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My Story
Jamie Chang
After double majoring in Psychology and Japanese, Jamie worked for 5 years as a QA for a Bay Area tech company while ministering to college students, the youth, and the elderly as a covocatiol minister. After that, she became a full-time minister, joining a 2-year church planting residency before moving to Philly.
Steven & Jamie met while attending the same church at UC Berkeley as undergrads. We love Asia, California, Philly, and our 2 kids - Silas (5) and Brooke (1) - but not necessarily in that order :).
I was born in Baton Rouge, moved to Chapel Hill, almost landed in Minneapolis, but instead grew up in Taipei. There, I went to a Catholic International School, where I was drawn to the sacred - but taking the Christian stuff seriously at school wasn’t a thing other kids did, so I tried to play it cool.
When I was 16, I moved to California with my sister, who was starting at UC Irvine as a freshman. We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment and in two weeks, learned how to cook, clean, do laundry, and live on our own. (Props to my sister; I don’t know how she did it!) With the move, I felt like I went from having everything to losing everything overnight -- my family, my eight pets, friends, good grades, and more. In my teenage angst, I zoomed out and thought about how the same thing would just happen when I died. I would lose everything again. What’s the point to life then? I could have easily plunged into an existential crisis, but instead I busied myself and tried not to think about it much. Yet, I could never quite rid myself of this gnawing sense that there has to be more to life.
The rest of high school went by with little worth mentioning. However, in college, God had a very different plan for me. I met a group of Christians who actually tried to live out what they believed. What made them different was the way they related with each other, treating each other like family and with love. I found a home away from home. But more importantly, through them I met Jesus and learned that I have an eternal home with Jesus, and that death is not the end.
My hope is that every college student would be able to use their four years at college to thoughtfully and courageously consider the why of life, and to discover that they don’t have to end up in an existential crisis, but can find hope in Jesus.