Overlook reporter Ted. Name him Pastor Ted now.
Ted Chen, a well-recognized face on NBC4 Information in Los Angeles since 1995, signed off for the final time Wednesday night earlier than setting off on a brand new path as a Christian minister.
“A lot of you already know I’ve been in seminary for the final a number of years,” he stated, sitting with co-anchors Colleen Williams and Michael Brownlee after watching a video tribute to his time in entrance of the digicam. “I received my grasp’s in Christian research, and proper now I’m pursuing my doctorate, my doctorate of ministry. And so, yeah, I’ll be graduating to full-time ministry starting tomorrow.”
Even so, after 30-plus years in excessive gear, he may want a minute. However Chen stated he’s wanting ahead to “a little bit slower tempo and an opportunity to dig deeper” shifting ahead — that and never having to inform his spouse he has to hurry off on brief discover for a piece factor.
“I’m gonna miss it, positively,” he stated. “I inform folks, there’s an adrenaline shot to this, to being a part of this enterprise. There’s a severe, heavy accountability that I took through the years.”
Chen’s profession took him from Reno to Fresno to San Diego over these years and at last to L.A., the place his favourite project wound up being the 2008 Summer time Olympic Video games in Beijing.
“It was China’s first Olympics and I bear in mind how proud my mother and father had been. … They had been simply so excited,” he stated. “And it was simply so significant to see that second for China, and to enter the countryside and canopy the plight of farmers.”
Chen additionally loved all of the awards reveals he labored — hey, who says a reporter has to have gravitas on a regular basis? — and stated that “as a Trekkie,” his favourite celeb interview was with the actor Leonard Nimoy.
“I usually don’t get starstruck,” Chen stated, “however — him. Mr. Spock.” Whoo-ee.
Within the goodbye video, Hetty Chang, NBC4’s Orange County reporter, remembered the second she realized Chen was one thing particular to the folks of Los Angeles.
“Once I first rode within the Golden Dragon Chinese language New Yr parade with him, I checked out him and thought, ‘Are you moonlighting as a film star?’” she stated. “As a result of folks had been stopping our automobile, our little float, and [they were saying things] like, ‘Cease the automobile! I wish to take an image with Ted Chen!’”
Chen’s spouse, Ariell, wrote “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU” in an Instagram story Thursday urging followers to observe his on-air send-off. The 2 met one another cross-country via a matchmaker after she, then Ariell Kirylo, had moved away from the L.A. space. They discovered they shared a “non secular dwelling,” Classic Church in Santa Monica.
“That was actually an fascinating twist,” she instructed California Marriage ceremony Day, “to know we had been in one another’s neighborhood all alongside, but it surely took me shifting to D.C. to name a matchmaker primarily based out of Florida to fulfill a person at my church in L.A.! And so they say relationship in L.A. is difficult.”
NBCLA didn’t reply instantly Thursday to The Instances’ request for remark, however Ted Chen put issues in perspective himself, borrowing a web page from all these athletes he’d seen through the years and telling Brownlee and Williams in any case their variety phrases, “I’ll take the encouragement — and provides God all of the glory.”
