TikTok Brought Me to Church
Cross-Cultural Voices
March 17, 2026
Yosef Zenebe: Not many churches have a TikTok presence. We ended up filling a vacuum. We still get people who walk in through the door, and we ask them, how did you hear about Perazim? And they'll tell us like, we just simply searched churches in Minnesota on TikTok, and you were the first page that came up. We weren't paying for ad space.
And it still makes me laugh because there's something in that story that feels consistent with who we are. We weren't trying to be savvy or trendy. We were just being faithful with the little that we had, putting it into new places, and God opened a door that we didn't even know there were.
John Yoder: Hi everybody. John Yoder here. Welcome back to part two of our interview with Pastor Yosef Zenebe of Perazim Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you missed our last podcast, I encourage you to go back and listen to it. You'll hear how he grew up caught between Ethiopian and American cultures and came to peace with both, and how he was part of the team that launched Perazim Church in 2019 to reach second generation young adults.
As Pastor Joseph continues his interview today, he shares how his church really exploded in growth as they begin to share on TikTok. And he also shares how his church reaches both Africans and African Americans, and how white Americans as well have worked together to reach the second generation.
I noticed when I first worshiped with you in your new spot in St. Paul that yes, you had more than doubled from the last time, and it had been a little while. Much of that is because of TikTok. Now from the beginning, you have always been a social media heavy church. You've got a website, but it's pretty bare bones. There's not a lot there.
You've always thrived on Instagram, but I didn't know until recently that you've had a strong presence in TikTok and that has brought a lot of first time guests through the door. Tell us about that.
Yosef Zenebe: Honestly, all of the credit goes to Parker. He's our media team lead. We were already creating content, whether it was sermon snippets, weekly highlights, and he just simply took that same content and pushed it onto TikTok.
And it wasn't some big strategic initiative. It was just faithful creativity. But what we noticed was that with each platform, it had its own generation. Facebook was where our parents were. Instagram was where the millennials congregated, and TikTok was primarily Gen Z. And it was exactly the people that we wanted to reach.
And I think because not many churches have a TikTok presence, we ended up filling a vacuum. People would tell us, we still get people who walk in through the door. Like, how did you hear about Perazim? One of the first questions I'll ask and they'll tell us like, man, we just simply searched “churches in Minnesota” on TikTok, and you were the first page that came up.
We weren't paying for ad space. And it still makes me laugh because there, there's something in that story that feels consistent with who we are. We weren't trying to be savvy or trendy. We were just being faithful with the little that we had putting it into new places, and God opened a door that we didn't even know there were.
And a lot of the second generation, Gen Z that are coming into the church, they're bringing their friends and a lot of them are coming from first generation immigrant churches that don't have spaces for them, and they're finding Perazim is what they were looking for.
And man our hospitality team is always running out of gift bags, because every single week people are like, man, I'm trying to get plugged in. I'm trying to serve. And so it's coming from second generation. Our church was predominantly Ethiopian the first three, four years.
But now, like within the Hispanic Latino, but also within, Kenyan, West African, Ghanaian, Nigerian, we have representation all over. And Perazim is no longer a predominantly Ethiopian church. I would say we make up maybe 35% of the demographic of our church.
John Yoder: For many of us, we don't really fully understand the difference between African immigrant culture and African American culture. How are they the same? How are they different and what is it like to preach to both,
Yosef Zenebe: I think there are some real similarities that we share. We both have cultures sharing deep roots in community and collective identity. The family isn't just nuclear, it's extended and it's central. And there's the shared experience of navigating predominantly white spaces of racism and being othered. And there's a shared pride in resilience and music and food and oral storytelling tradition that runs through both.
But I think the key difference between the cultures, African American culture and African immigrant culture and Ethiopian culture specifically, it tends to carry a strong emphasis on education as a primary path forward. A respect for elders, a deference for them. Optimism or a belief that hard work leads to success. And sometimes it's called that immigrant hustle mentality.
And also just the cultural pride that exists tied to a homeland language or a lineage. Whereas the African American culture is built in America actually out of survival, resistance and creativity, and has its own distinct language patterns, music, and all of those things.
The tension between the two between African immigrants, sometimes as immigrants, we arrive with stereotypes about African Americans absorbed from Western media. And so I remember there was always a clash with the first generation immigrant parents. They would say, you're not black, you're Ethiopian, you're not black.
But I go to school. And all of my friends go to school, and we are seen as black. We are black. And it was always like not wanting to be grouped in with them. And even sometimes even with my African American friends, like sometimes they view African immigrants with suspicion because the, we, they see us as outsiders who benefit from the black struggle without sharing its history.
And so it's a real and honest tension worth naming. But I think because we grew up having to navigate so many different spheres, and there was a part of my identity that respects and honors the black culture and the shared struggle, that I think it's very easy for us to include black African American leaders within our leadership team as well. We try to be able to serve everyone as best as we can.
John Yoder: The last couple times I've heard you preach, I've heard themes, and the big thing is simply we are not a politically motivated church. We use language like we don't lean blue or red, we stand on the word, and we don't follow the elephant or the donkey, we follow the lamb, or some language like that. Why is that an important theme for Perazim?
Yosef Zenebe: I think with the Christian identity, sometimes we get pulled into a certain demographic, but then because we're very young and a lot of people have like liberal values, they're coming from a different influence.
