Sexual harassment allegations against LGBTQ-friendly pastor in Hong Kong raise questions over power dynamics
Hong Kong Free Press
The sacking of a pastor at one of Hong Kong’s only LGBTQ-friendly churches has prompted three people to come forward with allegations of past sexual harassment, with two of the alleged incidents dating back more than a decade.
Experts said the cases highlight the hesitation that some may feel in making complaints about authority figures in places of worship.
Joe Pang, a Malaysian pastor known for his LGBTQ advocacy, was dismissed by The Blessed Ministry Community Church (BMCC) last December after over eight years there. In a February statement, the church said Pang had committed “serious misconduct” and “conceal[ed] important information due to conflicts of interest.”
According to the church, Pang had asked it to sponsor the school fees of a student with whom Pang was in an open relationship. Chris Cheng, a BMCC board member, told HKFP it was inappropriate for a pastor to encourage the church to use its resources to benefit their personal life.
Pang told HKFP he had only dated the student for a month and the relationship had ended before the student was engaged with the church. He has filed a complaint to the Labour Department alleging wrongful termination.
Following news of Pang’s termination, three people came forward and accused the pastor of sexual misconduct and harassment – allegations that Pang has denied.
A ‘haunting’ experience
Speaking to HKFP via Zoom, one of the alleged victims recounted what he described as a non-consensual sexual encounter with Pang and Pang’s then-boyfriend in a Sheung Wan hotel room in November 2011. At the time, Pang had not yet begun working at the BMCC, but had been invited to Hong Kong from Malaysia to speak at the church. The BMCC paid for his accommodation during the four-day trip.
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Bruce, who spoke under a pseudonym to protect his identity, was working in mainland China at the time, and visited Hong Kong that weekend to attend the pride parade. There, he met members of the BMCC and decided to stay longer in the city to attend Sunday morning service the next day, where he met Pang for the first time.
That night, Bruce went with some congregants, as well as Pang and Pang’s partner, to a bar. With no plans on where to spend the night, a church member suggested that Bruce stay with Pang and his then-boyfriend as they had a spare bed in their hotel room.
Bruce said that he had just showered and got into bed when the couple approached him and had sex with him.
That night in the hotel room is one that is sort of indelibly in my memory… it’s affected my trust in church leaders, particularly in LGBT churches
Bruce
“The lights were still on when everything happened,” he recalled.
Bruce said he did not express his opposition as he did not feel like he could. Both men were larger than him and he said he felt it was “easier to let it happen” than “fight and get out.”
He told HKFP that while he was left traumatised, he had not filed a police report as the “gravity of the situation didn’t really sink in.” Bruce returned to mainland China for work the next morning and resigned the incident to “bad memories.”
But the episode never left him. More than a decade on, as time and experience helped him comprehend what he described as a “haunting” incident, Bruce said he now considered what had happened as rape.
“That night in the hotel room is one that is sort of indelibly in my memory… it’s affected my trust in church leaders, particularly in LGBT churches,” he said.
Pang told HKFP by phone that he remembered Bruce staying in his hotel room that night, and that he and his partner at the time had sex with Bruce. But Pang said he believed it was consensual.
“It could have been a misunderstanding, a miscommunication,” Pang said, but questioned why Bruce did not put a stop to it. “He could have said: ‘Wait, I’m just sleeping here tonight, I’m not here for this’.”
Adam, another alleged victim who also asked to be known by a pseudonym, told HKFP via Zoom that he was drawn to Pang when he started attending a LGBTQ-friendly church Pang had founded in Malaysia. “I really worshipped him,” Adam said in Cantonese.
“I thought he had a gift from God to help this group of [sexual] minorities,” he said.
That impression changed in December 2009, when Adam stayed at Pang’s home after a Christmas carolling event ended late. Adam said that Pang had entered his room while he was asleep and touched his genitals. He pushed him away and Pang eventually left, Adam added.
Adam told HKFP he did not tell the church what had happened because he cherished the safe space it provided, having been rejected by a mainstream church because of his sexual orientation.
Asked about the alleged incident, Pang told HKFP he had no memory of it.
A power hierarchy
Pang’s dismissal over the student sponsor issue, and the subsequent sexual harassment allegations, have exposed the power dynamics in churches that can discourage complainants from coming forward.
Grace Bok, the convener of Covenant of the Rainbow, a coalition of LGBTQ churches and groups, told HKFP that sexual harassment in churches was “about power, not sex itself.”
“A church’s structure is a pyramid, with [the pastor at] the top having supreme power,” Bok said, speaking in Cantonese. “If you talk about it in a more extreme way, they represent God, the Lord.”
With such a power imbalance, victims may not speak out because they fear nobody will believe them. They may also question if they themselves were in the wrong, said Bok, who is also the pastor at inclusive church One Body in Christ.
“[Some churchgoers] have a blind reverence for their pastors,” Bok said.
Pang, however, said he felt it was unfair that people always believed it must be “the person in power doing the bullying.”
‘Empowering role model’
A long-time advocate for sexual minorities, Pang is known in Hong Kong’s LGBTQ Christian community as one of the city’s only gay pastors. In 2007, he founded a gay-friendly church in Malaysia, the Good Samaritan Kuala Lumpur.
The church did not respond to HKFP’s request for comment.
When the BMCC began looking for a new pastor who could be an “empowering role model” in late 2014, Pang emerged as a strong candidate, people familiar with the hiring process told HKFP.
The following year, the BMCC – which was founded in 1992 and claims to be Asia’s first LGBTQ-friendly church – sponsored Pang’s work visa and arranged for his move to Hong Kong.
