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JG: So what I want to, we're kind of in the last phase of our discussion, which I've really appreciated, and your, your candor and openness are always, it's always such a pleasure to speak with you. What I want to do is kind of, not to shortchange your experiences at West L.A., but really kind of bring it up to the present and talk about your role here at Centenary Methodist Church. And I'm, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you came into this position and you felt returning to the church in which you grew up as its kind of senior minister?

MN: My coming to Centenary was, in my perception of things at least, similar to how I was appointed to the church in Sacramento and, and similar to how I was able to come back to West L.A. My coming to Centenary was an unusual move. It happened, just the fact that it happened is unusual. Very rarely, at least in the United Methodist Church, but I think this is true for most churches and at least mainline Protestant denominations, very rarely does a person get to come back and pastor his or her own church. I guess it's got somethin' to do with that statement of Jesus, "A prophet has no honor in his own country." And so just the fact that it happened is very unusual. To the extent that I ever thought I would be able to come back to Centenary, I just figured it would happen during the latter part of my career -- and who knows, maybe I am in the latter part of my career -- but I thought it would happen much later than it did. However, the fact that it happened under the episcopacy of Bishop Roy Sano makes all the sense in the world. Bishop Sano, as I said previously, was the pastor here at Centenary forty years ago at the former church out on 35th and Normandy, and so I knew him and knew of him from back then.

Also, in a way I unconsciously skipped over this, but going back to my days at Pacific School of Religion, Roy Sano was also a professor at Pacific School of Religion at that time. Gosh, how could I ever forget to bring that in? And it was during his time at PSR that he got elected to the episcopacy and actually started out his first eight years being the bishop of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference with its office in Denver, but Roy Sano was a professor at PSR back during my time and prior to that he was the chaplain at Mills College up in Oakland, so because I was fortunate to be at PSR when he was there, we had reconnected during that time. And so from that time on he and I had kept in touch with each other, or at least knew what each other was doing, him more than me, and so I guess him being the bishop here in this conference and also the year 2000 was the year that he was retiring, I just have a feeling that had factored into his decision to appoint me back here. As a matter of fact, I talked about how I got the call from the L.A. superintendent up in Sacramento who said that, "Mark," who asked me if I would like to come to the West L.A. Church, well, I find out about my appointment coming to Centenary in a similar way, also, actually in some ways it's even more acute than that, I received a call one evening, again, I was in the car, my cell phone went off, and it was the Los Angeles district superintendent who by then was Reverend Dr. Otis Fentry, unfortunately now the late Reverend Dr. Otis Fentry, but Dr. Fentry called to tell me that Bishop Sano is appointing me to Centenary. And I vividly remember Dr. Fentry's words, he says, "This is an appointment that's coming from the bishop's office," which implicitly meant this was not an appointment coming from the district superintendent, okay? [Laughs] So I distinctly remember when I heard this I just said, "Oh," and I mean, what else can I say? And Dr. Fentry said, "Well, we'll be in touch with you. We have to set up an appointment with the Centenary staff parish committee," which is essentially the, the human resources committee, the HR committee of the church, and so that's how that appointment happened. So I was shocked.

Again, I was shocked that, number one, it was happening, number two, that it was happening so soon in, in my view of how these things usually work, but that it was also happening coming straight from the bishop's office and not from the superintendent himself. Now, I'd like to think, and I'm sure that Superintendent Fentry didn't have a problem with me coming to Centenary. Now the other side of the coin was Reverend Dr. Grant Hagiya, who was the senior pastor here at this time, was going to be appointed this district superintendent to Los Angeles, so, and I already knew that was in the works, so that... and the other thing that I thought about at that time was I really didn't think that it was in the cards for me to come to Centenary at that time, if ever, because there were at least several other pastors, and in particular, several other Sansei pastors who I could think of right off the top of my head that were far up the pecking order than I was to be considered to come to Centenary. I mean, these are Sansei pastors who had more experience being a senior pastor, and even among my contemporaries, others who were in the ministry the same amount of time as me and all that, they had more experience being either a senior pastor or a solo pastor than I had, because, again, I started out as an associate in Sacramento and then came to West L.A. as the senior, but there were some other Sansei pastors who started off as a solo pastor and then in their next church were also solo pastors or senior pastors, so from that standpoint were higher up the totem pole than I was in terms of, I guess, eligibility requirements, having the experience to pastor a large church like Centenary, so for those reasons I was also shocked that I was being appointed to come back here. But at any rate it happened and things have, have turned out the way they've turned out and it's been a very positive experience.

That quote from the gospels, though, Jesus's quote, "A prophet has no honor in his home country," I did think of that for a while, but it also reminded me of a conversation I had had with a professor back during my seminary days. As a matter of fact, it was a, my professor in New Testament scriptures, Dr. Wilhelm Wolner, and for whatever reason I remember in, in one of our classes, it was after class one time and we were talking about, I guess, the class session that day or something, but I remember him asking me, just as a professor who was interested in his students, nothing in particular about the class or the coursework, but he asked me what my intentions were. And I said, "Well, Dr. Wolner, I might pursue ordained ministry and who knows? Maybe I might have a chance to go back to Los Angeles and pastor my home country, but there's one thing that concerns me about that." And he said, "What is it?" And I said, "Well, you know, Jesus has his line in the Gospel of Luke, 'A prophet has no honor in his home country,' and so for me to go back to Los Angeles at some point to pastor my home, to pastor my home church might be a problem." And he had a very good response to that. He says, "What you have to do is establish yourself in another church for a number of years and make that your home country, then you can go back to Los Angeles." So when I thought about that, in a way, that's kind of how it has turned out here at Centenary. It's not like I graduated seminary last year and was a greenhorn and right away got appointed back to my home church. I have known of pastors to whom that happened and unfortunately, in at least some of those cases, not with very good results. But in my case I had been away from Centenary for, what, at least since 1982 when I had gone off to seminary, and so it was a good, what, at least fifteen years or so before I did really come back, so in that sense I had been able to establish other parts of the world as my home country before coming back here to Centenary. And the other thing that had happened within Centenary itself is that the church had moved. The church had physically moved from the old location on 35th and Normandy, which is where I had grown up and where that is the context, those are all the memories of Centenary that I had had, but it had left that location back in the mid-'80s to come back down here to Little Tokyo. So in many senses the Centenary that I was being appointed to and coming home to was not the same Centenary that I had left back in the early '80s. Sure, there were a lot of familiar faces here and sure, Centenary still had the bazaar and a lot of activities that it traditionally had, but in many ways there were new faces here, new geography, a whole new way of doing things, and so in a larger sense it really was a different and a new church for me, a new, a different and a new Centenary for me to come back to. It wasn't the same church.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.