Church Staff.

Pastor Uma

Senior Pastor

Kanagasabai UmaShankar — “Pastor Uma”

Uma, as most people here know him, came to the United States from Sri Lanka as a young man with his studies in front of him and a plan for his life. The plan didn’t survive his sophomore year. At Concordia University in Portland, he became a Christian, and the life he’d mapped out gave way to a different one. He spent more than two decades here on a Green Card before becoming a U.S. citizen.

He met Toni, married her, and together they raised three boys — AviLashan, Arujun, and Aashwin. For most of those years, Uma’s work was with young people. He spent about a decade as a Director of Christian Education in the Pacific Northwest, in Sandpoint, Idaho, and then Hillsboro, Oregon, before moving into the classroom. He taught science and theology, first in Tacoma, Washington, and then for six years in Tomball, Texas. Wherever the family landed, the work was the same underneath: helping kids figure out who they are and whose they are.

People kept telling him he should be a pastor. For a long time he said no. He already had a calling he loved, and the usual roads to ordination didn’t fit a man with a full-time job and a family to feed. It took a friend, Pastor David Kim, pointing him toward the Cross-Cultural Ministry Center — a path built for someone right where Uma was — before he finally stopped resisting. He started in the summer of 2020 and kept teaching the whole way through, serving his vicarage in the Texas congregation his family called home.

The training took five years. He finished it the same spring his youngest son finished high school. With all three boys grown and out on their own, the move that came next belonged to just Uma and Toni — across the water to Oahu and to Messiah Lutheran in Ewa Beach. Since February, he’s also been serving as long-term guest pastor at Trinity Lutheran in Wahiawa, where he leads chapel for the school and preaches on the weekends.

These days it’s an empty nest and a new island. Oahu is home now, for him and Toni both.