Is Your Church More Chinese Than Christian?

photo credit by phil of posterchildforgrace.blogspot.com

I just recently discovered Andrew Lim and this nice piece he wrote from down under.
Is your church more Chinese than Christian?
From the article, 7 key identifiers for when Ethnicity supersedes Christianity
1. When the church becomes an excuse for a social club for a particular ethnic group

2. When ethnic/cultural unity is more important than gospel unity.

3. When ethnic-cultural values override Biblical virtues and Biblical truth.

Formally put: “In the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, Jesus has given us a culture-transcending and a culture-transforming dynamic which confronts ethical categories of all societies and ethnic groups. The Gospel calls into question all social mores and moral codes.” Informally put: God’s virtues trump our values.

4. When church is restrictive and exclusive.

5. When church becomes insular and inward focused.

6. When church becomes homogeneous, rather than heterogeneous.

“People like to become Christians without having to cross racial, linguistic, or class barriers…It takes no great acumen to see that when marked differences of colour, stature, income, cleanliness, and education are present, men understand the gospel better when expounded by their own kind of people. They prefer to join churches whose members look, talk, and act like themselves.” (Understanding (1980), p. 227)

This states in brief what has become known as the Homogeneous Unit Principle (HUP). Although it sounds obvious to anyone involved in evangelism, it has had significant consequences for the church. It has influenced the development of many churches with a heart for mission. As churches move more towards making mission a priority, the more they will have to deal with cultural issues that interfere with or distort the gospel, and so the more the HUP appeals. The problem with this approach is that homogeneous evangelism tends to create a homogeneous church.

7. One Final Story St Andrew’s Cathedral and Asian Bible Church. You have to ask Andrew about what this means.

this isn’t anything new or profound. we need to be reminded that we’re all in danger of doing these things whether we’re ethnic based or not.

Chinese in the Mainstream: Three Delivery? Sigh.

Next week (June 27) Nicktoons will premiere “Three Delivery“, a cartoon about three Chinese teenagers saving Chinatown from evil one delivery at a time…
I don’t know about this one.
Is three delivery a play on “free delivery”?
Why do Chinese always have to be associated with take-out and kung fu?
The artwork is somewhat nice. The clips off the site were so-so. Not as funny as The Notorious MSG. It hasn’t grabbed me. I’m still a little taken back by how it all seems very backwards in these times. We’ve come so far from this image.
Please, just don’t suck.

Links
Three Delivery.com
Official Nicktoons Site
Also check out…Why is TV so White? Entertainment Weekly pulls out a very interesting article on the topic of why there is such a lack of diversity on TV.

Related Posts:
Chinese in the Mainstream: Learning from Kai-Lan

On Chinese Nationalism

No doubt times have changed and China has most definitely changed but have our attitudes and ideas about her and her people changed with her? What exactly are the attitudes and ideas of those in the Chinese church and American born/raised children? The Chinese church is already such a complex creature. Now we’re starting to see something different, a devotion to the motherland that’s not about missions or the growing church. In recent weeks with a monumental election in Taiwan, riots in Tibet, and talk about boycotting the opening ceremony of the Olympic games amongst other things the fires of this devotion has been stoked. Generally I think we do tend to focus on the oppressive government and cast China as an evil force - perhaps even a bunch of “goons and thugs?” We think persecuted church. Nonetheless creating a dichotomy between the government and its people.

How do we reconcile the two?
I admit I’ve never really had warm fuzzies about China. Hong Kong perhaps but not big mama. Those outside of the US may very well see us in a similar light, an evil capitalistic government and its lovely diverse people.

Those who come from China to study here in the US and attend our churches have a different view of China but we probably have not noticed in the years they’ve been here until recently. A couple of weeks ago there were disputes between congregation members about Tibet and Chinese nationalism. It just struck me as something new and odd.

Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.

China is their home not simply a mission field. They will return home once they’ve completed their coursework. They have also lived and benefited in the progress China has made in being an economic force. They’re pro-China and now they’re more vocal about their devotion to the motherland.

Did I think people would not have this kind of love and devotion for China?

The NYTimes report about this rising voice across the country on college campuses.
Here are some excerpts:

“But after I come here, my professor told me that I’m nationalist.”
“I believe in democracy,” Ms. Jia added, “but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.”

“We’ve been smothered for too long time,” said Jasmine Dong, another graduate student who attended the U.S.C. lecture. By that, Ms. Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of overseas Chinese. “We are still neglected or misunderstood as either brainwashed or manipulated by the government,” she said.

the fortune cookie chronicles

Are Chinese restaurants more American than apple pie?
Jennifer 8 Lee thinks so in her new book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the world of Chinese Food. Here’s a quick review.

Did you know that there are twice as many Chinese restaurants as there are McDonald franchises. Somewhere around 40,000 in the United States there are more of these than the number of McDonalds, BKs and KFCs combined. How about fortune cookies? Are they Chinese or Japanese? I guess that depends on who you ask. Whowouldathunkit?

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a fun and insightful read. A must-read in the ABC curriculum. If you thought Chinese food and what goes on in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants were a mystery before….

