Mike Livingston remembered the day the Rev. Warren Won-kyong Lee, fresh out of Princeton Theological Seminary, popped up at his high school church fellowship meeting in South Los Angeles.

“None of us knew why he was there, this short, bespectacled Korean dude,” Livingston would recall decades later of the 1966 appearance of the first Korean (and Asian) American pastor at the black church, Westminster Presbyterian. “He drove a white, stripped-down, manual transmission (gear on the steering column, not on the floor!) Ford. It had an AM radio and a heater. Period.”

The rest is history.

In a moving tribute in Lee’s 1993 book, A Dream for South Central: the Autobiography of an Afro-Americanized Korean Christian Minister, Livingston swore: “Warren changed our lives completely.

“If I cannot say this for the entire congregation, and I want to, I can say it with confidence for our youth group, and with complete, joyful confidence for myself,” wrote Livingston, a high school senior when he met the KA pastor.

Livingston would follow his pastor/mentor/comrade’s path via UCLA, Princeton Theological Seminary and a series of urban congregations, finally ascending to the lofty position of president of the National Council of Churches.

LEFT: Lee’s parents, Hwa Mok Kim Lee (left) and Sun Tu Lee, in 1970. • RIGHT: Sun Tu Lee, shown here in 1938, came to the United States in 1922 as a student but quickly ended up working menial jobs to earn money.

Clothes and cars meant little to the KA minister, described Livingston, who said that Lee lived in a one-room house at the time — and “that designation is generous.”

In A Dream for South Central, he elaborated on Lee’s profound influence on the youth at his church:
“We were teenagers in the midst of the ferment of the ’60s: civil rights, black power, war and peace, counterculture challenges to settled roles for men and women, changing attitudes toward sex, the increased use of ‘recreational’ drugs.
“In our [youth] group we would talk about subjects we either couldn’t or wouldn’t discuss in other places, home especially. We read and talked about The Autobiography of Malcolm X, about relationships and sexuality, racism, faith, war and peace.”

Lee would take the teenagers to visit other youth groups from churches very different from their own. He encouraged them to march and demonstrate on behalf of causes they believed in. “We boldly participated in those critical times in both the life of our nation and our own lives,” described Livingston. “Warren didn’t make our decisions for us; he was our wise mentor, our pastor and friend.

Growing up in South Los Angeles and attending Manual Arts High, which fielded competitive sports teams, Lee played basketball.(in the front row, right)

“And yes, he is a great preacher. He has the courage to say even the most difficult words of truth. But what Warren did best then and now is love. He gives himself completely to life, as he did to the people of Westminster, to our youth group and me.”

In a recent interview with K.W. Lee, Livingston, now the executive director of the International Council of Community Churches, spoke animatedly of the black congregation’s embracing of the KA pastor. “They loved him from the very beginning.