“The call was there very early for me,” the Rev. Greg Kimura told The Living Church. On October 18, the former nonprofit executive was elected the sixth Bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin, one of the smaller dioceses of the Episcopal Church, which has dealt with oversized problems.
“It’s my sense … that the boat has been turned already, and the diocese now is on stable ground,” Kimura told TLC.
In 2007, the ecclesiastical district in Central California went through a very public split, with majorities of 40 parishes departing to form what is now the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of San Joaquin. The division led to a protracted legal battle over church assets that lasted for years.
Throughout the turmoil, membership slumped. What was once an 8,800-member diocese with 47 churches is now less than a third of its size.
“But the church, to its credit, stood firm on the issues of sexuality and on women’s ordination,” Kimura said. “And that message was gospel-centered, and that message persisted amidst all the conflict, and now the church is in a different place. These are settled matters now in the Episcopal Church.”
With eyes on the future, the fourth-generation Japanese American and third-generation Episcopalian foretells possibilities. “I think right now is just a really ripe moment for evangelism,” he said. When he becomes a bishop, he hopes to bring a “kind of small evangelical ethos into my ministry.”
The current rector of St. James’ Church in South Pasadena, California, in the Diocese of Los Angeles, has a track record of bringing stability and even growth to congregations he has led. During his very first assignment, however, he confronted a disaster.
In November 1996, the parish building of Holy Spirit Church at Eagle River, Alaska—a suburb of Anchorage—caught fire. Kimura was rector, and his congregation’s building was extensively damaged by water and smoke. Equipment, tables, chairs, and even materials for Sunday school were decimated.
“We thought we would lose some of the faithful,” reads a story about the fire on All Saints’ website. But 135 people attended the service in a makeshift sanctuary, where Kimura gave “his most heartfelt healing sermon ever.” The parish rebuilt, and Kimura led the church to transition from mission status to a financially self-sufficient parish. “First mission in 45 years to become a parish,” the forthcoming chief pastor of San Joaquin noted in his CV.
Kimura then became a university chaplain, and noticing the landscape of the church—where serving in the priesthood full-time is not always feasible—he pursued a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion in Cambridge and served in nonprofits. For six years, he led the Alaska Humanities Forum, a nonprofit promoting Alaskan identity, which opened doors for him to move to California to serve as president and chief executive officer of the Japanese American National Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate institution.
Paraphrasing a famous phrase to describe his first board meeting in the Los Angeles-based organization, he said, “I knew I was in another world, you know, it wasn’t Alaska anymore.” During that meeting, he met Norman Mineta, transportation secretary during the Bush administration. On 9/11, the Japanese American government official refused calls to profile Arab citizens.
“In the chaotic hours and days following the attacks, Mineta did not yet know that his childhood incarceration by the federal government in the aftermath of Japan’s Pearl Harbor bombing nearly 60 years earlier would be a crucial element in decisions about how the George W. Bush administration responded to 9/11,” Susan Kamei writes in the Asia Times.
“We owe a great debt of gratitude to Norm Mineta, because he was there and said, ‘You can’t do this,’” Kimura told TLC.
Mineta’s family’s experience is not abstract for Kimura, but a part of his family’s history.
Minidoka Concentration Camp
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the FBI raided the home of Kimura’s great-grandparents. His great-grandfather, who ran businesses in Anchorage, was held as an alien enemy in the same detention center where his granduncle was training as a military police officer. The next year, the Kimuras were all detained together at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho, where the Episcopal priest’s father would be born.
It was at Minidoka where his grandparents, William and Minnie, would convert to Christianity from Buddhism. After the war, the couple became very involved in All Saints Church in Anchorage—William, an artist, designed the stained-glass windows for the church. Minnie served as treasurer of the altar guild until she died.
Even while working in the nonprofit world, Kimura served as a priest. While head of the museum, he was an assisting priest at St. Cross Church in Hermosa Beach, California. “I’ve spent my career not knowing anything but being a priest,” he said. Five years after leading the cultural institution, Kimura became the rector of St. Andrew’s Church in Ojai, California. There, he confronted another kind of fire—a wildfire.
The Thomas Fire of 2018 in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the largest of its kind in the state’s modern history, almost burned the town of Ojai to the ground.
Bishop John Taylor of Los Angeles remembers talking to Kimura over the phone. “He was driving around through the smoke, making sure farmworkers and unhoused people weren’t at risk,” Taylor told TLC in a statement.
At St. Andrew’s, Kimura started a Spanish-speaking service despite not knowing any Spanish. It became the largest of the three Sunday services, which made the rector realize “that there’s really a huge need out there.”
Most members of the Spanish-speaking service were migrant field workers from Central Mexico—men and women who, as Kimura remembers, did not take time off even during the pandemic.
“They were the people who were out there picking food. They’re proud of the work that they do, and they should be,” he said. “They’re producing food that feeds families, that feeds America.”
He added, “People don’t realize this, but the San Joaquin Valley provides 50 percent of all the produce for the United States.” An estimated 2.4 million Latinos live in the central San Joaquin Valley. According to the 2022 census, they make up 54.8 percent of the residents.
Kimura can now pray the liturgy in Spanish and can casually converse using the language. The Diocese of San Joaquin, led by its current bishop, the Rt. Rev. David Rice, and Hispanic Missioner, the Rev. Nelson Serrano Poveda, has started a ministry to get closer to Spanish-speaking immigrants who work on farms—and who continue to work despite the threats of fires, a pandemic, and, most recently, unlawful detentions.
The latter makes Kimura furious and indignant. “I think the church is going to be judged by its response to these difficult times,” he said. “When Christ was walking the earth, he was always going out to communities that were being excluded and marginalized. So my model for ministry has always been to try and follow what Jesus himself did.”
A visual circulated widely in the media shows videos and photos of migrants being shoved, strangled, and taken away in unmarked vehicles by ICE. Even in courtrooms where migrants go for regular check-ins, they are approached by masked agents to be detained and potentially deported.
Kimura, who has written a book about the sanctuary movement, was accompanying migrants at their ICE check-ins beginning in the first Trump administration. One time, he accompanied a mother of two whose family was “deathly worried that she’s going to get deported.” He picked up the woman and drove her to her appointment. She had to check in with ICE three times in three weeks.
Kimura said he kept a contingency plan for such work, highlighting landmarks or safe spaces where he tells migrants they could run to, just in case they were chased by agents.
“I just find it almost ludicrous that I’m almost having to think in these surreptitious ways to protect people who are innocent victims of a profoundly broken immigration system,” he said. “I actually don’t know what I’ll do if ICE does try and take them away.”
He added, “I’ll try and get in the way.”
Kimura will be consecrated by Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on April 18.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