And so how do we navigate, because we don't just preach the word of God just to say Jesus saves, you have a great Sunday. But how do we bring the Word of God to life within our communities? How does it inform our worldview? How are we Christians politically? How are we Christians culturally? How do we navigate truth in a world that every app, everything that we read is saying, this is the truth, we have the truth, and not all truth is created equal.
And so how do we navigate those different spaces? So I think in trying to bring the Word of God to life we're constantly navigating political things that are happening within our culture, and how do we use that biblical framework to look at scripture, to look at our world?
And so we have to constantly remind our congregation, who are young, who come from oppressed minority groups, like how do we navigate like that tension? And so within the preaching we try to address it without having to pick a side, but finding truth in both sides.
John Yoder: Amen. One last question and then we'll open it to the crowd for some Q&A. We absolutely love Perazim. It’s unique. There are not many second gen style churches like that anywhere in the US.
What we commonly see, because all of us do what we're used to: white churches replicate white churches. African American churches replicate African-American churches. And first gen immigrants, whether they're Mexican, Chinese, Russian, reproduce after their own kind. Very few are wired to give birth to a church like yours.
The leadership of EEC was very wise, very generous. So how do we multiply Perazim churches? How can we have five Perazim in the Twin Cities and all across the country? And how do we have Latino and Asian Perazims?
Yosef Zenebe: I think the road to getting here wasn't easy. And I think that's part of the answer.
Had it not been for EEC really believing in us and saying, we want to launch with you. Had it not been for churches like Westwood who took a risk on us and gave us a space to use for free, I'm honestly not sure Perazim would exist at all. That kind of generosity from Westwood was irreplaceable.
Westwood is a kind of like a megachurch, and they have multiple sites and locations in the Twin Cities, and they were very generous with renovating a space that could hold our size, and whether it's like the instruments, the cameras, the computers, they provided anything. And that kind of generosity was honestly irreplaceable.
And I think that's the thing. Not many established churches are willing to take that kind of risk on young leaders. There's usually a long list of prerequisites that end up discouraging ownership and vision before it ever really gets off of the ground.
And young leaders who have a genuine calling, they end up feeling like they have to wait decades for permission.
But I think that the deeper shift that needs to happen is how a lot of first generation immigrants define missions. I think for a lot of churches, being missional means sending people overseas, and that's beautiful and it's necessary.
But what about the mission field that God has already placed in your backyard? What about the second generation, the immigrant communities, the Gen Z kids searching for churches on TikTok because they can't find one that speaks their language? I think if more established churches, first generation churches adopted a genuinely missional posture towards the next generation, and toward the nations that are already living in the Twin Cities, and we backed it up with real generosity the way that Westwood did for us, I think we'd see a multiplication of churches like Perazim because the vision is there in young leaders.
What they need is someone to believe in them and give them a runway because every first generation immigrant church that I've been a part of, I've visited, there are like young people that have a burden. There's like a cohort that in some way shape or form, God has reached them.
They have a heart for the next generation, but there is just no space for them. It's like it isn't the devil that's giving them a hard time. It's the churches and the leadership that is not creating space for them. And it seems like anything that they do differently than the first generation church immediately gets seen as no, this is wrong. This is sinful.
And rather than allowing for space and creativity for them to worship God in their own language and culture. And how do we bring this about? I think if the churches saw the second generation as just needing to copy and paste onto them our cultural values, and we expect them to be the same, it will fizzle out, and the next generation will die.
But if the churches saw their kids genuinely as a mission field, as a different culture that speaks a different language, and so how do we learn their values? How do we get the Bible into the same strategies that missionaries use when they go to different cultures and study?
I think if we saw the second generation in that same shape, way and form as well, that the future of the second generation immigrant churches is bright. Because I see a lot of gifted, talented people that God is raising up. It just sometimes, unfortunately, they don't have the space for that within their own church.
And so a lot of the Gen Z group that's coming to Perazim, they actually have their own Bible study. They're all from various backgrounds, and it's funny to me because even theologically, like their parents don't align. Like some of them are Seventh Day Adventists, evangelical, Pentecostal, like so many different denominations, but they're just like, Hey, we just love the Word of God. And so whether you worship on Saturday or Sunday, let's get together. Let's meet up, have a Bible study.
And it's sad that the church is not the one that gave them space for that. They had to find that out for themselves. And I think a lot of first generation parents, they say we sacrificed for you so that you could have a better life. I wish we could say the same about our churches, that we made a sacrifice so that our ceiling was your floor. But unfortunately, even in the story of Perazim, we didn't start from the ceiling of the first generation church. We started off basically on the floor again.
When I talked to the senior pastor of the Ethiopian church not too long ago, and when he was telling me how the Ethiopian church first started, they were meeting at a 5:00 PM service. A white church had given them space to worship, and that's how they grew. And that's what Perazim is doing. We started at a 5:00 PM service at a white church, and as we were growing, now we're at a 2:00 PM service. Like we're not starting where you finished. We had to start all over again.
And so I think that's some of the heartache that I feel like I wish that we had been given the space to start where you finished, not to have to start all over again.
John Yoder: I hope you found this part of Pastor Yosef’s interview useful. When we opened the webinar to the floor for questions and answers, the people who were on that interview had a lot of questions to ask. In part three of this podcast, we are going to share those with you. We'll talk to you then.
