Francis Chan is the founding pastor and teaching pastor of Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, CA. After being raised by his Buddhist grandmother in Hong Kong, Francis came to America at the age of five. His mother died at his birth, his stepmother died in a car accident when he was nine, and his father died of cancer when he was twelve years old. Francis came to know the Lord in high school in Stockton, CA. In 1994 Francis and his wife Lisa started Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley. Over the past ten years, the church has grown to over 3,000 regular attendees. Cornerstone has many ongoing ministries including Cornerstone Television, an evangelistic cable television show. Pastor Chan is a highly sought-after speaker at many Christian colleges and youth conferences nationally and internationally. He is also currently active with Children’s Hunger Fund, African Renewal Ministries and World Impact.

EN: What three words would you use to describe yourself?
FC: Blessed, undeserving, in over my head.

EN: What was your childhood like?
FC: My childhood was weird with my mom dying and my stepmom dying and my dad dying. When you deal with such big things early on in life, pretty soon things like death are really not that big a deal to you. They were at the moment because I had to grapple with it, deal with it and understand it. But now when people die, I see it as just a part of life. It doesn’t overwhelm me. So in that sense it was good. As a child I wasn’t really attached to anyone. Maybe my brother a little bit and eventually my friends. There was really no sense of family growing up. It was awkward. I came from Hong Kong, so I had to deal with switching cultures. I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere, not at school, not at home.

EN: You were never close to your father?
FC: No, he was just a very authoritative figure. Typical Asian father—demanded a ton but never really spoke with me. I don’t remember any conversations we had.

EN: Did this shape the way you saw God?
FC: For years I treated God as someone I feared. I feel like I understand the fear of God well because of my dad. I didn’t understand the love of God well until I became a dad. I had a lot of these feelings of never thinking that I was good enough and I wasn’t as smart as my sister. Those types of feelings definitely entered into my relationship with God. I felt like because I did this sin or because I did this in the past He’d never forget this. Those are all feelings I’ve felt about God in the past.

EN: How did you meet Christ?
FC: Our dad made us go to church and so did my mothers. I never would deny God or Christ but it’s hard to know when you really know God, when you’ve had a genuine relationship with Him. I know in high school I really understood my relationship with God. I may have had a relationship before that but I remember in high school I definitely believed in Him and loved Him. In high school a friend of mine took me to a youth group where I started learning from a youth pastor that taught in a way that I could understand. Since then God continued to develop my relationship with Him. I personally think it was definitely ingrained in me as a kid but it was understood by me in high school.

EN: Did you know that God was going to call you into ministry?
FC: It’s weird. I had thoughts of it when I was young of possibly going into ministry. In high school and junior college I knew I was supposed to speak and be a pastor. I definitely had no idea what I was in for. I didn’t know that any of the stuff that I’m doing today was going to happen. I never dreamed that it would be this big or that there would be this many people who would listen to anything I have to say so that’s been a real surprise and every year it gets more and more surprising.

EN: What are some advantages of being a Chinese American amongst mostly Caucasian Americans?
FC: There really hasn’t been a ton. It really opens the doors to so many different venues like some of the more Caucasian venues are open to me because they want a token Asian. So I think that’s cool. And then at the Asian events I feel at home because I totally understand the youth and their upbringing. I feel like I relate because I get the way some of them were raised because that was me. Because of my nationality, when I work in inner-city ministries, it breaks any prejudices or barriers. I feel like God’s used my ethnicity to open a lot of doors for me.

EN: How did you decide to move here and start a church in Simi Valley?
FC: The starting of the church was so strange. As I look at my life, the greatest things that have happened have been “accidents.” They weren’t anything I planned for. It wasn’t like one day I sat down and said, “I’m going to pastor a church.” In fact, my plan was to be a youth minister for life. That’s what I came out of college saying I was going to be. Here I was in this city working at a church that kind of fell apart. I was somewhat disillusioned with churches in general. I always had in my mind what I thought church ought to be like and it really was like a spur of the moment decision or calling or sense of a calling by God to start a church at the time that I did. It was about a month after I got married. I had to tell my new bride that I wanted to start my own church. I asked her, “Even if it’s like a dozen people in my living room, but we knew that we were all there just to worship God and just to hear from His word and we had confidence that something genuine was happening, wouldn’t that be a great worship experience on Sunday mornings?” And I thought that if it didn’t turn into a church that supported us, it wouldn’t be a big deal, I could just work a second job. It was this really strange beginning but that’s the way that everything works in my life. Everything is spur of the moment and really sensing God’s leadings and then as I pursue, God confirms that it’s Him by making everything fit into place.

