Forgotten Leaders and Why History Matters: A Conversation with Tim Tseng

To kick off our 10th anniversary micro-series celebrating the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary, we sit down with Dr. Tim Tseng, Asian American church historian and director of the Asian American Christian History Institute (AACHI). Tim takes us back to 1972 and the founding of PACTS (the Pacific and Asian American Center for Theology and Strategies), tracing a lineage of Asian American Christian leadership that runs decades deeper than any single institution's anniversary can capture. The origins of PACTS: a 1972 gathering of Bay Area pastors trained in mainline Protestant seminaries who began questioning assimilation and erasure within their denominations The newly republished PACTS Reader, edited by Roy Sano and now available through Claremont Press—the story behind bringing this out-of-print, historically significant text back into circulation AACHI's mission and the "pearl divers" metaphor for surfacing hard-to-find Asian American Christian stories The Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State (1968) and the birth of ethnic studies as a backdrop to the Asian American Christian movement How the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power shaped Asian American Christian consciousness, and PACTS' relationship to (and distinction from) liberation theology The story of Mabel Lee, a pioneering unordained church leader and suffrage advocate in New York's Chinatown at the turn of the century The danger of "Columbusing"—claiming to discover ideas and movements that our elders were already engaging with over fifty years ago Tim's reflection on being forced out of theological academia in 2005, and what nearly 20 years in local church ministry taught him about listening to God's people at the grassroots We hope you enjoy this series! Tim Tseng https://aac.fuller.edu/post/person/timothy-tseng-phd/ The PACTS Reader (Claremont Press) https://claremontpress.com/uploads/3/4/8/4/34846481/theologies_of_asian_americans_and_pacific_peoples_final_.pdf https://claremontpress.com/theologies-of-asian-americans-and-pacific-peoples.html PACTS Archive https://cdm15837.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15837coll16 AACHI www.pearldive.net Sign up to receive more updates from the AAC: https://aac.fuller.edu/newsletter/ If you appreciate the work we do at the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary, please consider supporting us! Your monetary support sustains our vital work and expands Asian American research, leadership development, and pastoral formation for the Church in the year ahead. Donate here: fuller.edu/giveaac.