Silent
Exodus
Can the East Asian church in
By Helen Lee
Asian churches in the
In many respects, the
Asian church in the
The surge in Asian
immigration led to an explosion of new churches. But the flip side of this success story has
been a silent exodus of church-raised young people who find their immigrant
churches irrelevant, culturally stifling, and ill equipped to develop them
spiritually for life in the multicultural 1990s.
‘The Korean church I attended as a child was uncomfortable for kids,
with no English sermon or children’s program,” says 34-year-old John Lee from
Of those young people who have left their parents’ churches, few have
chosen to attend non-Asian churches.
‘The second generation is being lost,’ says Allen Thompson, coordinator
for multicultural church planting in the Presbyterian Church of America. ‘They are the mission field we need to focus
on.’
Dave Gibbons, a
half-Korean, half-Caucasian pastor, spent five years working in a
first-generation Korean church, developing an English-only ministry for its
young people. One day, he was sitting in
a required elders’ meeting, conducted entirely in Korean, which he was unable
to understand fully. As he read his
Bible instead, he was subsequently stunned by a realization about his own
efforts. “I was trying to pour new wine
into old wineskins,” he explains. “In
the process, I was raising a generation of spoiled saints, with no
accountability or ownership of their own ministry, because the parents had
always been in charge of the church.”
Other Asian-American leaders have started having similar
realizations. And for the past several
years, these emerging leaders have been remolding Christian outreach to Asian
Americans. They aspire to engage a
disaffected generation of former churchgoers, while retaining a strong Asian
dimension to their ministry.
This task of reclaiming
the younger generations is difficult in different ways for each Asian ethnic
group. While Chinese, Japanese, and
Koreans share similarities, their history in America, immigration patterns, and
ethnic heritages differ significantly and pose distinctive problems.
Asian churches are
confronted with similar dilemmas of identity and mission: whether their
principal role is to serve new immigrants, to disciple an Americanized next
generation, to blend their congregations into Christian America, or to move
their churches into some yet undiscovered form and function.
In coping with decades of
discrimination, Chinese Christians responded by bonding tightly to their
ethnic culture and language. “The
Chinese chose as their principal church paradigm to have Chinese-language-only
churches,’ says Stan Inouye, founder and director of Iwa, an Asian American
ministry-consulting organization in Monrovia, California. In addition, many Chinese-American churches
have formed schools within their congregations to teach Chinese language and
culture.
But as the Chinese
churches in America matured, significant change has been avoided or resisted,
especially in introducing English worship services. The drive to preserve their culture and to be
a safe haven for new immigrants has had unintended negative consequences for
their children—American-born Chinese, known as ABCs.
As a result, Inouye says
Chinese churches have lost countless ABCs who desired separate services in
English for their comprehension and spiritual growth. Samuel Ling, director of the Institute for
Chinese Studies at Wheaton (Ill.) College, estimates that only about 4 percent
of ABCs—who constitute 40 percent of the U.S. Chinese population—are integrated
into the Chinese church.
For the Chinese church, as
well as among Asian American Christians overall, the intense emphasis on new
immigrants is easy to understand.
Federal census projections report that Asian immigrants are the
nation’s fastest-growing group. The
total number of Asian Americans is expected to increase to 13.2 million by
2005, an 81 percent increase from 1990.
Sang Hyun Lee, systematic
theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, says, ‘As [Asians] come
together in their ethnic churches, they experience an inversion of status, a
turning upside down of the way they are viewed in the society outside.’
. Without the linguistic
and cultural barriers that Asian immigrants usually face in mainstream
America, the church becomes a place where new Asian Americans feel comfortable
and where fresh immigrants can learn from and support each other. Chinese church-growth statistics reveal how
immigrants are flocking into new congregations.
There was a 500 percent growth in Chinese churches in America between
1968 and 1990, for a total of 644 congregations.
But this growth has not
effectively stemmed the departure of many of their American-born children in
search of cultural relevance and English-language church services.
GROWING PAINS: “The Korean church in America, in general, is very
busy just trying to survive,” says Daniel Lee, a first-generation Korean pastor
at Global Mission Church (GMC) in Silver Spring, Maryland. ‘It hasn’t had enough energy or time to focus
on the second generation yet.’
Koreans have embraced
Christian belief as have few other Asian groups. More than 20 percent of the population in
South Korea is Christian, and the percentage is much higher among Korean
immigrants to the United States, with more than 2,000 Korean churches, attended
by about 1 million Korean Americans.
Some 70 percent of first-generation Korean Americans are affiliated with
a Korean church in the United States today.
