eMusing Series: Globalization and Its Implication In Asian-American Church Ministry
Part four - Globalization and Its Implication In Asian-American Church Ministry
Yom Kippur 2003 - John L.Ng © Copyright 2003
Whenever my two good friends and i meet up in New York, we always celebrate our reunion with some good food and fellowship. The last time we ate together was in a fusion food restaurant. The latest trend in urban eateries is multi-cultural menus. A typical entrée may be a combination of Thai and French or Vietnamese and Peruvian cuisines. Eating in a global village like New York City, one can enjoy an infinite variety of food that fuses different ethnic tastes into one dish.
In this series' first article i mentioned that the Asian-American church model has emerged to reach the many English speaking Asian communities. Congregants of these churches are a mixture of Asian-Americans who share a similar American experience. In the last decade or two, these churches, although few in number, have provided an inviting environment where Asian-Americans can find a sense of belonging and acceptance as well as Christ Jesus. In the past few years, however, some of these Asian-American church pastors are having second thoughts. To do church work in a diverse place like New York, they think best to change their churches to multi-cultural. That is, they want to transform their church model to attract as many ethnic groups as possible. But i doubt that this change is advisable. We can enjoy fusion food but can we enjoy a fusion ministry with people of mixed ethnicities. The issue is not ethnicity but more cultural. It is not the color of our skin as much as the content of our cultural orientation. Can a multi-cultural congregation live, grow and have its being?
Should Asian-American Churches Become Multi-cultural Churches?
The whole world has come to New York. It has more than 400 ethnic neighborhoods. Each one is culturally rich and socially enriching, and each one is different. To be sure, this globalization has impacted the way the churches and their pastors do ministry in the city. In the 1990's two colleagues and i separately planted three Asian-American churches. After more than five years, these churches are doing relatively well. In fact, one of them has daughtered two other churches in other neighborhoods. When the three of us first began, we strived to make our church work uniquely inviting to Asian-Americans. We saw their great need and felt the best way to reach them was to provide a culturally sensitive and socially attractive environment for them to embrace God in Christ Jesus.
Recently, my two colleagues have a change of heart. Both feel that their ministry should change to reflect the city's ethnic diversity. They want to expand their church work beyond Asian-American to a multi-cultural congregation. One of them has barred his congregants from bringing Kim chi and other Korean food to church. He pointedly reminded his members that they are not a Korean church and insisted that they do much to make it "racial friendly." Over the summer, I read that several Asian-American churches elsewhere have also sought to make their congregations more multi-cultural.
When my two colleagues and i get together to eat and compare notes, our disagreement over this ministry approach has caused tension between us. I still believe strongly that to be effective in outreach the Asian-American churches should stay mono-ethnic. They wonder out loud too often whether i am a racist hiding behind my conviction. Feeling a bit defensive, i retreat to my study to rethink the validity of the Asian-American ministry model.
Perhaps a conversation with a student of mine best delineates the overarching issues in this debate. My student pastors a Latino working-class church in Hoboken, New Jersey. The church's neighborhood has been predominantly Latino. However, in past years, the neighborhood has gone through a sociological change. Because of the high rent in Manhattan, many young, non-Latino white, urban professionals have found their way to Hoboken where real estate is relatively cheaper. So what was once a working-class Latino community has evolved into an upper middle-class non-Latino white neighborhood. Meanwhile, the church is losing its members as they are wedged out of the area.
My student asks what his church should do. There are no simple or easy solutions. However, there are three fundamentally choices: one, the church stays where it is and hangs on to what it has; two, the church leaves to find a more advantageous pasture for Latino ministry elsewhere; three, the church changes its ministry focus to accommodate the non-Latino white middle-class professionals. None of the options are painless. If the church chooses to stay, sooner or later it will die of sociological strangulation. If it leaves to reestablish ministry elsewhere, the move is disruptive without any guarantee for success.
If the church seeks to reach out to its new neighbors, it will have to change every aspect of its present ministry to accommodate its potential newcomers. My student is not hopeful and says, "If we choose the third option, my people will not want to make that sacrifice." Then he asks, "Is this wrong?" To answer his question, there are several theological and sociological considerations.
Some Theological Considerations
First, let me say up front that wanting to do pastoral work in a mono-ethnic church does not have to be racially motivated. When my student asks if it is wrong for his church not wanting to accommodate its new neighbors, the implied wrongness is racism. He assumes that his congregants do not want to make the sacrificial changes because they do not want to reach out to those who are not like them. That may be a false assumption. Racism has to do with action or decision made solely based on race. His congregants' resistance to change may not be racially based.
When i was interviewed for a pastoral position years ago, my wife was not with me. One elder couple in that church tried several times to ask what race was my wife. Apparently, a previous candidate was not considered because his wife was Caucasian. More recently, i spoke at a family fellowship meeting. One mother asked what criterion had my wife and i instilled in our children to look for in a future spouse. I had a ready answer. When our children were younger, we had talked about looking for the three "C's." Their potential life-mate should be Christian, cultured and cute. After my response, that same mother insisted that we should have added another "C" to represent Chinese. Now i think that both the elder couple and this mother were racists because their decisions were solely based on race.
