This season we're sharing stories of life change at Forefront. We're calling it “Make A Joyful Noise”! Each story of life change is indeed joyful. These stories mark long journeys of leaving faith, dealing with pain, and living with doubt but finding beauty, community, and joy on the other side!

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Stories from our Congregation: Kevin Hu and Charisse Sererano

Prior to Forefront, Charisse and I had both spent most of our churched lives in conservative spaces. We were maybe a little too familiar with these spaces. Charisse’s dad served in pastoral capacities in baptist congregations for a large part of her life and since it was a family ordeal, it’s also the environment in which Charisse grew up. I, on the other hand, went to college at a fairly prominent evangelical institution, Wheaton College, and worked as a youth pastor for a couple years in equally conservative spaces. Our politics and theology was rapidly changing in the years leading up to Forefront – call it what you want, evolving, diverging, complicating – and remaining in a church whose guiding tenets was at odds with our beliefs felt unbearable.

“Remaining in a church whose guiding tenets was at odds with our beliefs felt unbearable.”

Learning how to live out the ethic of love that we found in the Bible was difficult. What we saw all around us were oppressive structures that suffocated, harmed, even killed folks based on race, class, gender, and citizenship. We believed that to live out an ethic of love was to seek to dismantle these structures. Although folks in these more conservative spaces at times shared with us in our values – Micah 6:8 and maybe fruits of spirit type stuff – they did not seem to share in our critique of power/how to engage it.

We believed that to live out an ethic of love was to seek to dismantle these structures.

We found a spiritual home in Forefront where a community of believers were committed to 1) seeing the oppressive structures all around (and within) us, 2) expressing solidarity through the church’s values, and 3) practicing that same solidarity in protest and partnership w/ community orgs. Forefront made room for us to imagine a new kind of Christianity. One that worked for everyone’s freedoms rather than committing sycophancy to those in power. One that believed in questioning a once invincible orthodoxy; a beacon of rigidity that has been the source of many’s traumas. Forefront showed us a Christianity that actually could be liberative, and therefore could be good news.

Forefront made room for us to imagine a new kind of Christianity. One that worked for everyone’s freedoms rather than committing sycophancy to those in power.

So Forefront has changed us by helping us learn and unlearn, as well as reinvigorated our theological imagination. We found folks who shared with us a faith affinity that empowered us to take our faith to the streets to denounce power. But it has also changed us because it has introduced us to our racial kith-folk. I only speak for myself in this final note: before I met the Asian folks at Forefront, Asian Christians had almost always been conservative. Though a possibility existed where we could share in food, maybe in experiences of discrimination, maybe resonance in the lost of history; but without the critique of power, those affinities always remained shallow. I’m not going to talk about all the ways Forefront Asians have changed me. To attribute it to their progressiveness is far too reductive. But one thing I know – without Forefront, I might’ve never found them. They’ve been my anchor, especially in these covid times.

Please invest in stories like this

We’re raising $40,000 so that we can continue to be a church both online and in person - and we’re 80% of our goal as of today! We anticipate that day coming and are planning ahead for a new and bright future. Your gift not only allows Forefront to continue to pay the bills, you gift allows us to create a care team fund that continues to support members of our church. It gives stipends to your ministries and groups. It buys the equipment that allows some of you, our virtual community, to experience Forefront’s community and worship from anywhere in the world. It helps furnish the homes of refugees through our partnership with Ruth's Refuge. You could set up a recurring monthly gift during this “Make a Joyful Noise” Campaign.

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