Keith Park

One steady conviction, carried into every room.

For more than two decades, Pastor Keith Park has preached a single, stubborn idea: that God is kind, that His love is not rationed, and that people are made to receive it.

Pastor Keith is the founding pastor of Church of Southland in Anaheim, California — a church he and his wife, Yunghi, began in 2001 with roughly sixty people and no building of their own. An alumnus of Fuller Theological Seminary, he came to ministry a well-traveled man of wide experience, having pioneered campus ministries and young-adult communities across North America before ever planting a church of his own.

He has never been content to simply "go with the flow." From the start he set out to lead a church clear in its purpose — the salvation of souls and the inward and outward healing of broken people — and warm in its welcome, a place where people don't just hear about God but meet and experience Him. Today, having handed the pulpit to the next generation, he serves as Pastor Emeritus of Church of Southland — both its Anaheim and Chino congregations — not stepping away from the work, but into a new season of it alongside Yunghi.

An unlikely road to the pulpit.

Pastor Keith's story didn't begin in a pulpit. It began in the working world, where by every ordinary measure he was doing well — and quietly certain God was asking for something more. For a time he kept that sense at arm's length. One of his first attempts to answer the call was famously impractical: opening a Christian bookstore in a Jewish neighborhood. It didn't last — but that detour set a very different trajectory.

The call, as he tells it, was not loud — a gentle whisper heard as a young man in Los Angeles, speaking of love, mercy, and a life given to serving God's people. He answered it. Over the following years the journey carried him further than he imagined: pioneering ministries with campus groups, and helping lead the ACTS Fellowship and Petra churches, including years of fruitful ministry in Canada.

By many accounts he was thriving in Toronto. And yet he left it behind — a decision that puzzled some who knew him — returning to Southern California in 1998 to serve as the English Ministry pastor of Grace Ministries International in Fullerton. What set him apart, those closest to him say, was a restlessness of the right kind: a hunger not merely for more knowledge of God, but for more of His presence. Soon that hunger took the shape of a specific calling — to plant a new church.

A church built on faith, not real estate.

Church of Southland officially began in February 2001 with about sixty members — and a promise Pastor Keith would later laugh about breaking.

He had told the church they would never buy a building; they weren't "in real estate," they would simply rent and go where God led. For years that meant worshiping wherever they could gather — the Sequoia Athletic Center, the Radisson in Fullerton, a Four Point Sheraton, the Woodfin, a Holiday Inn — carrying the church in and out of borrowed rooms week after week.

Through God's provision, that season gave way to permanence. In 2008 the church purchased its first home, affectionately nicknamed "Woodland." Then, after several building campaigns, the Southland family built a new church in Anaheim in 2014 — the home it worships in today. As a founding church of Acts Ministries International (AMI) — today a global community of churches spanning more than ten countries and over thirty cities — its reach grew far beyond one congregation. Across twenty-three years of leading both Southland and AMI, Pastor Keith poured himself into planting churches, sending missionaries, and raising up pastors and elders now shepherding congregations of their own.

Milestones

1. 1998

   Returns to Southern California

   Joins Grace Ministries International in Fullerton as English Ministry pastor, and soon senses God calling him to plant.

2. 2001

   Church of Southland is planted

   Begins in February with roughly sixty members, meeting in rented hotel and community spaces.

3. 2002

   Acts Ministries International

   Southland becomes a founding church of AMI, joining a global family in church planting and missions.

4. 2008

   A first home — “Woodland”

   After years of moving between rented rooms, the church purchases its first building.

5. 2014

   A new church in Anaheim

   Through God's provision, the congregation builds and moves into its current home on Sanderson Avenue.

6. 2024

   Pastor Emeritus

   After twenty-three years, Pastor Keith hands the pulpit to the next generation and is commissioned into a new season of ministry.

What he never stopped preaching.

With conviction that came after your soul and a humor that could disarm the whole room a moment later, a few themes ran through nearly everything Pastor Keith preached.

A reassignment, not a retirement.

Ask Pastor Keith about all the fuss over his retirement and he'll wave it off with a grin: “I'm not going anywhere. I am not dying — I'll be around.”

Those who have traveled with him recently describe a fire that isn't cooling with age so much as burning brighter and hotter. He steps out of the weekly pulpit, but not out of the work — he and Yunghi continuing to join God in His global redemptive work by the power of the Holy Spirit, serving this generation wherever they're sent.

Keith & Yunghi.

Whatever the ministry accomplished, Pastor Keith is quick to say it was never his alone. After forty years of marriage he's fond of admitting that he's the one who married up — and that Yunghi is not merely a pastor's wife but a minister in her own right, welcoming newcomers, mentoring quietly, and brightening every room she enters.

Together they weathered the real cost of ministry — years of pressure, a heart attack, and sacrifices carried by their whole family, including their two sons, Calvin and Joel. Through all of it, those who watched them up close point to one thing above the rest: they remained in Christ. Pastor Keith often credits the prayers that carried him — not least his mother's, who prayed for him for sixty-seven years.