the gospel. Our humanity is imperfect, broken, and divided — and we shouldn’t be surprised to see our theological and political positions reflect that as well. By focusing on the inclusive (inviting a variety of backgrounds to both express and experience the presence of God) and intentional (postured purposefully outwards to those on the margins) love of Jesus, my prayer is that we would begin to embody the beloved community that Jesus sought to create. And by keeping our ministry local in a way that shatters the assumptions of online presumptions and generalizations, my hope is that we would speak hope to a world that is so desperately aching for it. Though I’m seeing an increasing hunger for good pastoral leadership (and to the best of my ability I will try, imperfectly yet humbly and in a way that always seeks feedback and forgiveness), my belief is that we are all ministers — called to invite one another, across differences and from every tribe and tongue and nation, to have an encounter with the risen Lord Jesus.

I hope you’ll join me on that journey!

P. Ray