Asian spirituality

I attended a bi-monthly meeting of Asian American pastors last Thursday (the South Bay chapter of the Asian American Bay Area Fellowship). It's always encouraging to get together with other pastors, especially if we're being honest about our struggles and not just tooting our own horns about how well our churches are doing.

When we first started AABA Fellowship 15 years ago, it was virtually all Chinese American pastors. Last Thursday, of the 7 who made it to the meeting, 3 were Korean, 3 were Chinese and 1 was Japanese. And the Koreans were definitely the most vocal. (One of the Chinese and the Japanese were really late, anyway.) The Korean church in America seems to be growing steadily and I know several Chinese churches that have hired Korean pastors to work with their youth or English-speaking congregations because there's a lack of Chinese seminary graduates and pastors.

What makes the Koreans so fervent in Christian spirituality? One answer would be the relatively recent history of Korean immigration to the US relative to Chinese immigration (the 80s were the heyday of Korean immigration). Korean cultural identity is related to Christian piety because of the strength of the Christian Church in Korea. And recent immigrants always hang on tightly to any expression of cultural identity as a way of keeping a sense of identity in a new land. Another would be the emphasis on fervency especially in prayer. That fervency is a legacy of shamanistic Korean religion that was co-opted by Korean Christianity.

I don't have a final answer on this. But it's a question that greatly interests me as I look for ways to reach out to the very complex group that is "Asian American". I'd like to know more about Japanese and Vietnamese and Filipino and Hmong spirituality, Christian and otherwise. I'm not looking for excuses for how hard it is to reach Asian Americans with the gospel, but for ways to express the gospel message in culturally relevant ways and then allow for a deeply authentic love for God and the world that God loves.