Authority of the Asian American Church

The knot that once tied Christianity and western culture together has unraveled. While western Christianity is undergoing cultural disestablishment, for most cultures in the world, there never was establishment, much less disestablishment. For instance, Asian American churches, rather than undergoing disestablishment, are undergoing cultural dissonance. Ironically, such concerns as the gospel and non-western culture that have occupied many other cultures, have reached its full circle with a concern for the gospel and western culture. Rediscovering the Asian heritage of the gospel requires the unfettering of the internalized western form of Christianity.

When one attempts to be Asian and American in the way one understands and practices Christianity, one is confronted with a complex and delicate dynamism between culture and gospel that needs to be unraveled and reexamined if Asian American churches are to earn authority in the world. For three decades, the challenge of addressing the church’s authority from an Asian American perspective has remained unchanged. C.S. Song described Asian American theologizing as trying to nail a stick unto one empty space after another.[1] Unlike the debate over Christianity and cultural establishment, and the impending cultural disestablishment, one of the urgent needs for the hybrid Asian American, as three decades ago, is to reconcile the innate Asian cultural heritage and Western Christianity. Although a few Asian American theologians’ voices have emerged, they are more representative of the academic institutions that house a separate Asian American center. [2] In the last decade a few Asian American feminist scholars have also emerged who tend to represent the ecumenical and religious left in their theological work.[3]

Prior to answering the question of authority, church, and the world, defining the boundaries of the term, “Asian American” is important. The original meaning of the term, “Asian American” dates back to the Asian American movement in the late 1960 during the Civil Rights Movement era. The aim of the movement was to repudiate the alien label, “Oriental” and to advocate for pan-Asian unity. Currently the terms “Asian American” or “Asian and Pacific Islander American” are used to identify East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), Central Asian (Pakastani, Afghan, Burmese), South Asians (Indians), Southeast Asians (Thai, Vietnamese, Hmong, Cambodians, Laotians, Filipinos, Malay, Indonesian), and Pacific Islander (Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian) peoples.[4]

For this essay, the term “Asian American” refers mainly to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descendants whose cultures have been impacted by the Confucian social hierarchy. The organized Asian American churches conflate Confucian and Christian values. Although Vietnamese culture is also influenced by Confucianism, due to my limited cultural contact with Vietnamese, I will use the term, “Asian American” in this essay to refer to East Asian descendents.

Whereas the postmodern context readily opens up a rare opportunity for excluded groups to assert themselves in the Judeo-Christian context, many Asian American churches are confined to the modernity paradigm rooted in the dualistic separation of private and public, sacred and profane, this world and the other world. Under this dichotomous belief system, compartmentalizations of theological and social paradigms comfortably co-exist. Furthermore, western and Confucian fundamentalism find common ground with an evangelical Christianity that stresses piety, clearly defined truth, and the literal interpretation of the Scripture, mirroring modern missionaries’ influence in Asia. Obsession with orthodoxy leaves no room for a hermeneutical creativity for the hybrid Asian American context.

Time magazine’s report on “Evangelicals in America,” identifies salient characteristics of Evangelicals:

There is no pope, no central ruling body, American Evangelicalism—with its home-schooling Fundamentalists and PTA-attending megachurch moms, its neo Calvinists and Pentecostals, its multiple denominations and thousands of unaffiliated churches-seems to defy unity, let alone hierarchy. Yet its members share basic commitments to the divinity and saving power of Jesus, to personal religious conversion, to the bible’s authority and to the spreading of the Gospel. (David Van Biema, “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America,” Time, (February 7, 2005): 34-45)

While mainline denominations have exhausted their vitality for more than two decades, the locus of energy in Christianity, according to Time’s report, resides in theologically and socially conservative Christianity with its overflowing energies of superstars like Rick Warren, James Dobson, Richard Neuhaus, Joyce Meyer and others.

Consequently hybrid Asian American Christians live in a polemic world that separates Christian belief and indigenous worldviews despite the persistence of the innate Asianness that begs for theological articulation. The intrinsic East Asianness is characterized by personal identity shaped by family and community that contrasts with the western individualistic and independent identity.[5] Nonetheless, such strong familial ties tend to loosen as the process of assimilation to mainstream culture takes place, resulting in an authority gap and role confusion within the immigrant family and church.

The term, authority, is rooted in “author” (Latin, anutor), the source of knowledge and truth, “exousia” (Greek), “out of, or from [the] being. The term requires integrity, authenticity, and vulnerability. The differing assumptions about authority in the Asian American family and church have been a source of much conflict. The more Americanized the generation is, the more achieved authority is demanded, lacking the historical and social contexts of Confucianistic ascribed authority that comes by position.

When the culture undergoes radical change through migration, finding consensus within the church as to what authority is and how authority is to be exercised remains vague. There also exists a huge discrepancy between one’s theological belief of authority and behavior, particularly when the belief is dissonant from one’s own culture. In that case one’s cultural norm tends to supersede in practice over against one’s belief. The incongruent self understanding of the Asian American church stems from the under-representation of nonwestern culture in Christian theological discourse.

