He is a technologically-savvy Asian-American who described himself as the pastor of a “funky urban church” in San Francisco. The election came Saturday evening, June 21, at the end of the General Assembly’s opening day.
Reyes-Chow, 39, also is the married father of three daughters, who told the assembly he believes, as his Filipino and Chinese grandparents taught him, “Nothing is too hard or too wondrous for God.”
In response to a question about the eternally-haunting question about inclusivity and ordination of gays and lesbians in the PC(USA), Reyes-Chow said he has a rule in ministry: “No elephants in the room.” Reyes-Chow said he has always felt that ordination should be extended to all, but “at the same time I understand that is not where our church is.”
Reyes-Chow said a conservative friend once described him as “excruciatingly fair,” and said he understands that Presbyterians must come to the conversation about ordaining gays and lesbians “knowing and trusting in Christ to be the bridge and the bond between us.”
After his installation, which Reyes-Chow described as “surreal” and “humbling,” he added: “I think it now means I’m a grown-up.”
No winner emerged in the first round of voting although Reyes-Chow came close. The first-round voting broke down with 341 for Reyes-Chow (48 percent), 250 for William Teng (35 percent), 102 for Carl Mazza (14 percent), and 14 for Roger Shoemaker (2 percent).
On the second round, support seemed to shift from Mazza – who also said he favored opening ordination to gays and lesbians, the only other candidate who did so – to Reyes-Chow. He prevailed with 390 votes (55 percent), with Teng winning 255 votes (36 percent), Mazza 52 votes (7 percent), and 
Shoemaker 7 votes (1 percent).
Reyes-Chow has chosen as his vice-moderator Byron Wade, pastor of Davie Street Church in Raleigh, N.C.
Going in to the election, there seemed no clear front-runner – and conversations in the hallways ran to the basic wisdom that, “It all depends on how they answer the questions.”
There did not seem to be – as has happened some years – a single blockbuster question, one on which people could feel the mood in the room shift. But Reyes-Chow – the founding pastor of Mission Bay Community Church and a graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary – seemed to edge ahead bit-by-bit.
In response to a question about small, rural churches, for example, he answered that we tend to think that “all small churches are the same.” But the concerns of an inner-city church that’s declining because it doesn’t respond to changing demographics are different, he said, than those of a congregation in a small town in which the older people are dying off and the younger people are moving away. To say to that rural church, “You have to get bigger in order for us to value you is borderline cruel,” he said.
Asked about balancing personal righteousness with concerns about social justice, Reyes-Chow replied, “The two are not mutually exclusive but feed off of each other. A relationship with Christ is both personal and communal,” and can be manifested in everything from working to make the world better to “diving fully into the worship life of a community and personal discipleship.”
Reyes-Chow – the baseball-loving (it’s all about the As – the Oakland Athletics), motorcycle-riding, earring-wearing pastor of a congregation of about 150, most of whom are under age 40 – also challenged the PC(USA) to adapt to a world in which the impact of technology is pervasive.
Asked what the impact would be on his congregation if he were to serve as moderator for two years, Reyes-Chow said he previously served a traditional church, in which pastoral and hospital visits were common. Now, he said, he has hundreds of online interactions with his parishioners each week. His congregation supports “multiple voices” – Reyes-Chow only preaches about 30 times a year, and even when he does, he typically draws others into the conversation.
He said of young people: “The world today expects transparency. … Folks smell it when we are not being real.”
The four men who sought this position – three pastors and an elder, ranging in age from 39 to 64 – in some ways represented in brush strokes the diversity of Christian mission in a changing world.
Teng, a pastor from Alexandria, Va., described himself as a “cross-cultural Christian” and “the product of Presbyterian mission” – Presbyterian missionaries in China in the late 1800s introduced his great-grandfather to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Shoemaker, an elder from Nebraska, has been involved in the Czech mission network – an example of grassroots mission partnerships blooming across the PC(USA). “Networks, partnerships and shared resources are the emerging paradigm for the church’s mission,” he wrote.
Mazza, a minister, is a co-founder of Meeting Ground, a ministry in Maryland with the homeless that brings congregations together to reach out to those who otherwise have no home. He write in material provided to the assembly that “it was through Presbyterian mission that I was exposed to a living God,” as a teenager who had himself been homeless and alienated.
And Reyes-Chow is a self-described “techie” – an aficionado of blogging, coffee shops with strong java and wireless access, Twitter and Yelp and Facebook. “It’s really not a method,” he said in a news conference of his online communication and social networking, “but how I naturally engage with people.”
Reyes-Chow also talks in post-modern twang – about being in relationship even when we disagree, for example, or about sitting with tensions and asking hard questions, “like can we agree to disagree about homosexuality?”
He did not pretend to have all the answers for this assembly.
Instead, Reyes-Chow challenged the PC(USA) to risk and say, “All right, here we go” – trusting that, as his family taught him, and as he wants his daughters Evelyn, Abigail, and Analise to believe, “Nothing is too hard or too wondrous for God.
