Ministering to Asian Americans - notes
June 3, 2009
[DJ Chuang] I’m really grateful for the invitation from Wayland Wong of the Fellowship of American Chinese Evangelicals, and for their convening the English pastors fellowship & lunch at Chinese Evangelical Free Church in Monterey Park today. 52 ministry leaders were in attendance. I took about 24 minutes on the presentation and 35 minutes on discussion and interactive Q&A.
I thought it was an engaging time of conversations around where ministries are currently effective with next gen Asian Americans and where it might be going (or could be going.) You can see for yourself. Your feedback is most welcomed, so please add a comment below and continue the conversation right here online.
Here are the resources I mentioned:
- Resource Center for Asian American leaders, hosted here at L2 Foundation
- L2 Foundation books: Asian American Youth Ministry and CONVERSATIONS: Asian American Evangelical Theologies in Formation
- List of 100+ churches effectively reaching next gen Asian Americans
- a copy of the Powerpoint slides I used for my talk
Video to the entire meeting courtesy of @jonathanhochan:
The video contains the entire meeting time, including praise & worship, devotional, introductory remarks by Wayland Wong about the history of Chinese American ministry (at 1:00:30) , and then my talk (at 1:16:30) with discussion / Q&A starting at 1:40:00.
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Comments:4 Responses
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June 3rd, 2009
Thanks for the presentation, DJ. I appreciate the time you took to prepare your talk. I have more to think about, and more to consider as I continue to minister in these contexts.
It was a great time to worship together, pray together, listen to the word, discuss issues, and connect in a new way. Thanks.
June 3rd, 2009
Hey DJ, I think that this meeting sparked something and I think a lot of people are open to begin dialoging about the realities of Asian American Ministries. There is definitely some talk about an Idea Camp:AsianAmerican conversation.
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts and insight. Thank you for challenging us to think more creatively and to take risks. I really appreciate your thoughts. Have a good one sir.
June 3rd, 2009
@Daniel, thanks for your comment, and so glad you could be present. Great to see you and to hear of your progress with studies. My prayer for you is that God’s call to you would be clear, better earlier than later.
@Jonathan, Thanks for making the live-stream and recording! That makes it so much more valuable to those who weren’t present, and it can now be shared with other key leaders and provide an opportunity for on-going discussion that will spark new life into our churches and reach the next generations.
June 10th, 2009
DJ — hi! good job! Two questions came to my mind as I watched, and I’d be interested to hear what you think:
(1) How effective are English ministries in Ethnic Asian churches at reaching unchurched AA’s? The suspicion I have is that growth in these congregations is largely from churched AA’s who return home after college, or churched AA’s who move to the suburbs, looking for an ethnic church, but I have no evidence to back up these suspicions.
(2) What differences have you seen in next gen AA’s and the white, mainstream generation of the same age? We hear alot about the “emergent” culture which is anti-absolute truth, all about relationships, artsy, etc. While I think AA’s do share many of these qualities, I think they are significantly different in some ways as well. For instance, I think AA’s are not as “allergic” to absolute truth, and are in general more modernistic in their thinking. Have you observed this as well?
Thanks!
Ben Pun