In transitional times of dissonance, what easily fills the void appears to be the three pillars of the church—numbers, profit, and property—under the banner of the church growth movement. Without proper cultural and theological guidance this mantra legitimizes the church’s upward mobility. Business Week calls evangelical churches in America “earthly empires” whose pastors’ “eager embrace of corporate style growth strategies” is yielding a big-budget capacity to churn out a dazzling array of goods and services.[6]

When the church enjoys its material wealth, somehow her prophetic calling slips away all together. This is where the danger of establishment kicks in and creates all kinds of trouble over money, competition, and power abuse. Regretfully, this fills the public arena with church scandals, power abuse lawsuits, and litigation over church property while some quietly live out the gospel.

What could possibly reconcile such disparity in the way authority of the church is understood and practiced among Asian American Churches? The biblical portrayal of Jesus’ authority could create a common discourse for both generations and perhaps carve out an Asian American church’s self understanding of her authority in the pluralistic world. In citing the Hebrew bible, Terry Nichols states that “authority is presented through stories.”[7] The narrative aspect of the authority described in Hebrew Bible can, in fact, ground Asian American Christians with biblical and cultural identities. Without a conscious collective identity, the community falls into the prey of cultural dominance, e.g. the capitalistic mantra. The seekers of upwardly mobile middle class churches need to exercise prudence and simplicity that counteract eschewed sense of entitlement under the guise of American Dream. The church needs to rediscover itself not as a settled, but a sojourning community.

Unless Asian American clergy collectively renew their minds, spirits, and behavior we might find ourselves on the verge of spiritual bankruptcy. Only through contrite hearts and brokenness will church’s authenticity be recovered, and only then will the church be able to attract listening ears of the world. Now, more than ever, the American Dream stands against the truth that Jesus embodied. Only the countercultural, prophetic voices will recover the large portion of truth that has been swept away by Marketdom, packaged as the Kingdom of God. Through these voices the church’s position of authority in the world will be recovered.

Unveiling the false dichotomy between the church and the world reveals that the church is not so much set apart from the world as she claims to be. Describing the Asian American Church in the world is, therefore, challenging as she is still confined by four walls of the church building in a culturally and theologically polarizing world that separate private faith and public arena. This dichotomy promotes congregants to see the world as fallen, and thus, an object of their proselytizing, but not to do enough self-proselytizing. In other words, in the words of Bob Dylan, “He who’s not busy being born is busy dying.” I apply this to the church which, like the world, needs conversion. This is what the apostle Paul meant in his call to be a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Throughout western church history, the church’s nearly absolute authority brought darkness as well as light in the world. Consequently, the American separation of church and state was an inevitable progression, due to abuse of authority. Simultaneously, it also requires a delicate balancing act between the two worlds. When too much world is in the church, she loses her authenticity and thus authority to speak with integrity to the world. When too much separation exists between the two, the reign of God is limited to the four walls of the church. It results in a foreignness of the gospel to which the public cannot relate. The General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Samuel Kobia, calls forth genuine dialogue and speaking truth to power in the public square which is filled with the ideological propaganda of “the 24-hour news cycle.”[8]

For Asian Americans, the church’s boundary still remains in the narrowly defined Asian American communities. For the first generation, the language barrier limits their engagement in the public sphere other than offering social service at best—food and clothing distribution to the homeless shelter for evangelism. For the English-speaking congregants, it is a polemic theological conviction that separates the church’s engagement in the world except seeing the world as an object of proselytization. The underlying assumption here is that the church, lopsided by the corporate mentality, lacks authentic self-critique.

Asian American churches lack social embodiment of the Gospel. The historical markings of the black evangelical and progressive Baptists, whose civil rights activism was conceived from church leadership and authority, persist despite challenges by the fundamentalists. Asian American churches do not utilize such historical markings from their own contexts, and instead espouse of personal salvation, familial blessing, and the building projects. Although Chinese Americans forewarned that their second generation did not return to the mother church, the Korean American first generation is obsessed with the church building projects more than equipping future leaders. Compared to the 1990s, the Korean American second generation’s enrollment in major seminaries in the United States has plummeted drastically due to irreconcilable generational conflict, and lack of personal and theological identities in church ministry.

When the church loses its core nature of reconciling but engages in ideological wars, she also loses authority to transform the world in her dire need of transforming herself. Until justice rolls down like streams within the church, her authority is powerless. The post-church growth era requires the church to steer away from self-serving to prophetic calling for reforming and reconciling in the world that God so loves.

[1] Choan-Seng Song, The Third Eye Theology (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1979), 5.

[2] Pacific School of Religion particularly has taken leadership in producing prominent Asian American scholars such as C.S. Song, Bishop Roy Sano, and Fumitaka Matzuoka.

[3] Kwok, Pui-lan, Gail Yee, and Rita Nakashima Brock.

[4] Timothy Tseng, Pulpit and Pew Project, 2005.

[5] David Ng, ed., People On The Way: Asian North Americans Discovering Christ, Culture, and Community, (Valley Forge: Judson Press), 1996, xix.

[6] Business Week Online, “Earthly Empires: How Evangelical Churches are Borrowing from the Business Playbook,” (May 23, 2005), cover story.

[7] Terry Nichols “Authority” for “the Authority of the Church in the World” section of soon to be published Composite Essay of the Authority of the Church in the World Study Group, (November 26, 2003), 5.

[8] Samuel Kobia addresses Disciples of Christ general assembly 2005 on "Global challenges to North American Christians,” (Portland, Oregon, USA: July 26, 2005).

The Authority of the Church in the World: A United Church of Christ Perspective, Rev. Dr. Susan E. Davies