Welcome to the Bridgetown Church podcast. For the month of May, we are honoring Asian American

Pacific Islander Month. Each week, members of our church family will be sharing stories

that acknowledge and celebrate AAPI history from their lived experiences and the world at

large.

Hi Bridgetown family, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Today we continue

our celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander, or AAPI Month. Throughout the month of May,

we're sharing stories from people within Bridgetown who are part of the AAPI community. You

might be asking, why are we doing this? Many reasons, but one will name is we want to

celebrate the diversity of the family of Christ. If Scripture and God Himself hold up

the multi-ethnic expression of the church as something to be celebrated, we want to do

the same. One way to do that is to hear and honor the experiences of our brothers and

sisters here at Bridgetown. That's what we're doing today. My name is Casey McDonald. I work

in operations here at Bridgetown and I'm also helping launch our new Justice Reconciliation

and Mercy Department alongside J.T. Thomas and honestly do whatever else is needed at

Bridgetown and I'm here today with my friend Chelsea. Hey, I guess Brennan Niemann,

hello to all the folks out there. My name's Chelsea Sound. It's been coming to Bridgetown

maybe for about eight years now I want to say eight years. Eight years. And I've been

born and raised in Portland my whole life. So all 26 years of home. That's awesome. What

part of Portland did you grow up in? So growing up our family was in the Montevilla area.

If anybody's familiar, we grew up off of like Halsey in 71st and that's when the big migration

of folks started coming. Started coming into Portland.

Coming into Portland, yeah. And then eventually we moved out to the burbs of Oregon. So Gladstone

...