{"id":896,"date":"2009-05-13T09:23:20","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T17:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katylee.com\/blog\/?p=896"},"modified":"2011-05-01T20:13:22","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T04:13:22","slug":"baptist-pastor-murdered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/13\/baptist-pastor-murdered\/","title":{"rendered":"Baptist pastor murdered"},"content":{"rendered":"

This news story <\/a>of a gunman charging into the First Baptist Church in Illinois reminded me of a similar incident many years ago when I was in college when our pastor was shot and killed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Greg Owyang of First Chinese Baptist Church of Los Angeles was a up and coming Asian American pastor. This was in the day before the term Asian American was even popularly used.\u00a0 He had a gift and the insight into reaching the American born segment of young Chinese Christians. He was a great preacher, exemplifying the style used by Asian Americans preachers today of telling stories and using humor. That was uncommon among Chinese preachers then.<\/p>\n

Greg, in his mid 30’s, was sitting at the stage of the church to prepare to preach one Sunday like every other Sunday, when a disgruntle congregant walked into the worship service with a gun and fired shots at the stage. One of the elders, Fook Kong Li, and Greg Owyang, were fatally shot.<\/p>\n

Fook Kong Li was a successful businessman who gave large sums generously to Christian ministries. He was on the Board of Trustees at BIOLA. I had been to Fook Kong’s house (with a tennis court) on several occasions for church activities. He was leading singing that day, standing up at the podium when the shots were fired.<\/p>\n

I was not attending that church that day, but the news of the shooting shook the Christian community, especially the Chinese, with a deep sense of grief and loss. Both men who died were extraordinary Christians, faithfully serving the Lord.<\/p>\n

I can’t imagine what life was like for the spouses and family There are no answers adequate for these types of circumstances. I do know that both spouses continued in their faithful work for the Lord. Greg’s wife comforted me and gave me some perspective when I lost my baby.<\/p>\n

The verse that kept me sane when I was grieving was John 6:68 “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” No matter what our circumstances, the Lord is God. We need go nowhere else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This news story of a gunman charging into the First Baptist Church in Illinois reminded me of a similar incident many years ago when I was in college when our pastor was shot and killed. Greg Owyang of First Chinese Baptist Church of Los Angeles was a up and coming Asian American pastor. This was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-spiritual-life","category-thoughts-on-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}