A Church Grows in Brooklyn

I remember attending my father’s graduation from theological seminary in idyllic Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when I was four years old. My father was away for months studying in the U.S. while I was in China, so when I saw him in his robes and cap, he looked like a monarch at his coronation. I also remember the cars that shared the road with the horses and buggies of the Amish, who fled persecution in Europe in the eighteenth century to find religious freedom in this small corner of America. A century earlier, Pennsylvania’s namesake, William Penn, a Quaker who’d been thrown in jail in England because of his religion, including a stay in the Tower of London, had himself come to this country to find safe haven for his beliefs.