Title: American Asian Disciples told: 'Speak truth to power'
Date: August 6, 1998
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
98b-48
by W. Evan Golder Editor,
United Church News
OAKLAND, Calif. (DNS) -- "Speak truth to power." In such a time as this, that's what Christians and the church need to do, according to the Rev. Wallace Ryan Kuriowa, executive director of the United Church of Christ's Office for Church in Society, Cleveland, Ohio.
Ryan Kuriowa's observation came in his keynote address to the tenth biennial convocation of NAPAD (North American Pacific/Asian Disciples), July 30-Aug. 1, here at Mills College. Currently NAPAD numbers 43 Disciples congregations as well as five missions and three new church starts.
Basing his speech on the convocation theme, "For Such a Time as This," Ryan Kuriowa said, "God has placed us here in this time, for such a time as this. We need to work for fairer, more just immigration laws. We need to work against hate crimes perpetrated against people of color. And we need to create a more hospitable presence for other Asians and Pacific Islanders as they come to a strange and new land."
More than 125 people from 15 different states attended the convocation, which also featured worship, workshops and a banquet at Oakland's First Korean Christian Church, the host congregation.
Ryan Kuriowa noted that although speaking the truth to power can seem "pretty intimidating," opportunities abound for the church to do it, "whether in the halls of Congress, or to the poultry industry in solidarity with chicken-processing plant workers, or to the prison industrial complex and the states with regard to capital punishment and the mistreatment of prisoners."
His keynote address and subsequent Bible study sessions were based on the book of Esther. This book has many characters we should pay attention to, he said, including Esther herself. She risked death by speaking the truth to the king, and the king's first wife, Vashti, who defied the king's order to parade herself before his drunken companions.
"How dare any of us say no' to the principalities and the powers?" Ryan Kuriowa asked the participants. "Vashti serves us as a model of the faithful church. God calls us to speak that powerful two-letter no' word to those who expect us to roll over and silently accept the unjust thing, just because the powerful have demanded we do so."
Ryan Kuriowa named Asian-American examples of those who refused to board the internment trains during World War II with a "no": Gordon Hirabayashi, the Quaker pacifist, who said "no" out of his religious conviction; and Minoru Yasui, Mitsuye Endo and Fred Korematsu.
"It was because of their actions," he said, "that the sad story of the internment was remembered in the 1980s and eventually led to an official apology and redress. Because persons of conscience have said no, healing has begun for that injustice."
Noting that many in the room have benefitted from the sacrifice and hard work of those who have gone before, he called on them to do two things: to keep those stories alive by telling them over and over again; and to speak out on their own against the injustices of our day.
"Esther asked the community of faith to fast and pray," he concluded. "That may be what God has called you to do. But recognize that whether we are Vashti, or whether we are Esther, or whether we are in that company of prayer, God means for us to be in the midst of the struggle for justice and hope."
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