A life of ‘sacramental imagination’: YDS alum Chad Tanaka Pack

A California arrival

Tanaka Pack’s sense of Christian ministry in the past decade has been tested and sharpened in the crucible of his experience as a gay Asian American man in the world of business, church, and the creative arts. He has long been bi-vocational, working in finance while preaching regularly. Born in Hawaii, he has lived in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and, since 2019, California. Each geographical place has served to complicate and deepen his faith.

“My approach to pastoral care has changed over the years. California certainly has affected how I offer spiritual care. People here are not as judgmental as people in other places I’ve lived. You are free to live how you want to live. There’s not a lot of accountability—compared to my New England experience, there’s no ‘order’ or shared vocabulary of social behaviors. So, when offering pastoral care, I try to create a space where a person has the freedom to explore their spiritual questions in a way that works for them.”

Being in Southern California, he said, gives him a unique window on the unruly spiritual temper of the nation, and the difficulty this mood presents to contemporary churches everywhere.

“Los Angeles is hyper-individualized. For example, congregational giving, across denominations, is extremely low here. And there are extreme disparities of wealth and equality. Yes, that’s true of other cities, including New Haven, but there’s a way in which the highs and lows in Los Angeles are particularly troublesome. One can live in Los Angeles and only rarely cross paths with the poorest of the poor.”

Working at Inner City Law Center on L.A.’s Skid Row, he has regularly witnessed the ordeal and desperation of poverty up close. The organization advocates for housing and support for low-income tenants, working-poor families, immigrants, homeless veterans, wildfire victims, and people who are disabled or living with HIV/AIDS.  

“I can’t not experience the inequality and poverty of the neighborhood and the city,” he said. “Outside our offices, we see people suffering from severe mental health disabilities. The fact that Skid Row has existed for generations is an indictment of the city’s lack of commitment to humanity. And unless we take action now, the large-scale experiences of unhoused people here will be replicated across the country in the coming years. It could happen everywhere.”

Inklings of a calling

Growing up in Honolulu, Tanaka Pack attended a high school affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Otherwise, ministerial stirrings weren’t part of the picture in his early years. He earned a business degree at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and went to work as a New York corporate accountant. He also had hopes of a writing career as a playwright and poet.

“Crunching numbers on Wall Street wasn’t the end-all be-all,” he said. “I had set aside three years’ money for an MFA. That was the plan.”

Around this time, he started connecting with an inclusive, prophetic, artistic congregation—Middle Collegiate Church in New York’s East Village. One day in 2006 he signed up to preach for a small informal worship gathering. He figured it would be an outlet for his creative writing. After his first sermon, the positive feedback he received was immediate.

“They said, ‘Chad you’ve got to go to seminary!’ And I said, ‘But I’m an accountant, a writer!’ They said, ‘But this might be the Holy Spirit …’”

He began helping lead Wednesday night worship there. Encouragements from church members continued. The congregation gave him a vision of how the church was relevant in the 21^st century. Soon he took the leap into gospel faith and a commitment to service: He applied to YDS and the ISM and was admitted with a scholarship.

Graduating in 2010, he was ready to seek ordination. This turned out to be a stormy process that took nine years to resolve. Living in Pittsburgh in 2017, he had several clergy job interviews and many passive-aggressive rejections. He met resistance as a queer Asian American who also had a husband at the time. It was a discouraging period of underemployment. In 2017, he became the first openly gay and married candidate to be ordained in the Reformed Church in America. The Collegiate Churches of New York ordained him, and he was working there as an associate minister, but denominational leadership refused to acknowledge that he was an ordained minister in the RCA. In 2019 he transferred his ministerial standing to the UCC, without conflict.

At the lowest points during those years, he said, he had to strip back his expectations, his hopes of congregational ministry. But that time toughened him too, and helped clarify his understanding of his spiritual capabilities and gifts of empathy whether he was a “minister” at the moment or not.

“I decided I wasn’t going to worry about vocational purpose. That was scary because it challenged who I thought I was. But out of that time I learned endurance. I learned that at my core I’m not a minister or an accountant: I am a human being moving through the world on a spiritual path with others. If that’s how you see yourself, you’re free to make different kinds of decisions. You show up in different ways.”

‘Grace is revealed’

In 2019, he turned a page by leaving the Northeast, moving to Southern California, and joining the staff of Inner City Law Center full-time, helping homeless veterans find housing. The work was personally transformational: He discovered he could live out a Christian life of service outside the church. It required not denominational credentials but a willingness to “see, hear, smell, taste, and touch where God’s omnipresent grace is revealed” throughout the world: once again, a sacramental imagination.

He wrote about this for Reflections at the time, declaring  that his new circumstances had freed him to follow Christ: “I trust I am answering the call of Jesus. I am confident I am living the Gospel. With this newfound vocational clarity, I’m no longer concerned whether my job meets a particular definition of ministry. I’m simply helping people get housed.”

On the side, he continued guest preaching and consulting with churches, and became a part-time assistant minister at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. He also served on the YDS Alumni Board.

His many experiences have shaped and altered his ideas of how churches can meet the world in all its chaotic needs and contradictions.

“I’m now in a space theologically where I believe everyone has the answer in their heart—when I preach or mentor, my job is to create a space where people can discover the truth they already know. I think pastors, especially, know what they need to do, but they need to get to a space, or perhaps an in-between space, where they can be in touch with that. If I can, I want to help people give themselves permission to explore what they already know.”

Living in California, he said he’s never known “a place where the gospel is needed more,” but its swarming pluralism, or distracted indifference, has prompted him to rethink how he talks about the nature of divine presence in daily life.

“I was writing a prayer the other day and I realized I rarely refer to ‘God’ anymore—I say divine energy, spirit, universe. The word God seems too bounded at this point. Because God is not just a god—it’s more a spirit infusing our entire universe. Being in California has challenged me to express these ideas differently. In the northeast I could say ‘God’ because there’re still enough people who use the word ‘God’ there. Being here has changed my faith.”

New role in the UCC

His new work with the Southern California-Nevada Conference will include coaching congregations, helping them find their way into multiple possible futures.

“Trends going on nationwide are happening here. It’s a mixed bag of congregational growth and death. Some congregations are holding steady. Some aging congregations remain super-active. Others are coming to the end of their ministry. One thing I’ll be doing is helping congregations think creatively about their legacy as they end their ministry. I don’t think it’s bad that some congregations are closing. That’s simply where they are at this point—so, no judgment. The question is how to support them wherever they are in their ministry.”

He discovered long ago that his own bi-vocational path—the moments of grace and epiphany along with some gnarly twists and turns—has been good preparation for the unpredictable 21^st-century life of ministry. He urges ministers-in-training to consider cultivating other skills and competencies to round out their formation. But above all, trust themselves in the moment.

“It’s hard to offer advice, but I would say trust that you are where you need to be. Even if you don’t have a lot of clarity about it right now, trust the process— trust the present, where you are right now, and worry less about where you’re going. Because all we have is the present. And that trust empowers you to live more deeply where you are now, accepting yourself more fully where you are right now. And that will help you do ministry more effectively—where you are right now.”