Ryan Kwon’s church-planting journey nearly ended before it even got started. When he first learned about church planting, he was already an established pastor and had the impression that it was just something disillusioned younger people did to split from their current churches. He had almost put it out of his mind when God spoke to him through a song and changed the trajectory of his ministry.
Today, Kwon is the founding and lead pastor of Resonate Church, a multiethnic multisite church in Fremont, California, that launched in 2010 with a mission to multiply churches in the most unchurched region in America: the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s been on the boards of Acts 29 and Exponential, and serves as a council member for The Gospel Coalition, while being a frequent conference speaker.
In the following conversation, he discusses his journey to becoming a church planter, how the American church has misunderstood discipleship, and what happens when you truly understand what it means to be a child of God.
Share a little bit about your faith journey and call to ministry.
I grew up in a nonbelieving family. [My parents] were Olympic athletes. They ended up coming to the States with the hopes of having a family here. They really had a very hardworking mindset: Hard work equals a better life, and a better life equals the way you’re going to save yourself from damnation, or save yourself from hardship, or save yourself from not living the life that you want to.
Part of my story, too, is that I was [born] premature. I was slipping out of my mother’s uterus at six months, and I was supposed to be stillborn, but for some reason God gave me breath and life. Early on I was just a little fighter, I suppose, and I survived.
When I was in the sixth grade, my dad looked at me and said, “You know what? You’re going to be a doctor.” That’s all he said. And I said, “Yes, Daddy.” That’s all I thought I was going to be, so I pursued medicine at UCLA. In my last year of college, a classmate for the very first time shared this radical gospel of Jesus, and I was just blown away. I thought, If this is true then it actually revolutionizes everything in my life—and so it did.
I went to church for the first time … that was an experience. All my life as an Asian living in an Anglo world, I always felt like I had to work for things. I’ve always had to be good at things, or I had to be charming or generous or whatever it took. I just worked for it. At church, before I could even engage and try to work my way in, they just received me. And there I met an incredible, brilliant doctor who gave up everything to become a medical missionary in Indonesia. That sparked my interest to become the same. I’m like, Maybe God is calling me to be a medical missionary. His advice to me was, if you are, then go to seminary and learn the Bible first, because wherever you go, you’re going to be inquired of and have opportunities to share your faith.
So, that’s how my seminary journey started. I didn’t know what seminary was, because I was kind of a new Christian. I thought it was Christian trade school, like mechanic school. I went there, and it just blew my mind. I took a New Testament survey, Old Testament survey, and a hermeneutics course over the summer, and I just couldn’t believe that this was the Bible. I fell in love with studying and reading it. I was a science and math guy all my life, like a STEM guy, and for the first time I became a history guy and a philosophy guy instantly, because it just piqued my interest in Jesus and history. And I never looked back.
Of course, that put a wedge in my parents’ dream of me becoming a doctor, and that was kind of rough for maybe five to 10 years. But eventually my mom became a believer, and that was a supernatural story there too. She witnessed to my dad, and he later on became a believer. I know God saved me for his pleasure, but if it was somehow to reach my parents, man, I’m so grateful for it.
So, what was the miraculous story of your mom?
When I was about 26 or 27, my mom got sick with liver cancer, so I ended up moving back home and decided to live with her to try to help her and help my dad take care of her. It was Valentine’s Day—I’ll never forget—I bought some Patti LaBelle concert tickets in LA for her and her friend to enjoy that night. And then I had gone out. I remember coming in really late—like one or two in the morning—and as I was passing by her room, I saw the lights on. So I knocked and went into her room and asked, “Hey, Mom, are you OK?”
She had been weeping all night it seemed like. Her face was a mess. And in her hand was one of those tracts. Apparently all the times that I tried to share the gospel [fell on deaf ears], but for some reason a stranger had handed her a tract and she’d been reading the prayer of salvation in the back, praying and repeating that.