At BMCC, Pang was well-liked, church board members told HKFP. Past and present congregants described him as a charismatic man who taught them self-acceptance. He often greeted others with big bear hugs, they said, although those embraces sometimes made people feel uncomfortable.
Pang told HKFP that he did not care for hierarchy and saw the church’s congregants as his friends. “I told them not to call me pastor,” he said. “Just call me Joe.”
He added that he would hang out with congregants outside of church, going to bars with them – though he said he did not drink much alcohol and “would never get drunk.”
Another alleged victim, Cherry, told HKFP that Pang once pulled her over to sit on his lap before a Sunday service at the BMCC six or seven years ago. She also said that she once witnessed Pang reach out towards a churchgoer’s chest and pinch his nipple out of the blue while outside a bar.
Cherry said Pang claimed that if people truly accepted their bodies, they would allow others to touch them.
Pang denied forcing anyone to sit on his lap, saying that he was normally too busy before services to socialise with congregants. He also told HKFP he had not pinched a man’s nipple, saying that would be “too sensitive.”
He said, however, that it was common for there to be “a lot of bodily contact” when hanging out with members of the church at bars, adding that people had complained he got “too close,” and that such complaints – according to theories he had read – stemmed from people feeling insecure in their bodies.
Verbal warning
The BMCC said it only became aware of the three sexual harassment allegations against Pang in late January, a month after firing him. But it was not the first time they had heard such complaints about him.
In August 2022, the church received a complaint that Pang had made a “sexual advance” towards somebody at a nightlife venue, Cheng, the board member, told HKFP. As part of its protocol, the church brought in a third-party mediator for an investigation but was unable to prove the complainant’s testimony. Pang was ultimately given a verbal warning.
Pang told HKFP that he had been accused of ordering somebody to give him a blow job in the back staircase of a bar where churchgoers had celebrated the BMCC’s 30th anniversary. He denied doing so, and said the church had later apologised to him after determining that the complainant had told lies.
But Cheng told HKFP it did not conclude that the complainant had lied, simply that they were unable to verify his testimony. The victim had neither wanted to proceed with the case nor report it to police, Cheng said, as he did not want to “make a big deal out of it.”
Ruby Lai, an assistant professor at Lingnan University’s Department of Sociology and Social Policy, said that in the face of entrenched power dynamics, such as those in a church, it was important to establish mechanisms for people to report complaints, just as the BMCC had done.
However, as the 2022 BMCC complaint showed, alleged victims may not see the investigation through to the end for the same reasons they stayed silent in the first place – because they feared they would not be believed.
“But at least [the church] would know that this person has been complained about, and they can be more alert going forward,” Lai said in Cantonese.
‘Emotional manipulation’
The student with whom Pang was said to have been in an open relationship told HKFP he met Pang at a workshop in October 2018, after which the pastor began initiating conversation almost daily. The student, who asked to remain anonymous, said he started dating Pang because of low self-esteem and a belief that he could learn from the pastor, although he said he had been reluctant.
According to the student, the pair dated until December 2022, a timeline that Pang disputes. The pastor told HKFP they dated for about a month in mid-2021, when the student came to Hong Kong and was staying with him, but before he moved into the university dorms and began his studies.
Pang, however, said that before the student moved to Hong Kong they had been on “dates,” meeting up in Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia, often when Pang travelled for work.
“We stopped dating after a month [when the student came to Hong Kong] because we felt we could not really click,” Pang told HKFP.
But the student told HKFP that Pang often demanded he went over to his apartment. Pang acknowledged that the student spent time there, but said it was “whenever he was free” and not upon Pang’s orders.
WhatsApp screenshots dated October 2021 and seen by HKFP appeared to show repeated calls and messages from Pang telling the student to come over.
The student said he felt “emotionally manipulated” by Pang while they were dating. He said he tried twice to break things off, but Pang had not let him, adding that the relationship ended in December 2022 after Pang met another man.
The church said it learned of the relationship last October. After conducting an investigation, it gave Pang the option to quit. Pang did not, so the church dismissed him. The pastor – who said the probe was unfair – then filed a complaint to the Labour Department alleging wrongful termination.
In response to HKFP, the Labour Department said it “will not comment on the individual case.”
Pang told HKFP it “pained him” to take legal action against the church, which he had always seen as his family. He also said he felt that the church had not sufficiently listened to him, and had sided with the student.
“I am not trying to get money here. I am trying to win back my platform to be heard,” he said.
A community and a ‘safe space’
Churches are not unique in having entrenched power dynamics. Hierarchies exist in schools and workplaces, where sexual misconduct can also arise. But what is different about churches – which could further deter people from speaking up – is the community that they provide, one scholar said.
“You may be very emotionally attached [to] and have many interpersonal relationships in the church. You have your social circle there,” Lingnan University’s Lai said.
Churchgoers could risk negatively impacting their relationships with their closest peers if they spoke up or complained, Lai said.
For minority groups like the LGBTQ community, there could be yet more at stake. Congregants at gay-friendly churches could worry about losing what may be their only refuge, or perhaps further stigmatising the community.
“You may worry that, if I report, will it cause the church’s reputation to be damaged,” Lai added.
Asked at the end of March if he was in Hong Kong, Pang said no but declined to say where he was. A live stream on the Facebook page of the Malaysia church which Pang founded, Good Samaritan Kuala Lumpur, showed him preaching in person at a service on Easter Sunday, but not during any Sunday services in April.
With the pastor already dismissed, the BMCC said it had no power to investigate the latest allegations. The church said it had not been not aware of the accusations before hiring him, and that it had sent its February statement on Pang’s dismissal to other gay-friendly churches in Asia so they could make informed decisions if they were to consider employing him.
“Pastors are people too,” said JY, another BMCC board member. “They have to be accountable for their actions.”
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