confessions of a mono-culturalist

Being an Asian American church is hard. The natural tendency of any person or group is to be mono-cultural. In fact, to be Asian American is in a sense to be mono-cultural, too, because not everyone who is from an Asian ethnic background would call themselves Asian American. It’s an American social construct produced by the Civil Rights Movement.

So within the category of Asian American is a diversity of cultures that we can choose to recognize and celebrate… or not. If we choose not, then we are going to go down one of two roads. We will either become essentially white, or we will go back to the ethnic cultural rhythms that are most comfortable to us. The latter is what has happened to Grace Community. (I’ll say something about the former a little later.)

A couple of months ago I looked at who was a part of Grace Community and did a simple data analysis. I counted up everyone who was not of Chinese extraction. I found that only 18.9% were not Chinese. Of that group, 7.4% were white. In other words, we call ourselves a church for Asian Americans, but only 11.5% of us are not ethnically Chinese. I don’t know what all the causes are, but we are becoming more and more mono-cultural.

One cause is that I’m not Asian American enough. My native cultural rhythms have Chinese origins: it’s the food I’m attracted to, it’s the holidays I’m most familiar with, it’s the language I get harassed for not speaking. No one expects me to speak Korean or Japanese or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Hmong. And I taste the food of other cultures with a Chinese palate, i.e., as a “tourist” (albeit a fairly adventurous one) and not as a native.

More importantly, I have very little familiarity with the holidays or sense of calendar of other Asian ethnicities. Holidays give form to our sense of the year. They also describe what is important to us (which is why Senator McCain apologized for not originally supporting a day to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). Language and food are also purveyors of values, ways that a culture is expressed and passed on. So this is truly a confession: as a pastor of an Asian American church community, it is my obligation to become more familiar with the cultures of everyone who is a part of Grace Community so that I can better shepherd each of you. For that past lack of interest, I sincerely apologize.

It isn’t enough to merely use the label “Asian American”. I’ve done that in the past, but too many of my Chinese American cultural rhythms have slipped out unconsciously. I think that’s why we’re becoming more and more a Chinese American church. I want to reverse that trend.

But why not studiously avoid any reference to culture? Because it’s impossible. As I said earlier, language, food and holidays are all purveyors of culture. Asian culture is noticeable because we live in a place that has its own culture: mainstream white American culture (“white American” is itself a social construct that at one time did not include the Irish or Italians). Avoiding any reference to non-white American culture is to attempt to integrate into white American culture by denying our differences, rather than accepting and understanding those differences and then using that understanding to enrich the greater American culture.

Being an Asian American church is harder than I thought. But I believe that by seeking to understand and celebrate our differences we will find a new diversity of expressions of God’s creativity and new ways of understanding God and the world he has made and loves and sent his Son to redeem.