She said, “Ryan, how many times do I have to pray this before I get saved? Do I have to pray it 500 times, 1,000 times?” And she was willing to do it.
I said, “Mom, you’re not going to believe it, but all you have to say it is once. You only have to mean it once and pray it once, and he will pay for your sins and he will give you this new life.”
I remember her looking at me and saying, “That’s impossible. Nothing is that good.”
And I got to tell her that Jesus is that good.
She received the Lord that night, and became a grace agent immediately. She lived for another 10 years and got to experience church for the first time, and that’s what led my dad to faith. My dad would have to give her rides because she was no longer able to drive, and he would stay in the parking lot. He just got tired of doing that after a while and went in. Eventually, [it was] the gospel being preached over and over again, and my mom being so steadfast and faithful and praying for her husband [that] turned [him]. I just never thought that my dad … he’s one of those guys, like you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. The gospel can, though. The gospel could transform the oldest of dogs, and he was revolutionized too. I’m so grateful.
What made you decide to become a pastor after seminary, and start Resonate?
I come from an honor culture, and in the first church that I served at, somebody tapped my shoulder and said, “Hey, I think you’ll be a great pastor.” I just thought that’s how you give your life to the Lord: You just go all the way. So I went all the way.
[Never underestimate] the power of the shoulder tap, somebody saying, “I believe you can do this.” More and more as I grow into leadership and am a pastor for a longer period of time, I think so much is not what you believe about yourself. The best kind of coach in the world is not one that teaches technique but teaches belief. Can they help you believe in your calling? Can they help you believe more than what you believe about yourself? And that was certainly my case.
I had several shoulder taps of people along the way saying, “I think you’re the guy. I think God has anointed and appointed you. I think this is the way that God has called you and wired you.” I was prone not to listen to myself, but I was prone to listen to others because I was a good Asian boy. God even used that, attending this Asian church, and I grew there.
“I believe beauty is the greatest apologetic in the world.”
Then, the reason why I came to Northern California is my wife [Jenni]. I had just gotten married and we prayed a bold prayer to say, Lord, send us anywhere, wherever it is. We’ll go to Afghanistan for you. We’ll go to the Middle East for you. We’ll go to Southeast Asia for you. We’ll go to Africa for you. Like, send us to a hard place. And little did we know, but he was going to send us to a town called Fremont, a place where I was guest preaching at an Anglo church one Sunday. And the rest is history. The Lord brought us up to that very church. And it was a wonderful church. I served as a teaching pastor, had so much fun ministering to the people there, learned things that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else.
I’ll tell you one quick story. Howie Thompson was a 75-year-old elder when I was a 35-year-old elder, and he came to me after I had been at the church for six months and said, “Will you disciple me?”
He was a high school baseball coach [who had] coached [former MLB pitcher and color commentator] Dennis Eckersley. He had credentials and he had receipts, and I was a nobody, right? And, of course, in the Asian culture there’s such ageism. There’s hierarchy, and if you are a year younger, then you get to sit at the kids’ table. There’s all these cultural dynamics. So for him to say that to me, it was paradigm-breaking.
I said, “No, I can’t disciple you, Howie. You’re the mayor of Fremont. Everybody knows you.”
And he said, “I’ve observed you for the last six months. You have so much to teach me. Will you meet with me?”
And I, just in faith, met with that man. And I know that I’ve learned more from him than I ever taught him, but that was a breakthrough when [I understood that] maybe God had called me to actually teach adults, even people older than me. So that alone was worth my time there.
Yet the church was very inward. It was great in ministering to the people—incredible teaching, faithfulness, great counseling, great pastors that shepherded super well—but they weren’t discipling people to be on mission. When Jenni and I prayed to send us to hard places, we were asking the Lord, Will you make us evangelists? Will you make us disciples to send us to a place where we would actually pastor not only our home, but our neighborhood first and then our region and then our city?
