Tim & Lydia Choi
Tim
My goal in life was to make it big: rich, powerful, and famous enough for Time Magazine to write my obituary. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky but I wanted to get out to the big city to make my mark. My parents both attended Southern Seminary and served at different churches, so church was definitely a big part of my upbringing. I had varying experiences of church, from a small, cozy, ethnic church where I couldn’t understand what was going on, all the way to a 30,000-person megachurch with breathtaking programming. I even had the privilege of attending a Billy Graham crusade during his final tour, where my mom promptly decided that my sister and I would be walking up to receive prayer... whether we liked it or not. So a big part of my identity growing up was as a Christian.
My Christian identity started getting challenged in the latter part of high school. My life goals - sold to me through movies and TV - rendered Christianity irrelevant at best. I had a growing number of intellectual questions that I couldn’t resolve on my own. But I think most of all, there just wasn’t anything compelling about Christian life to make me want to stick it out. And the church was something I was more apologetic to my friends about, rather than proud of. So I made a clear, conscious choice to leave the church when I left for college and have a fresh start. I made my choice official through the ceremony of putting my Bible on my bookshelf next to my childhood books before leaving for college.
To my surprise, this period didn’t last long. The day I arrived at UC Berkeley, I met some Gracepoint staff playing basketball and it ended up being a life-changing experience. I got plugged into a community of people who were trying their best to live out Christian life in all areas. And the next four years became a life-trajectory-altering experience of learning how huge the gospel actually is and what God’s plan for my life is.
Since then I’ve helped start church plants in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Seattle (University of Washington), and now my wife, two boys, and I have the privilege of helping start a new church in Long Island, NY near Stony Brook University. We’re really excited to help recreate, once again, the compelling picture of church that saved my life.
Lydia
I come from the foggy hometown of San Francisco. I was raised in a Christian family. And so, from a young age, Christianity was familiar to me and the church was my extended family. Through my tumultuous middle school years, I came to understand how the gospel is relevant for me personally and it was in 7th grade that my personal relationship with Jesus began.
But it was in college at UC Berkeley that I gained a more significant understanding of what it meant to live out the gospel. I met like-minded Christian friends who I could do life together with, and it was in the context of a close Christian community in the campus context that I really began to experience both joy in Christian life and vision for how life is meant to be. And it was in college that I grew in the desire to share what I received with others, especially other college students.
And so, since graduating from college eight years ago, I have been serving in college ministry and continuing to reach out to college students like myself. Looking forward to all that God has in store for us here in Stony Brook.