This is an extremely high
church-to-person ratio made all the more remarkable because it has taken
place in the past 30 years. In 1965,
federal immigration reform abolished restrictive quotas that for decades had
severely limited Asian immigration. In
addition to opening the doors to previously excluded Asian immigrants, the
1965 law included provisions that facilitated the entry of immigrant family
members. Koreans in particular took
advantage of the new law, often emigrating as entire families, one factor that
has contributed to skyrocketing Korean immigration.
As Korean churches in
America developed, they were immediately faced with the costly proposition of
developing ministries for all generations at once. This problem was intensified as children of
the immigrant wave became young adults attuned to life in the American
mainstream.
A recent study by pastor
Robert Oh surveyed Southern Californian second-generation Korean Americans who
are members of first-generation Korean churches and found that 80 percent hope
to attend a church where English is the primary language.
Scholars Young Pai,
Delores Pemberton, and John Worley from the University of Missouri-Kansas City
School of Education have also studied Korean-American adolescents, and they
believe there is a deeper problem.
‘Korean-American young people at the college level are not likely to
seek out either Korean or Caucasian churches,’ they wrote. ‘[They] may tend to feel uncomfortable in
both Korean and Caucasian churches.’
OVERASSIMILATION? For
centuries, the Japanese have had a near legendary resistance to Christian
evangelization. And among the 870,000
Japanese Americans, there are only 195 Christian churches and about 35,000
Christian believers, according to John Mizuki of the Japanese Evangelization
Center in Pasadena, California. However,
churches for Japanese Americans have not had the same disputes over language as
the Koreans or Chinese. ‘Because the
Japanese assimilated very quickly, the services were divided into English and
Japanese long ago,’ says Carl Omaye, senior pastor of the 75-year-old Anaheim
Free Methodist Church. ‘We have three or
four generations coexisting together in our church.’
And leadership problems
have not been as prominent. During World
War II, the forced internment of Japanese Americans in relocation camps had a
profound and lasting impact on the Japanese church.
In this trying period,
ministry consultant Inouye notes that Japanese Americans met together
generationally in the camps and developed structures of leadership, which
carried into the formation of church leadership after the war ended.
‘So churches had different
paradigms of leadership coexisting under one roof—one style led by the first
generation, the issei, and [another] style led by the second.’
The Japanese-American
church also does not have the challenge of coping with an ongoing spurt of new
immigrants and rapid population growth.
Japanese immigration peaked around 1910. Nevertheless, Japanese-American Christians still
have difficulty retaining their believing children within an ethnic church
context.
‘ Many Japanese find
themselves more comfortable in an English environment, which means we’ll see
fewer and fewer specifically Japanese churches,’ says church history scholar
Tim Tseng. “I don’t see too many new japanese-only churches forming unless the
younger generations start them-which I doubt they will.”
The maturing
Japanese-American church is caught between an ethnic culture resistant to
Christianity and a population of highly assimilated third- and
fourth-generation American believers who have a weakened loyalty to their
ethnic Christian identity.
PRESSURE POINTS: On top of the intense attention paid to native
language, ethnic discrimination, and immigrant needs, Asian-American Christians
grapple with additional pressure points concerning the demands for leadership
equality, the role of ethnic identity in the church, and the importance of
spiritual development Unless these added difficulties are solved, they have
the potential to hinder church growth among younger people.
These young people, often
influenced by Western ideals of democracy and equality, tend to differ with
Asian cultural views on hierarchy and authority. ‘In Asian culture, you have a very slow
giving over of authority and control to the younger generation,’ says Robert
Goette, director of the Chicagoland Asian-American Church Planning Project. ‘Often, the control resides with the parents
until they die.’
Scholar Tseng agrees:
‘Unless the first-generation leaders are able to give second-generation
pastors the freedom to lead, their young people will not go to these
churches. First-generation pastors need
to be aware of this dynamic.’
Second-generation leaders
also note their responsibility in this process of partnership with the
first-generation leaders. ‘The relationships
between the first- and second-generation pastors has to be stronger,’ says
Grace Shim of Parkwood Community Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a second-generation,
Asian-American congregation. ‘If there
are two pastors who are willing to compromise and put aside cultural differences,
there’s hope.’
Another area in which
older and younger generations frequently differ is in the preference of the
first-generation members for a monocultural setting, while the younger
generations often feel restricted by such rigid ethnic-identity boundaries.
While Peter Cha, also of
Parkwood Community Church, was serving as a young adults’ pastor in a
first-generation Asian church setting, he began to see a growing number of
non-Koreans coming to the church as well as an increasing number of interracial
marriages.
‘The first-generation parents
began to complain to me about it,’ Cha says. ‘The nature of the immigrant church is that the
mission of that group is to provide for the needs of the
first-generation. And while they want a
vibrant second-generation ministry, they find it hard to deal with the side
effects, like having non-Koreans come.’
But today’s Asian
Americans live in a society where they are typically spending less time in a
monocultural setting. And even for those
who are fully Asian in their ethnicity, acculturation has often made the
ethnic-enclave atmosphere of the first-generation church unbearable for them.