Because of that, a friend of mine who was a worship pastor at that church said, “Hey, let’s go to this church-planting conference.”
I said, “What’s a church plant?”
He gave me a dumbed down version of it, and how church plants tend to reach newer people than existing churches. So, we went to Exponential in Orlando in 2009. I went to a pre-launch track to learn about church planting from scratch. It was incredible knowledge, and it was an incredible track. Yet as much as I was encouraged, I have to be honest, I was discouraged at the same time. It was filled with young people who aspired to do new work, but a lot of their motives for planting were, I could do a better version of the church that I’m in. Rather than the mission being the catalyst for church planting, it was like a better church, a newer church, a sexier church, a church that I want to go to. It was just so self-centered.
I was already 40 years old. I was an elder of the church, and that young, angsty phase was kind of behind me a little bit. So, I was discouraged by it and thought, I’m never going to plant a church. Then, in the last session we were singing this song with the lyric: “There must be more than this.” The Lord speaks many times in my life through his Word, but this time he spoke through a song, and I thought, Is there more to life than the thing that I’m involved with right now?
When the invitation was given, I turned to my friend who brought me there hoping that I would actually plant a church. I looked at him, said, “Geronimo!” and I jumped, and I went down and got prayed for. Afterward I told my church, “Hey, I think God’s calling me to plant a church.” To their credit, they blessed me. They basically said, “What could we do to help?”
I ended up planting a church in the same city, a missional church with a core group of about 35 people in my living room. Resonate Church was launched in 2010, and it’s a gospel center now, a multiethnic, multicampus church in the Bay Area with four physical campuses. We’re planting another campus on Easter, and we are planting two autonomous churches in the fall. We’re super-stoked, super-encouraged by what God is doing here in the Bay Area.
The Bay Area is one of the least-churched areas in America. What have you learned pastoring a church in that kind of culture with people who kind of don’t even see their need for the gospel?
I’ve learned a lot. One of the things that I learned is that when I first went to seminary the thing that they wanted to teach you is polemics and apologetics—remember the Bible Answer Man, Hank Hanegraaff, and Walter Martin—and you learn all the arguments, but here in the Bay Area arguments don’t win the day. It’s not objective things. Primarily in our culture, it’s subjective things that drive the conversation. It’s what you feel, what you think, what you believe. You can make the best and the most rational polemical argument you want, and it won’t move the dial at all.
You know what does move the dial? Beauty does. I believe beauty is the greatest apologetic in the world. I think every person is inclined to beauty. Every person has inner beauty, and every person is looking for beauty, to add beauty. That’s why we travel. That’s why we spend money looking at a waterfall, conquering a mountain, or going to the ocean. We’re seeking purpose in life and beauty. And that’s not stopped here in the Bay Area.
In 1848 in San Francisco there were 1,000 people. And you know the team calls itself the 49ers because in 1849 the gold rush struck, and all the people migrated to the West and started digging and getting massively rich. So, in just one year the population of San Francisco went from 1,000 to 50,000. Fifty thousand people, in one year. We’re not talking about airplanes, and we’re not talking about mass communication or the internet. We’re talking about word-of-mouth. And they all made it out there digging for gold, right?
In some sense, people are still digging for gold. It’s now the Silicon Valley where they’re digging for meaning, happiness, the pursuit of wealth and satisfaction. And in some ways, they still haven’t found it.
“Somehow the word discipleship got hijacked. We’ve used it primarily in America as spiritual growth, when I think it has a missional ethos attached to it.”
What’s fascinating is since I think World War II, there’s been—just in America alone—1,500 religions; not churches, but 1,500 religions that have started. That just goes to show that we’re made for something more. We’re transcendent beings. I love what C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Man, that is so true here.
If you want to change a city or a region or your town or your street, you have to have an optimistic missiology. You have to believe that you can make a difference. You have to believe the resurrection is enough. You have to believe that people are not satisfied, that people are on a journey, and that the gospel is by far the most good news that we could ever proclaim to the world.