We’d break open the fortune cookies for the message inside, rarely eating the cookie. The cheerfully misspelled, awkwardly phrased, but wise words of the Chinese fortune cookie sages gave me comfort. My parents’ bookshelves were lined with Chinese philosophical classics like Confucius’s Analects and the I Ching. For a girl who could not untangle the thicket of Chinese characters in those opaque and mysterious books, the little slips of insight represented the distillation of hundreds of years of Chinese wisdom.
Then came a shocking revelation.
Fortune cookies weren’t Chinese.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles Official Site

Chinese in the Mainstream: Learning from Kai-Lan

I sat down to watch a few DVR days worth of Nick Jr’s “Ni Hao Kai-Lan” with my virusy family. It made it’s debut on Chinese New Year. (btw Xin Nian Kuai Le! 農曆新年) Jayden’s picked up more Chinese in one week than he has since he was born. The show is an interesting venture capitalizing on the bilingualism of Dora the Explorer and the play along think along techniques of Blues Clues. What’s more interesting to me is the emotional intelligence that Kai-Lan teaches. During the middle of the episode a character demonstrates some issue and Kai-Lan encourages kids to figure out why they acted in that way and find a solution. I can appreciate that and the Mandarin lessons.

The NYTimes has a good article on the show and its creator, Karen Chau. I found her relationship with her dad quite amusing and all too familiar.

Ms. Chao, who earned a degree in digital art from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000, didn’t quite follow the path her father preferred. “He set me up for an internship at PaineWebber, but I doodled on the cold-call sheets and taped the phone receiver down,” she said. “I wasn’t a very good worker bee, but Dad was ecstatic because I was wearing business outfits with shoulder pads and big pants. In Chinese culture criticism is love. So my dad must really, really love me, because he has a lot to say.”

Kai-Lan is timely. Kids are more influenced by Asian culture than ever before getting beyond Kung-Fu and Moo-Shu Pork of my childhood experience. Makes me think of all those years of Chinese school. To think, my parents were cutting edge then. It’s essential now to learn Chinese in American schools in order to prepare for a global economy.

An estimated 50,000 American children are being taught Mandarin in public schools, with an additional 50,000 studying in private settings. Next month the first 2,000 high school students will take the College Board’s new Advanced Placement exam in Mandarin. The number is small but an indication of big things to come, said Tom Matts, director of the board’s World Languages Initiative. “We expect to see growth in this course unlike any other introduced in the last decade or so.”

Also read Nick Jr on Ni Hao Kai-Lan

ABCs and Church

The L2 Foundation blog posted today about the alarming percentage of ABCs that attend church, less than 2% according to the recent Render Conference near Houston. [link:"Alarming Statistics About American Born Chinese"]

Less than 2% doesn’t surprise me as if any number would be comforting or satisfactory. If I have my numbers correct, there are roughly 3.5million Chinese in America and out of that number we have somewhere around 1.1million ABCs. So you do the math. 2% of 1.1million. You’d probably find many of these church going ABCs on the coasts.

The Chinese have been in America a long time (since the 1840s). So you have Chinese churches in practically every state. A Chinese church over 50 years old would typically have lots of ABCs in it and probably close to half of those churches would be found in California. However the fact of the matter is that these churches have been losing generation after generation of ABCs. Since the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 those statistics would dwindle further since there would be a growing number of first generation immigrant churches/congregations under 20 years old. These congregations will have ABC children and eventually English speaking ministries. The ABC population will only continue to grow (approx. 30-40k a year). The need to reach them will also grow.

It’s easy to be complacent with who comes to our services. We need to ask how many “new” Christians or seekers actually come? Why don’t they? I believe most of the growth in our English Speaking Ministries is not new growth by conversion but from transplanted Christians. We have young mostly single ABC Christians coming and going. It’s a cultural phenomenon. The hard truth is that there are many Chinese or ABCs outside of our walls (over 95%). There’s so much work to be done.

Statistics on Chinese in America from US Census Data 2006

ACHTUNG!

WOW. How easy it is to allow time to pass by.
I know. I know. I’ve gotten messages wondering what happened?
It’s been over a month and a brand new year boys and girls. Other than the busyness of the holidays I’ve been engaged in ministry and rethinking some things about abcpastor.com. Sometimes we just need to press pause.
I promise there’ll be some exciting updates coming. Thanks for being faithful readers. Hang on for more.

ACHTUNG! **************************************************************************************
What’s really kept me completely occupied is a little labor of love called, ACHTUNG! the youth program of the Chinese Mission Convention (CMC) by Ambassadors for Christ (AFC). I have been privileged to coordinate this program for the third time. It’s just a blast for me to work alongside good friends like Peter Ong and Joseph Tsang. Also artist friends Neah Lee, Tim Be Told, and Victor Lin. Other stars include Philly natives, Hoon Kim and Dean Trulear. All phenomenal leaders that I had the pleasure of partnering with in challenging a new generation towards the cross. In ACHTUNG, we attempted to do things differently than your average youth conference. We don’t want the students to just sit in a convention center listening to talking heads, as good as they are, we try our best to take them to the streets.