To be sure, cultural diversity enriches our lives. The mere enjoyment of fusion food is analogous of this richness. I believe cultural diversity is inherently part of God's created purpose to enrich our humanity. The Tower of Babel narrative in the first book of the Bible (Genesis 11) puts humanity's diverse cultures in perspective. We cannot assume that the story is a tragic consequence of divine judgment. It was God's created intention that the earth's peoples disburse themselves to fill the whole earth. When they resisted, God intervened and "scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth (verse 9). The Tower of Babel narrative explains how the peoples of the earth came to speak different languages in different cultures in spite of their common origin. It affirms our common humanity as God's creation and our rich cultural diversity in God's purpose (Bernard Anderson, "Unity and Diversity in God's Creation," Currents In Theology and Mission, April 1978, p.80)
In the last book of the Bible, St John sees a great multitude "from every tribe and tongue and people and nation" (Revelation 5.9) in worship of God. Toward the end of his vision, John also sees heaven as a great city of a diverse multitude (Revelation 21.1-3). These visions capture the eternal perspective that cultural diversity among God's peoples will remain a reality, even in heaven. As the peoples standing before God in prayer and worship, their social, cultural and linguistic distinctives are still identifiable and real. Even in their Christo-centric unity, God still meets his peoples in their cultural and social differences.
Cultural diversity is not a choice we make. It is a very real part of our humanity. We cannot run away from it or pretend that it is not there. We are inalienably bound to and by our cultural differences. Should the church be for or against cultural diversity? In some ways, that is a bad question. If something is beyond our prerogative, we cannot be for or against it. All we can do is to deal with it without compromising our theological integrity. A better question is how should the church respond to cultural diversity? My answer: In doing church work in a global village like New York, culture, not race, sets the context for ministry. To do church work well, we need to understand the nature and demands of cultural diversity. The church should accept our undeniable diversity and respond with social sensitivity and ministry sensibility.
Some Sociological Considerations
This notion that Asian-American churches should become multi-cultural has some sociological implications that cannot be overlooked. My student wonders whether his congregation is willing or able to manage the many severe ministry changes to accommodate its new neighbors. These changes have more to do with cultural values, social preferences and economic and education disparities.
For my student's church to be sensible and sensitive in ministry, there is a whole bag full of questions to consider: Can a working class congregation reach up effectively to an upper middle class community? Can two culturally different groups of diverse tastes in music, clothes, furniture, literature and preaching worship together? Can two socially different groups of diverse lifestyles live and play together? Can two philosophically different groups of diverse worldviews work together? When different groups come together, inevitably inter-ethnic relationships will be cultivated and nurtured. Are the congregants ready for these relationships? How will older parents feel when their children date and marry each other cross-ethnically? Can the church experience cohesiveness when so many differences are pulling them apart?
Every church has a sociological glue. It is that invisible cohesive that holds the congregation together. It is that shared cognitive orientation that gives everyone a sense of belonging and wholeness. As i wrote in the second article of this series, to find belonging and acceptance, all of us must find a sense of identity with the community in which we enjoy shared values and tastes. Without a sense of shared orientation, it would be nearly impossible for us to feel that we are part of a dynamic whole.
While serving my denomination, i visited many churches in various regions and talked with many pastors from different ethnic backgrounds. I found that almost all churches, regardless of regions or ethnicity, share their own cognitive orientation. Their congregants generally enjoy similar values, tastes and lifestyles. They feel that they belong because they share a similar philosophical window through which they view God, themselves and the world. Some churches may appear diverse to outsiders. But these churches are actually more cohesive beneath the external surface. Some of these congregations may be racially mixed, but they still share a common cultural and social orientation. I have been to a few congregations that are actually culturally and socially diverse. Although i have no codified evidence to confirm this observation, my impression is that these churches do not grow. The reason is simply that without a real cohesion, not too many people will find a sense of belonging and acceptance in these churches. Many may come and visit, but few will stay.
To be fair, i have to say that several multi-cultural churches are thriving well in New York City. However, they are more the exception than the norm. I strongly suspect that even in these apparent multi-cultural churches there is an unseen cohesive factor that is gluing them in a dynamic whole. In doing church work, this principle cannot be broken: The stronger the church's sociological cohesion, the greater is its opportunity for growth; the weaker the church's sociological cohesion, the lesser is its opportunity for growth.
Donald McGavran, the noted church growth researcher, observed that "conversion to the Christian faith is both a social decision as much as it is a theological decision." (Understanding Church Growth, 1970, p.215) When a person embraces Christ as God and Savior, it is a decision made in a context of people as well a decision made with personal theological conviction. To live, move and have our being as Christians, we have an innate need to experience cultural and social integrity. Just as we cannot worship freely in a church whose theology is different from ours, we also cannot live and work freely in a church whose shared cognitive orientation is different from ours.
When doing church work, I agree with McGavran's axiom: People like to become Christian without crossing cultural, social and linguistic barriers. The same rationale why many Asian-Americans cannot find belonging in traditional immigrant Asian churches also explains why most people will not find a good fit in multi-cultural churches. When churches want to reach people with the gospel effectively, they need to do it with social sensitivity and ministry sensibility. I still think that the Asian-American church model has both those values. It understands cohesion. It is probably the best ministry model to touch this generation of Asian-Americans because it provides an inviting environment where its kind of people can find belonging and acceptance as well as Christ Jesus.