We at our church have this vision to collaborate with other churches to see in the next 10 years 1% of the Bay Area come and surrender their life to Christ. That is 72,000 people coming to Christ. And we want to see that happen by collectively, the 3,000 churches that exist in the Bay Area among 8 million people, planting 240 churches together [each] growing to about 150 in [attendance]—all the cathedral churches blessing and resourcing the parish churches, the neighborhood churches, so that they could thrive and they could grow. And to the degree that they could grow is to the same degree that these cathedral churches are not just trying to grow themselves, but to grow a region through these churches.
So much of our vision as we’ve grown as a church here in the Bay, we’re certain we didn’t grow because we’re preaching a better message or because we have better music or we have better people. That’s not it. I think God has called us to be the cathedral church, to resource the parish churches and to love the parish churches. To love the region, and to have a vision not just for a city but cities in the Bay Area.
It’s one thing to plant a church. It’s another thing to plant churches that are planting churches and to continue that DNA of church planting forward. What were some of the challenges that you faced as you thought through scaling?
Yeah, I think scalability is an issue, but I think scalability is only an issue because we tend to be really good at deployment of people who are already ready, but we’re not very good in development. I think the church needs to get into the development game. But before you can develop, you must first disciple.
I think the church has short-circuited the process, and we just thought the Army Rangers of Christianity—the true missionaries—were the ones who were going to be raised up somehow. And it wasn’t necessarily raised up in the church, because they just felt called. They were anointed somehow. They said, “I’m going to go in”—instead of having a pipeline of discipleship that leads to mission, that actually leads to a development of that individual in leadership and the competencies to one day plant a church or be a part of a planting church, and then be assessed to deploy.
I don’t think we have a scalability issue—I think we have a pipeline issue. The pipeline is nonexistent in most places, and that’s the only reason why it’s not scalable. Because if we do have the pipeline that’s running, we’re seeing young people being developed, and we’re tapping their shoulders in junior high, in high school, to say, “Hey man, I believe in you. I believe God’s going to do something radical through you. I’ve seen this in you and that in you.” I love telling young people, “You’re better than me at this.” This is what Howie Thompson taught me: I could say that to somebody and really mean it. Most likely, young people have never heard that in their life.
We have this saying that’s written on our walls in our children’s ministry: “You’re never too young to change the world.” We have some Bible verses [too], but that is the first thing that kids come in and read. For us to have such an optimistic missiological belief that God could use young people and old people alike, and to have a pipeline to train—disciple them well to mission—and then to develop them in the skills, and then to eventually deploy … I don’t think we’ll have a scalability issue at all.
“If the gospel is true then it actually revolutionizes everything in my life.”
[Another thing is] the necessity of church plants moving forward leaning into more of a multiethnic expression. I really do believe if we’re going to be missiological, then we have to come under the great realization that our churches must be radically multiethnic and that we need to develop and disciple multiethnic brothers and to include them in the family. It is through the blood of Jesus that we find the greatest bond, rather than our ethnicity, our culture, our backgrounds or anything. That’s our last name. We all have our first name—we all have distinctives—but really what binds us together as a family that is eternally permanent is through the blood of Jesus. We’re the household of God (Eph. 2:19) where he is our Father and we are his children.
That to me is incredible, and that is something that we can’t kind of push aside and say that’s not in the plans of the New Testament church. I mean I can’t read Romans 15 and assume that Paul is not painting the picture of the gentile church as clear as possible that that is the church. That is what the gospel is. That’s the mystery of the gospel.
How do you build it into a church that discipleship and evangelism are interlinked from the beginning, so that people just have the expectation that they’re going to be sharing their faith?
