‘Those Were My Very Happy Days’

Retired Christian Reformed pastor and one-time home missionary serving two Chinese churches in California, Peter S. Yang now lives with his wife, Li Ui Yang, in San Bruno, Calif. This summer as he attended 60th anniversary celebrations for Golden Gate Christian Reformed Church in San Francisco, The Banner spoke with him about his church-planting work among Chinese people in North America on behalf of the CRC.

Sixty years ago, Pastor Peter Yang opened Golden Gate Christian Reformed Church to a small group of Mandarin-speakers in a classroom space over the YMCA on 18th Avenue and 7th Street in San Francisco, Calif. “That's how I began. The first worship service attended by only 18 people,” Yang remembered. “Those were my very happy days.” It was a unique moment in history that Yang’s background perfectly met.

Yang was born in 1936, when the Japanese were still occupying China. His family hid in caves for underground church during the war: “I still have scars all over me because of those days.” After attending high school under the communist regime (where it was drilled into him to never become a minister) Yang received a 10-day visa to visit his father in Hong Kong—and never returned. He studied in Taiwan and Hong Kong College and received a full scholarship to study mechanical engineering in Syracuse University in America. On a journey to improve his English before starting university, Yang did a semester at an Alliance seminary in St. Paul, Minn., where he unexpectedly met with a Hong Kong pastor and friend of Yang’s father, who said, “God probably sent you here for engineering of human souls.” Two other pastors in following days confirmed this message, Yang recalls. Paul Szto, one of the earliest Chinese pastors of the CRC in New York, sent Yang a bus ticket to join him at the then-mission Queens CRC.

Yang studied at Gordon Divinity School and then at Calvin University, first making up for three years of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Dutch before he was accepted. Two men, seminary professor Dick Van Halsema and Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services cook Peter Gabriel, invited Yang into their respective homes for many meals, or for overnights, to talk through Reformed theology. After he was approved as a candidate, Yang accepted a call to serve the Christian Reformed Home Missions (now part of Resonate Global Mission) among the Chinese in Los Angeles in 1963.

In the 1960s, Korea had expelled many Mandarin-speaking Chinese people who ended up in San Francisco. San Francisco, meanwhile, had abolished the law stating that Chinese were not allowed to purchase property west of Van Ness Avenue. Chinese people were moving across the city. Walnut Creek (Calif.) CRC (now known as Faith Christian Fellowship CRC) helped Yang research and propose a new church to Classis Central California. “I am a Cantonese (speaker), but I opened up the first Mandarin church in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Yang said. That was 1965.

Today, Golden Gate CRC has services in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, with a senior pastor in each language.

“I wanted the church to adopt a bridge concept,” Yang said. “Bridging between Chinese, the communist influx society, with the Christian faith; bridging between the Chinese culture and the Dutch culture and the Korean culture. And it's quite a challenge.” Today, “bridge” is one of the first words you’ll notice on Golden Gate CRC’s website.

Yang retired from Golden Gate in 2001, returning to China for evangelism. “I retired because I seek God's will in my ministry life, and I went on to do mission work,” he said. He started four orphanages in four cities in China and has led China International Mission trips in South America and South Africa, becoming “a mission advocate for the Chinese churches,” as he describes it. He also served as an interim pastor in New York, Munich, and elsewhere. “My life has been enriched by answering God's call in different areas.”

Considering challenges for today’s churches in a changed world, Yang still uses the word, “bridge.”

“My personal vision for a healthy and growing and transformed church must bridge God's gospel to this contemporary world,” he said. There are three challenges to this: “One challenge would be for the church to live out Christ's love in oneness. This is the first challenge of the internal growth of the church.” It’s not easy, Yang admits. In Golden Gate CRC, the four pastors “all come from very different backgrounds.” It takes real effort to maintain oneness, and to accomplish the other challenges: a focus on mentoring in discipleship, and centering all relationships in the gospel mandate. “Abraham Kuyper's Reformed thinking, I think, is very good for people … to learn and to follow … using God-centeredness in confronting all the ‘-isms’” in society, Yang said. “We must return to a solid gospel focus that is so much needed in this current world.”

Yang believes that Chinese believers contribute the gifts of their culture to the CRC, including a radical hospitality.

“I think the Chinese culture can contribute to the Christian Reformed Church if they are given the platform,” he said.