Riding the Wave: OCBC, BCA, and Project Catalyst

Around the 1920s, a small Sangha with a handful of members began meeting under the sponsorship of the Los Angeles Betsuin. One hundred years later, the Orange County Buddhist Church — my home temple — is the BCA’s largest, with 783 members. 

It started with gatherings in living rooms, grew to a modest wooden schoolhouse in 1935, and now has become an inspirational symbol of the Jodo Shinshu community and Nembutsu teaching in Southern California.  

It is, as I dare to dream, what Albany and Las Vegas as new and evolving Sanghas, respectively, will one day become.

That arc of growth, built on the decisions of pioneers willing to take risks and embrace change, is very much on my mind as I think about our collective history, the June National Board Meeting we just finished, and where the BCA is headed today.

Orange County itself has a similar story of transformation. Driving down I-5 back in the day, you could open the windows, smell the orange blossoms, and see orchards and strawberry fields for miles. Today, those fields have given way to dense housing, shopping centers, and suburban development. 

Moreover, the attractions have changed too. With apologies to my friends who are Disney fans (especially in Southern and Eastern District), my personal favorite as a young child — and future attorney privately wondering who approved the liability waiver — was Lion Country Safari, where you drove your own car through a fenced animal park and found yourself a car window away from lions, elephants, tigers and giraffes.

As times changed and the community around it evolved, so did OCBC. Arguably, one of the secrets to its success has been a willingness to innovate. 

From Rev. Tomoji Hirata’s push to open a Sangha for farmers too busy to drive to Los Angeles, to Bishop Rev. Marvin Harada’s expansion of youth engagement and Buddhist education, to Rev. Jon Turner’s digital learning platform - Everyday Buddhist, to Rev. Dr. Mutsumi Wondra’s development of ministers’ assistants and lay speakers — OCBC has always positioned itself at the forefront of change.

Impermanence is a foundational Buddhist teaching and yet change remains hard. Changing hearts and minds after years of comfort, habit and tradition can feel almost impossible — even when the facts and statistics like declining membership make a compelling case. 

While we celebrate different temple anniversaries across the BCA, each temple has a similar story about pioneers who made difficult decisions, took risks and invested in a future full of change. Today’s BCA is no different.

In this issue, you’ll read more about Project Catalyst, a proposed change to how the BCA structures its national membership and temple dues. In plain terms: Instead of temple assessments fluctuating each year based on paid member counts, we would fix the amount temples contribute to the BCA nationally. This frees temple leaders to focus their energy on growing their communities rather than managing assessments — and it opens the door to a new kind of national membership that includes all affiliated Jodo Shinshu followers in the United States, paid and unpaid alike. For the first time, we may begin to see the true scale of our community.

As part of Project Catalyst, we will survey membership categories, systems, records, and financial conditions across all BCA temples to identify best practices for engagement and measure our progress toward growth and sustainability together.

Waves of impermanence don’t respect borders as they roll through our communities. They don’t stop at the state line between California and Nevada, the county lines between Orange and Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Alameda, at OCBC’s gates on Dale Avenue in Anaheim, or at the BCA’s doors on Durant Avenue in Berkeley. They reach every district — Northwest, Central, Mountain States, and beyond. The orchards I remember from childhood are gone. My favorite lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, orchards, and strawberry fields are gone. Change comes whether we invite it or not.

I humbly ask that our temple leaders consider Project Catalyst in that spirit — as an exercise in interconnectedness and respect for change. No temple is an island — privacy is a challenge we all face, not a defense against working together. 

Even the largest among us can learn from others and grow stronger in partnership. The pioneers who built OCBC from a handful of farmers’ families into the BCA’s largest temple didn’t wait for ideal conditions or waves of change. They innovated, they adapted and they invested in a future they couldn’t fully see but knew was important.

Let’s embrace that same spirit now — with a national, connected effort of innovation and flexibility in how we grow, communicate with, and serve our members. That is a risk and an investment worthy of our pioneers and worthy of our next 125 years.