Jon & Carol Chou
Carol
Growing up, Christianity was mostly academic to me - learning the Bible stories and memorizing verses. I didn’t see much of a point to life and lived life vicariously through Korean dramas & K-pop. I generally avoided other people & kept to myself.
But all of that changed within the first week I stepped foot onto the UC Berkeley campus. I met people from our church who took God’s word seriously, desiring to obey God and see these old stories come alive in their own lives. Like Nicodemus in John 3, I wrestled with throwing out my old notions about Christianity, starting over, agreeing with Him that I am a sinner in need of the Savior, and agreeing that He is God, I am not.
So, as a sophomore in college, I decided to follow Jesus and it has been quite a journey since then to grow in faith. I’m thankful for our church community, where I have seen models of sacrificial love and costly decisions that have made it easier for me to do likewise. I have friends who’ve taught me how to apologize, forgive, and just be a friend. And younger ones have pushed me to grow up and have also challenged me through their discipleship.
I serve alongside my husband, Jon, through whom I get to experience God’s grace again and again. We’ve known each other since freshman year of college, got married a few years after we graduated, and have served together ever since.
Jon
Like Andrew Yang and Jeremy Lin, I grew up the son of Taiwanese parents. My life goal was to please my parents and be the sort of son that they’d be proud to talk about with their siblings, friends, and the uncles and aunties at church. Running for President and making the NBA weren’t quite within reach for me, so I pursued my goal by studying hard, playing a lot of piano, and being an outwardly compliant teenager. In college, I encountered the gospel of Jesus in a fresh way, repented for my sins, and committed my life to serving God and pleasing him.
Since graduating from college, I’ve worked by day as a rat-handler (or “research associate”) at an addiction research center, a computer programmer at a Bay Area startup, and then a patent attorney. But by night I was a bi-vocational minister at UC Berkeley. In 2015, my wife Carol and I went into full-time ministry, and since then our family has been on the move, first to Santa Cruz to help plant our church at UC Santa Cruz, and then to Pittsburgh, PA to help plant our church at Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. Now we are in sunny Santa Barbara, discipling and reaching out to students at UC Santa Barbara and Westmont College.
Carol and I have two boys - Stephen (10) and Michael (8).
Enneagram: I’m an Enneagram 5w6.
Myers-Briggs: INTP, which, according to Google, puts me in the company of Yoda, Gandalf, and Luna Lovegood.