I think it’s interesting that you dichotomized it: discipleship and evangelism. Somehow the word discipleship got hijacked. It has different meanings, and we’ve used it primarily in America as spiritual growth, when I think it has a missional ethos attached to it. This is what we say here at Resonate: “We don’t disciple and do mission. We make disciples to be on mission.”
It’s only one path rather than two different programs. We don’t have a discipleship program and a mission program. Missions is not a department of our church. We only have one mission. Every disciple lives on mission, and we made that into a synonymous term and an expectation of how a disciple actually grows as a biblical disciple.
In a lot of other places and spaces that I’ve been part of, they’re like, “Hey, you could be a disciple if you just join a small group, or you could be a disciple if you teach a Bible study.” We’re like, no, this is the marker of a biblical disciple for us: You are a worshipper. You’re growing as a covenant family member. You are actually learning and praying and reading your Bible. You are a servant of God. You are a missionary sharing the good news of Christ to your neighbors, and you actually reproduce yourself. So whatever you learn you learn not just for self-edification, but you’re actually learning to teach somebody else. We are really equippers of the ministry rather than the doers of the ministry. We make that pretty clear.
One of the ways that we make that clear in our missional communities is that in our church you cannot lead a missional community unless you already have an apprentice. We’re trying to form the reproduction aspect of discipleship. We want discipleship to be radically intentional. What that means is you already have in mind somebody who will come along with you as you disciple other people. That is the person expected to grow watching you, taking turns to one day disciple another group.
I think discipleship could so live in the mind rather than the heart that compels the hands and the feet. That’s actually one of the reasons why I named our church Resonate. I named it as a verb, and when most people hear it, they’re like, Resonance? We’re so accustomed to the church being a noun. I want our bias to be action-oriented, and a movement that goes outward. So that’s how the name actually started, and none of my core group liked it at all. They wanted something like Fremont Community Church. And I wasn’t trying to be cool or anything, but I just wanted a relevant name that actually describes our mission and our heart.
If you were to meet yourself right when you were becoming a church planter, right when you were jumping into ministry, what would you say to that younger version of yourself?
I’m almost embarrassed to say it out loud, but it’s just true, so I’ll say it: I would tell my younger self that you have nothing to prove. I came in thinking that I had so much to prove. I had a chip on my shoulder. I didn’t want to be a failure. I wanted to be respected. I wanted to accomplish things for the Lord. I’ve overspiritualized things that were ultimately about me, and I didn’t lean into the new identity that I had received.
When I got saved, I got a new eternity, but I also got a new identity. I love that when Jesus gives the Great Commission, he says, “You’re baptizing people in the name of the Father, Son and the Spirit.” That Greek word is eis, which means “into”—so you’re baptizing into the Father, into the Son, into the Spirit. We have those identities in us once we become saved.
“My identity that I find in Christ through the gospel outweighs all of my other identities put together.”
So, if I knew in a deeper sense earlier on that he’s my Father, and that means I’m his child, that we are his children. If I knew the implication of the imputed righteousness of Jesus: that I cannot be more righteous or more successful than the success that he already gives me in the gospel. That the empowerment of the Holy Spirit is something greater than every talent, every ability I could possibly have. That the Holy Spirit could accomplish things that otherwise I could never ever accomplish on my own—that’s how empowering it is. If I knew those things and leaned into those identities, I think I’d be less inclined to want to prove myself to be right and to make somebody proud.
To be honest, I would have loved to have been free earlier on not to be defined by what I’ve done, or the accomplishments, or even the fear of failure. I wish I would have known that my identity that I find in Christ through the gospel outweighs all of my other identities put together.
You’re no longer what others say about you, good or bad. You’re no longer what things have been done to you, even though they have been done to you. You’re not what your experiences are or the things that you have succeeded in. You are what Jesus declares over you. Why seek the affections of other people, especially the serfs, when you have the everlasting affection that you cannot dissolve of an everlasting king that you cannot stray away from. So, just lean into that.
You have nothing to prove. I’d tell him that.