EN: Was there a time of your life when you were inclined to turn away from God?
FC: The only time I can remember when I thought about genuinely turning away from God, was when my grandmother died and she was Buddhist. My brother and I watched her die and we were in the room as the doctors turned the EKG off—you know the machine that was keeping her alive. Watching the EKG go flat was so disturbing to me—the thought that she was going into eternal punishment and it was so hard for me to bear and accept. I was very tempted to just walk away from everything I knew. But my logic wouldn’t allow me to do that. I would have to throw away all the knowledge I knew—the knowledge of prophecy and history and I would have to throw away all that I knew to be true to my heart. But at that moment that I wanted to walk away from God, because if I was right my grandmother would be spending eternity in hell and that was just too much for me, but I couldn’t turn away from what I already knew. I just had to deal with the pain and I have to deal with the pain even to this day.

EN: How do you deal with the pain?
FC: Honestly, I try not to think about it, which probably isn’t the right thing to do. Maybe it is the right thing because I’m supposed to dwell on things that are excellent and praise worthy and lovely. I think it’s painful and it’s meant to be painful and it’s supposed to spur me on to not want to feel that pain again and so I do everything I can to tell people what the love of Christ has done for them. It’s just like every other pain in the world. You don’t know how you get through it but you do.

EN: What would you say to people who find it difficult to surrender their lives to God because of unsatisfactory answers about God?
FC: I have this belief that everyone either longs for God or they suppress, deny and want to run from God as far as they can. When someone has a question that’s a road block for them, if they really want God, they’ll find answers to those questions that will satisfy them. If they don’t want God, they won’t find the answers and if they get an adequate answer, they’ll just find another question but that’s not really the issue because it’s a heart issue. So I don’t put too much stock in the questions that aren’t answered to their satisfaction because at the end, even if the questions are answered to their satisfaction, they won’t be satisfied. It’s not the real issue.

EN: Who has been the most influential person in your Christian walk?
FC: In the early days it would be my youth pastor who discipled me and met with me every week for four year and really walked the walk. I’m still friends with him today. We still get together so he’s been this long-term model. His name is Stan Loubeck. There have been several men who have taught me along the way. Now, someone who has influenced me just through his writings is John Piper. He’s discipled me without having more than one conversation with me. I’ve only had one conversation with him but the rest of it has just been through his teachings and reading his books. It’s really changed my perspective on God.

EN: What are some areas in your life that you feel are easier to surrender, relatively speaking?
FC: Not that anything is totally easy. I think the money thing has never been a real issue for me, unless I’m just blinded, but I feel like I really don’t care. The less I have the happier I tend to be. Giving—I love giving and seeing what giving does and caring for the poor and seeing what it does for them. There’s no greater joy for me. I’ve never been possessive of my things. If anything I’m more scared to have things because I feel like it might be so much better if I gave it away and got something eternal for it. That part I would say is the easy part. The harder things are loving people, being able to look at people and really care on a regular basis. It’s hard for me to overcome my selfishness in that area. When it comes to my time and really giving of my time and my affection, sympathy, passion, it’s hard.

EN: What are some areas where God is challenging you right now?
FC: I would say in the area of faith and my prayers. Having so many things to do, God’s challenging me to pray more and trust that the praying I do will accomplish more than preparation time, study time, counseling time, speaking time. To really believe that rather than spending eight hours preparing for a sermon and studying, to spend six hours in study and prep and the other two hours in prayer, if you want to break it down in a ratio, and believing that’s better than crafting a sermon with the perfect transitions. So, it’s just trusting prayer.

EN: What’s your favorite book?
FC: Besides the Bible?

EN: Yeah, besides the Bible.
FC: As far as a Christian book, Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. That really resonates with me. It’s so simple. It’s so obvious. God is the Gospel, also by John Piper.

EN: Favorite movie?
FC: Cinderella Man, Gladiator.

EN: What’s your favorite food?
FC: Sushi.

EN: Describe your perfect day.
FC: My favorite things to do personally would be surfing and golfing and then just playing with the kids and having dinner with the wife. That would be my perfect day.

Posted: March 27, 2007
*This interview first appeared in Encounter Monthly Journal, August 2006