Sometime in the Fall of 2021, when we were cautiously returning to “normal” life after the COVID pandemic, Young reached out to me. After hobbling around as an interim priest from church to church for years, I had finally been called to be the rector of a church in Long Island. At the end of my first year as rector, the church community with the rest of the world was told to shelter in place. When Young called to talk about the first online PastoraLab cohort, I was seriously toying with the idea of leaving the ordained ministry. Looking back, I realize it wasn’t just the stress of leading a church through the pandemic.

As one of the few Asian American women ordained in the Episcopal Church, congregations were not used to seeing someone like me in church leadership, which meant they were not willing to call me as their priest.

Interim ministry, therefore, was what I got pushed into. As much as I enjoy preparing churches to call their next rector, interim ministry meant I was at a different church every other year, and, somewhere deep inside of me, I felt homeless. 

In my conversation with Young about PastoraLab, I shared about my deep sense of dislocation in my effort to stay faithful to God’s call on my life, to which Young said, “You are not the only one. I know it will be good for you to join this cohort to hear the stories of others like you.” I have often found that to recover hope and to continue stoking the fire of new imagination, I had needed to go through a process of lament. If nothing else, this online cohort would give me a place with others like me to lament, I thought. As I sat for my first PastoraLab session and saw ten little squares on my computer screen occupied by ten beautiful Asian women’s faces, each representing a place of uncommon leadership in a community, I felt validated.

Over the course of two years, I got to hear the personal stories of joys and sorrows in their unique roles of leadership from Mia, Tina, Jean, Joyce, Lydia, Van and Yulee. Somewhere in our collective stories of wrestling to stay faithful to God’s call in our lives in a risk-averse male dominated environment that is Christian ministry, I began to re-imagine what God’s call on my life means.  At our first in-person retreat in LA, after our initial awkwardness of connecting our virtual faces to real bodies, we eased into conversations about our personal lives. Those conversations are what led me to examine my own sense of call from God not so much as vocation but as transformation.

Today, I am at a church in Palo Alto, CA. At the end of my second year with them, the church has called me to be their rector. Like all the churches I have been at, I am the first Asian American woman priest amongst them.

I have travelled a long way from the time I confessed to Young about my disillusion with church ministry. In the process of my interview with the church, it gave me courage and a sense of connection to a place I had never even visited—The Bay Area, because of the women I had met at PastoraLab who live in this area. These women have been crucial in my orientation to the religious and cultural landscape of this place where I have landed, where I sense a genuine invitation to find home. 

I still lament, but it’s a different kind of lament. I lament not so much for myself anymore as for the “church” that still cannot receive and celebrate the gifts of leadership from women.

Like my forced experience of flittering from church to church doing interim work, there are many women who get pushed out from one leadership role to another in quick successions because the imagination of leadership, especially in the church, has long been populated by men. It is in my continued conversation with the women from PastoraLab and others  around me that I challenge myself daily to reclaim God’s call on my life much more as the changing of me than about any change I think I might bring as a minister of the church.  As Paul writes to the church in Corith, “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Cor. 3:18). To understand God’s call upon my life as the invitation to change is about transformation. 

This shift in perspective on the call I feel from God has somehow lifted that burden of conforming to “church” expectations. I am inclined to believe that the inhospitable space for leadership from women in Christian ministry is to do with conforming to a meticulously cultivated norm of male leadership rooted not so much in the liberating Good News of God in Jesus but in the age-old human culture of patriarchy.

As I try to embrace and live into the Easter faith of a new creation reminding myself that the resurrection is not of my making but of God’s, I continue to scrutinize my sense of call that has no elaborations beyond the simple,

“Follow me.” 

I am deeply grateful for the space created by PastoraLab at a time when, like the prophet Jeremiah, I was full of complaints and resentment toward God for having placed a call on me. That space gave me the opportunity to listen better, to think more expansively and to find freedom, joy and gratitude in the checkered story of my faith walk. Ordained ministry, for me, is no longer about serving the Church, it is about becoming more attuned to the living and ever changing Body of Christ wherein I am but a part. As a part of that living Body of Christ, I find myself deeply curious of how the Holy Spirit will change me and how that change would affect the rest of the Body.  

Written by Ajung Sojwal, PastoraLab Graduate

Ajung Sojwal is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, CA. She has been in the Bay Area since March of 2023 and is deeply interested in conversations that bring about change in individuals and in community. Currently, she is working with her church community to create a meaningful space for conversations on how Faith & Art invite change.