Selling the Holy Toaster

continued

“We rented so many different places that we used to joke that you had to have a good IQ to find where we’re meeting next,” Kim recalls. “Soon people started graduating and getting jobs, and then they started getting married and having kids, so my wife and I saw that we had to get a bigger home for the church.

“We have about four-hundred-plus attending folks,” says Kim—four times Grace Ann Arbor’s turnout. “In the beginning ninety-nine percent were Asian American, but it’s started to be multiethnic because we wanted it to be beyond race. Currently we are about forty-five percent Korean American, twenty-one percent Chinese American, fourteen percent Caucasian, five percent African American, and one percent Latino.”

Harvest Mission paid $1.7 million for 1001 East Huron. “We always want to be able to reach the U-M campus,” explains Kim. “The future leaders of the world are coming out of the university, and part of our vision is to be a blessing to the college students, to get them to live a life beyond themselves, to give them a larger vision of a world, larger than money and power—to give them a world view that’s more encompassing.”   

[Originally published in December, 2008.]