When Grace and Tony Yang
moved to Southern California, they spent many Sundays hopping from one Korean
church to another, but the process of finding a good fit was difficult. “Most churches we went to didn’t have
services in English,’ says Tony Yang, a second-generation Korean American.
Gibbons, who left the
Korean church setting to plant his own independent church with a more
multiethnic flavor, believes that the younger generations require churches with
a broader cultural vision in order to feet comfortable.
‘Today’s busters think
that if you’re not being multiethnic in your endeavors, you’re not real,’ he
says. ‘They see the diversity everywhere
else in society, but if they don’t see it in the church, they think the church
is superficial.’
A third pressure point
concerns providing quality spiritual education and training For the younger
generations in first-generation churches.
Due to the lack of teaching resources in Asian churches, or the decision
to conduct services and teaching times in Asian languages, the quality of
spiritual instruction the young people receive often falls short of their
needs. ‘Parents assumed that if you just
sent the kids to church through high school, they’d come out being good
Christians,’ Global Mission’s Lee says.
‘We thought our kids would go to church in college. That was a very naive thought.’
In addition, Asian
parenting styles are frequently based on the Confucian values of hierarchy and
authority. Charles Kim, a 29-year-old
coordinator of youth programs at Oriental Mission Church in Los Angeles, says,
‘The kids don’t own the faith. They come
to church because they are forced to.
They can’t differentiate between Asian culture and Christianity, and
then they often develop a hatred of the culture—which they then extend to Christianity.’
Gibbons also notes that
the second generation has to take responsibility for its own watered-down
faith. ‘We have been given ministries on
a silver platter. We have had all of our
ministries provided for us, which has-resulted in a weak Christianity.’
ENDING THE EXODUS: As AsianAmerican Christian leaders have assessed
their congregational needs and opportunities, they have undertaken three
principal means of solving their problems: renewing traditionalism, developing
a multiethnic approach, and planting new churches.
Julia Yim, a youth pastor
at the First United Methodist Church in Flushing, New York, has chosen to
sacrifice for the first-generation church.
‘I get tempted to leave the Korean church millions of times,’ says
Yim. ‘But it’s helped to build my
character, learning to be a servant.’
Others in the
first-generation, traditional church setting have tried to develop what is
called the ‘church within a church’ model, where the English ministry forms
its own autonomous body within the first-generation context. Lee’s GMC is an example of a first-generation
church that has tried this approach, and he believes it has aided the church in
keeping more of its young people than it could have without the independent
leadership of the second generation.
A handful of Asian
American churches, rich in many resources, are developing into multiethnic
congregations with a wide range of Asians and non-Asians as members. Originally a Japanese-American church,
Evergreen Baptist Church in Rosemead, California, today is a congregation of
1,000 with ministries to many races and generations.
In contrast, church
planting in the Asian community can be a delicate matter. Before planting New Song Community Church
near Los Angeles, Gibbons obtained the blessing of first-generation Korean
church leaders, explaining he was not trying to steal their young people but was
partnering with them to reach unchurched Asian Americans. “This is where the Asian American churches
have erred so far,’ Gibbons says. “We
have not gotten the blessing of the first-generation leaders!”
Nonetheless, church
planter Goette estimates that there are 20 second-generation Korean-American
churches and about 70 more pan-Asian American churches, nearly all of them
relatively new congregations.
CALL TO PARTNERSHIP: The success of churches such as New Song in forging
new partnerships between generations has given a measure of hope to those ministering
to younger Asian Americans.
However, many Asian
churches in the United States do not have ready access to the financial and
personal resources to duplicate New Song’s success. Other leaders are cautious, predicting that
it may take years to reverse the generational exodus of young Asians from their
home churches. Due to the lack of young
Chinese-American pastors, for example, scholar Ling says, ‘I don’t think we’ll
see vast improvement for another 10 to 20 years.’
Meanwhile, Goette says
more non-Asian churches should view Asian Americans as an unchurched people
group for specialized evangelistic outreach.
‘We shouldn’t assume that just because these Asian Americans were born
here and speak English that they will want to come to our Anglo churches.’
While innovative strides
have been taken recently in the Asian American church, a formidable task
remains in retaining and reclaiming Asian-American young people.
Gibbons believes that the
key may be for the younger generations to took at the legacy native Asian
churches have already left, and then follow their example.
‘The reason the Korean church is thriving is because of its commitment
to prayer and willingness to sacrifice,’ he says. “We of the younger generations need to be
given the same opportunity to sacrifice, and we need to stress this value in
our churches, so that we are willing to die for one another. Then, maybe, we’ll be able accomplish great
things in the church.’
Additional reporting by Ted Olsen.