“The decision was there very early for me,” the Rev. Greg Kimura advised The Dwelling Church. On October 18, the previous nonprofit government was elected the sixth Bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin, one of many smaller dioceses of the Episcopal Church, which has handled outsized issues.
“It’s my sense…that the boat has been turned already, and the diocese now’s on secure floor,” Kimura advised TLC.
In 2007, the ecclesiastical district in Central California went by a really public break up, with majorities of 40 parishes departing to type what’s now the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of San Joaquin. The division led to a protracted authorized battle over church property that lasted for years.
All through the turmoil, membership slumped. What was then an 8,800-member diocese with 47 church buildings is now lower than a 3rd of its measurement.
“However the church, to its credit score, stood agency on the problems of sexuality and on ladies’s ordination,” Kimura stated. “And that message was Gospel-centered, and that message persevered amidst all of the battle, and now the church is in a special place. These are settled issues now within the Episcopal Church.”
With eyes on the longer term, the fourth-generation Japanese American and third-generation Episcopalian foretells potentialities. “I believe proper now’s only a actually ripe second for evangelism,” he stated. As bishop, he hopes to convey a “sort of small evangelical ethos into my ministry.”
The present rector of St. James’ Church in South Pasadena, California, within the Diocese of Los Angeles, has a monitor file of bringing stability and even progress to congregations he has led. Throughout his very first task, nonetheless, he confronted a catastrophe.
In November 1996, the parish constructing of Holy Spirit Church at Eagle River, Alaska—a suburb of Anchorage—caught fireplace. Kimura was then rector, and his congregation’s sanctuary was extensively broken by water and smoke. Gear, tables, chairs, and even supplies for Sunday College have been decimated.
“We thought we’d lose a number of the trustworthy,” reads a story in regards to the fireplace on All Saints’ web site. However 135 individuals attended the service in a makeshift sanctuary, the place Kimura gave “his most heartfelt therapeutic sermon ever.” The parish rebuilt, and Kimura led the church to transition from mission standing to a financially self-sufficient parish. “First mission in 45 years to develop into a parish,” the forthcoming chief pastor of San Joaquin famous in his CV.
Kimura then grew to become a college chaplain, and noticing the panorama of the church—the place serving within the priesthood full-time isn’t at all times possible—he pursued a PhD within the philosophy of faith in Cambridge and served in nonprofits. For six years, he led the Alaska Humanities Discussion board, a nonprofit selling Alaskan identification, which opened doorways for him to maneuver to California to function president and chief government officer of the Japanese American Nationwide Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate establishment.
Mimicking a well-known phrase to explain his first board assembly within the Los Angeles-based group, he stated, “I knew I used to be in one other world, you recognize, it wasn’t Alaska anymore.” Throughout that assembly, he met Norman Mineta, the previous transportation secretary in the course of the Bush administration. On 9/11, the Japanese American authorities official refused calls to profile Arab residents.
“Within the chaotic hours and days following the assaults, Mineta didn’t but know that his childhood incarceration by the federal authorities within the aftermath of Japan’s Pearl Harbor bombing almost 60 years earlier could be a vital component in selections about how the George W. Bush administration responded to 9/11,” Susan Kamei writes within the Asia Occasions.
“We owe a terrific debt of gratitude to Norm Mineta, as a result of he was there and stated, ‘You’ll be able to’t do that,’” Kimura advised TLC.
Mineta’s household’s expertise isn’t summary for Kimura–however part of his household’s historical past.
Minidoka Focus Camp
The day after the assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the FBI raided the house of Kimura’s great-grandparents. His great-grandfather, who ran companies in Anchorage, was interned as an alien enemy in the identical detention heart the place his granduncle was coaching as a navy police officer. The next yr, the Kimuras have been all detained collectively on the Minidoka focus camp in Idaho, the place the Episcopal priest’s father could be born.
It was at Minidoka the place his grandparents, William and Minnie, would convert to Christianity from Buddhism. After the warfare, the couple grew to become very concerned in All Saints Church in Anchorage—William, an artist, designed the stained-glass home windows for the church. Minnie served as treasurer of the altar guild till she handed away.
Even whereas working within the nonprofit world, Kimura served as a priest. Whereas head of the museum, he was an aiding priest at St. Cross Church in Hermosa Seashore, California. “I’ve spent my profession not understanding something however being a priest,” he stated. 5 years after main the cultural establishment, Kimura grew to become the rector of St. Andrew’s Church in Ojai, California. There, he confronted one other sort of fireplace–a wildfire.
The Thomas Fireplace of 2018 in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the most important of its sort within the state’s trendy historical past, virtually burned the city of Ojai to the bottom.
Bishop John Taylor of Los Angeles remembers speaking to Kimura over the telephone. “He was driving round by the smoke, ensuring farmworkers and unhoused individuals weren’t in danger,” Taylor advised TLC in a press release.
At St. Andrew’s, Kimura began a Spanish-speaking service regardless of not understanding any Spanish himself. It grew to become the most important of the three Sunday companies, which made the rector notice “that there’s actually an enormous want on the market.”
Most members of the Spanish-speaking service have been migrant subject employees from Central Mexico—women and men who, as Kimura remembers, didn’t take day without work even in the course of the pandemic.
“They have been the individuals who have been on the market choosing meals. They’re happy with the work that they do, and they need to be,” he stated. “They’re producing meals that feeds households, that feeds America.”
Referring to his future task, he added, “Folks don’t notice this, however the San Joaquin Valley gives 50 p.c of all of the produce for the US.” Notably, an estimated 2.4 million Latinos stay within the central San Joaquin Valley. In keeping with the 2022 census, they make up 54.8 p.c of the residents.
Kimura can now pray the liturgy in Spanish and might casually converse utilizing the language. The Diocese of San Joaquin, led by its present bishop, the Rt. Rev. David Rice, and Hispanic Missioner, the Rev. Nelson Serrano Poveda, have began a ministry to get nearer to Spanish-speaking immigrants who work on the farms—and who proceed to work regardless of the threats of fires, a pandemic, and, most not too long ago, illegal detentions.
The latter makes Kimura livid and indignant. “I believe the church goes to be judged by its response to those troublesome instances,” he stated. “When Christ was strolling the earth, he was at all times going out to communities that have been being excluded and marginalized. So my mannequin for ministry has at all times been to try to comply with what Jesus himself did.”
A visible circulated extensively within the media reveals movies and photographs of migrants being shoved, strangled, and brought away in unmarked automobiles by ICE. Even in courtrooms the place they go for normal check-ins, they’re approached by masked brokers to be detained and doubtlessly deported.
Kimura, who has written a e book in regards to the sanctuary motion, has been accompanying migrants at their ICE check-ins even in the course of the first Trump administration. One time, he accompanied a mom of two whose household was “deathly nervous that she’s going to get deported.” He picked up the lady and drove her to her appointment. She needed to test in with ICE thrice in three weeks.
Kimura stated he stored a contingency plan for such work, denoting landmarks or secure areas the place he tells migrants they may run to, simply in case they have been chased by brokers.
“I simply discover it virtually ludicrous that I’m virtually having to suppose in these surreptitious methods to guard people who find themselves harmless victims of a profoundly damaged immigration system,” he stated. Though the longer term bishop concedes, “I truly don’t know what I’ll do if ICE does try to take them away.”
He added, “I’ll try to get in the way in which.”
Kimura shall be consecrated by Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on April 18.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Dwelling Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has additionally appeared in Christianity In the present day, Broadview Journal, and Presbyterian Outlook, amongst different publications.
