Raising up women leaders and voices

5 Asian American women InterVarsity ministry leaders put together this book, More Than Serving Tea: Asian American Women on Expectations, Relationships, Leadership And Faith, bringing out diversely rich perspectives about gender and identity issues through their personal narratives. Nikki Toyama, Tracey Gee, Kathy Khang, Christie Heller de Leon, and Asifa Dean shared the tasks of authors and editors, and they’ve been blogging over at morethanservingtea.blogspot.com, creating a space to dialog about the intersection of gender, race, and faith, particularly concerning Asian American women.

Nikki’s most recent blog wonders out loud about boundaries of the Asian American context:

I’m beginning to wonder if boundaries are the luxury of the middle class. Is there such thing as boundaries when you’re doing justice work?

I’ve wondered about boundaries, Asian American families, and Christian discipleship. What therapists call “enmeshment” is a common occurrance in Asian American families. Is it an issue that we need to fight against in the Asian community. Or is family therapy culturally bound.

What some might called “enmeshed” has great characteristics. There’s a wonderful sense of involving everyone, and a corporate identity that is a healthy antidote to a narcissitic individualized model. But it has its problems too.

From my limited vantage point, it comes across as parents who are very upset at a young person’s decision. A lot of emotional pressure lands on the young person to comply to their wishes. I’ve heard extreme cases of threatening suicide unless a young person changes their plans. More common examples are sleepless nights, extreme anxiety, etc. Are the young people just clueless and self-absorbed? Or is the older generation enmeshed? Both?

Is this just how things get done in Asian American households? What’s the Christian response?

Bo Lim has mentioned that an event may well be in the works specifically toward Asian American Christian Women in Seattle, possibly in 2008.

creators of culture

God calls people to all kinds of vocations to shape culture for the common good. Artists are now being noted for expressing their faith in creative ways without having to sacrifice their convictions nor having to be explicit about drawings of crosses or the Bible. This article excerpt,
Evangelicals seek role as ‘creators of culture’ — Once wary of pop culture and high art, faithful look to artistic renaissance, explains [ht: Fermi Project] ::

There are no crosses in Makoto Fujimura’s paintings. No images of Jesus gazing into the distance, or serene scenes of churches in a snow-cloaked wood.

Fujimura’s abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.

After the 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center, three blocks from Fujimura’s home, his work explored the power of fire to both destroy and purify, themes drawn from the Christian Gospels and Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”

“I am a Christian,” says Fujimura, 46, who founded the nonprofit International Arts Movement to help bridge the gap between the religious and art communities. “I am also an artist and creative, and what I do is driven by my faith experience.

“But I am also a human being living in the 21st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness — my own, as well as the world’s. I don’t want to use the term ’Christian’ to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same.”

By making a name for himself in the secular art world, Fujimura has become a role model for creatively wired evangelicals. They believe that their churches have forsaken the visual arts for too long — and that a renaissance has begun.

Read the full article at MSNBC.com >>

improving Chinese family communications

The Gospel Herald had recently posted 2 recent articles about Rev. Peter Lam of Asian Family Today: Researcher Comments on Cultural-Clash in Chinese Families and Communication Must Improve in Chinese Families, Researcher Says. Here are 2 excerpts from the articles:

Communication between parents and children is difficult , especially for Asian American families, which are under the influences of two cultures, said the head of Asian Family Today.

Rev. Peter Lam, executive director of Asian Family Today gave a lecture on parental communication with second generational children, at the The Salvation Army’s San Francisco Chinatown center.

From years of experience, Rev. Lam said, the most important principle is the Bible, which is the truth of all truths.

Quoting the bible verses from 2 Timothy 4:2 “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction”, Rev. Lam suggested that there are three principles “correct, rebuke, encourage” that parents must look at when communicating with children.

“Chinese parents tend to scold their children without telling them what they did wrong,” Rev. Lam said. “Nevertheless, more than correcting the mistakes with words, parents must live as a good example so that children can follow well.”

Rev. Lam emphasized that parents must learn to look into the children’s problem instead of only focusing on their behavior. Parents must teach children about ethics and values according to the scripture.

And, from Researcher Comments on Cultural-Clash in Chinese Families:

Rev. Peter Lam from Asian Families Today gave guidance to Chinese parents on how to talk to their second-generation children while dealing with the culture-clash that is prevalent in Chinese homes. …

First, he said, parents should always seek opportunities to teach.

When children misbehave, Chinese parents seldom have time away from their jobs to talk to their children about it immediately, Rev. Lam pointed out, while suggesting that parents to find a way to remind themselves what they need to teach to their children to not lose the opportunity.

Second, Rev. Lam reminded parents to have patience and to be careful in their attitude.

“Since most Chinese parents are too busy to discipline their children, they often lose [ their]tempers easily whenever children make mistakes,” Rev. Lam said.

growing autonomous churches via duplex model

This 2001 memorandum titled A Proposal for Duplex Autonomy (in PDF format) was drafted by an English Ministry (EM) of an immigrant Korean church and presented to the Korean Ministry (KM) session for consideration. (A “session” is the governing leadership body of a Presbyterian church.) A “duplex model” is two churches under one roof — descriptive of how two autonomous congregations commits to worshipping at one campus location, and provides a solution to the problem found in many immigrant Asian churches: traditional intergenerational churches often have an English-speaking subcongregation, but this often results in a lack of responsibility or sense of ownership required to sustain and grow churches.

The memorandum presents the following as rationale for empowering an English ministry towards full autonomy as an independently-governed church congregation:

1. EM is a congregation, separate and distinct from KM.
2. The present structure hinders the EM congregation from taking complete responsibility for the church.
3. EM will not in the foreseeable future “take over” KM.
4. Autonomy will strengthen EM: A Missions Analogy.
5. EM Pastors should be subject only to EM’s governing body.
6. The church’s growth may be crippled if EM is not allowed to accept the responsibility of decision making.
7. The Joint KM-EM Session Model is not workable or efficient.
8. The Two-Session Committee Model is not workable or efficient.

Download and read the full memorandum to see accompanying details on the rationale and context, and the proposed action steps. This memorandum clearly presents many of the issues involved in navigating the dynamics within intergenerational immigrant Asian churches. It should provide useful insights for leadership discussions in your church context as well.

Posted online with permission from Associate Pastor Kevin Haah, Young Nak English Ministry (Los Angeles, CA). Your feedback is welcomed here.

Christianity and the Chinese people

Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review (Volume 67, Number 2; Summer 2006) had a special issue on the topic of: CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE CHINESE, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. A number of interesting topics were explored:

• Exploring Mass Conversion to Christianity among the Chinese: An Introduction
• Social and Cultural Contexts in Conversion to Christianity among Chinese American College Students
• How Religious Organizations Influence Chinese Conversion to Evangelical Protestantism in the United States
• Favor Fishing and Punch-Bowl Christians: Ritual and Conversion in a Chinese Protestant Church
• More Than Evangelical and Ethnic: The Ecological Factor in Chinese Conversion to Christianity in the United States
• Conversion to Protestantism among Urban Immigrants in Taiwan

Its content are not readily available online, so you’ll probably need to visit an academic library to read these articles.

[ht: Cyrusco]