The Chinese Mission Convention (CMC) is a premier tri-annual missions gathering for China following on the coattails of the Urbana Student Missions Conference. This year’s convention highlighted the 200th anniversary of Robert Morrison’s mission to China. CMC does what Chinese ministries do best, reaching the Chinese.

Wanted: Chinese Creatives

Photos of fashion designers Phillip Lim, Peter Som, Anna Sui from Patrick McMullan from NYMag.com

By and large Chinese ministries, organizations and culture rarely recognize the role that creatives or creative professionals have in shaping the world around us even when the Asian design aesthetic has been so influential in recent years. Creatives are professionals/workers in art, design, advertising, marketing, and communications. They are the designers, writers, directors, architects, fashion designers and more. They are thoughtful and sensitive to how people think and live. They’re great strategic thinkers. They walk to the sound of a different drum. They design and communicate. What they do serves people.

Great design always connects with people. Designers inspire, provoke, validate, entertain and provide utility for people. To truly connect, designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences. Designers need to understand the relationship between what they produce and the meaning their product has for others. And they need to observe the people they are designing for in their own environments. - AIGA

Attach the word “design” or “award winning design” to a product and it instantly becomes a coveted object of desire. Target has really capitalized on this ethos with their mantra, “design for all”. We now believe that we can achieve better living through design.

US companies are quickly realizing that they must adapt cross-cultural strategies with creatives being key to reach key markets in China.

“Being a graphic designer in a global economy requires you to think about cultures and communication in a whole new way. Designers are now required to not only be thoughtful, but also sensitive and strategic in their thinking around cross-cultural design. As China opens up, and the economy there expands, we expect to see more work like this. In other words, we are keeping the Chinese type on our computers.” - Design Student

RED Network is an Asian design collective of creatives with bilingual and bi-cultural backgrounds focused on developing culturally appropriate products and business strategies. The network consists of Kaizor Innovation in HK, Y Studios, and culturalANTENNA in North America. Companies like these are quickly becoming hot resources for Western companies to reach Asian markets both in the hotbed of China and stateside. I’m sure we’ll see many more.

I wish we’d see these type of partnerships and innovative strategic thinking in the Asian Church. I wish more that Chinese churches would embrace and value creatives. In most Chinese families the creative professions or arts are not encouraged as a career choice for their idols, I meant to say children. Typically, it becomes a choice through years of outright or suppressed rebellion, when they’ve had it with their major or day job or when they’ve finally made enough money.

Creatives don’t quite fit in with your traditional immigrant church set up. It’s too stuffy. Second generation creatives most likely leave the immigrant church because they’ve may have been chastised for their non-traditional thinking or worse for their choice of clothing and hair color. Their career choice appear to have little value for the world. Parents offer critical or strange glances in passing. They’re “creative” and traditional church leadership doesn’t know how to work with that. Creatives, your artists, are generally not folks who like to conform but they have very keen insight into life. We need creatives in the church.

What if Chinese churches partnered with the creatives in their congregations? What if they partnered together to reach and shape the culture around them? What if second generation creatives helped immigrant churches with their websites?

What if. Just what if.

Chinese Entrepreneurs Choosing Africa

Photo: Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times

It’s a fact that there’s Chinese people like…everywhere.

The New York Times highlights a wave of Chinese entrepreneurs choosing places like Africa for living and doing business rather than the traditional US and Europe spots like many from the Fujian province.

The article highlights Yang Jie who started an ice cream company in South Africa and now it’s the country’s biggest. He figured in a subtropic climate ice cream would be in high demand. smart guy!
now there’s many stories like that streaming from young guys like Yang.

“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.

This is not without its downside. Africans may lose out. There may be some tensions and growing anti-Chinese sentiment.

“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.

“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”

That just sounds so very Chinese. Can it change?

Link
NYTimes: Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa

On another note…

I love my girl Angelica. That’s me and her at her farewell party.
She’s headed out to Senegal with the peace corps in just a matter of days.
She’s Chinese and she loves Africa. I love that.
Read her blog!

The Family Structure and Cultural Clash in Chinese / Asian Families

Cultural differences are clearly something that we wrestle with more than ever in society, church and even homelife. Things are not simply black and white. Those who live in the margins know that very well.

djchuang recently highlighted two articles from the gospel herald about Dr. Peter Lam (director of Asian Family Today and father of two second gen children) on improving the communication between Chinese parents and their ABC (or not) children. lam points out the obvious problems or methods employed (to those of us who are ABC) - rebuking, punishment, guilt - and he offers simple advice to parents - encouragement is key - and other biblical sounding counsel.

two articles
Researcher Comments on Cultural-Clash in Chinese Families
Communication Must Improve in Chinese Families, Researcher Says

i also enjoyed this thoughtful post from Nikki Toyama co-contributor of more than serving tea, about boundaries, enmeshment and justice. she poses some great questions that i wrestle over with my non-asian wife. how do you manage boundaries on the mission field, in doing mercy and justicework? do you?

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?

What’s cultural? What’s Christian? What’s do we embrace and what do we work against?

Back in 2003, the BBC had featured the cultural clash in The Asian Family.
Listen to their program here.