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.

duck walk

I went to a pastors’ meeting yesterday. What do a bunch of pastors talk about? One thing we talk about is how pressured we feel. One pastor shared how he was a journalist for 11 years and never felt the kind of pressure that he feels now to be at the top of his game all the time. Another shared his financial pressures. I sort of got the ball rolling when I shared how I’d felt very down on Monday, right after the weekend retreat.

It seems odd that I’d feel depressed after what had been a great retreat. But I’m going to share something that very few people know: on the surface everything was going great, but behind the scenes we were improvising and re-designing like crazy. Dave Evans mentioned that it was like a duck: on the surface things seem fine but under the water we’re paddling like crazy.

The question we kept asking ourselves was: how is this retreat fitting into the big picture of what God is doing at Grace? I felt like I was in a constant tension of both needing to have all the answers while also being spontaneously available to whatever God wanted to do. Sure, we could just let the Spirit lead but we needed to come up with a plan, too.

So by the end of the retreat I was exhausted. We had just finished a wonderful time of learning to rest in what God was doing among us, and I was tired. It just didn’t make sense. And I spent the whole day on Monday feeling tired and pretty unmotivated.

I told this to my prayer partner on Tuesday morning and it was refreshing to let go of that tension and be prayed for. I shared about this at the pastors’ meeting and was encouraged to hear that everyone else felt exactly the same way. We all realized that we wanted to ‘get it right’, to be the world’s greatest pastor (or at least the pastor of the big church nearby), and it was hard to faithfully walk the path God’s given each of us. We can talk about a lot of great ideas, but those may not be ideas that God’s designed us to implement and we end up like a bunch of exhausted ducks lying by the road in danger of becoming pastoral road kill.

So what’s the answer? I wish I knew, then I’d write a book and go on a lecture tour. What’s more important is that I’m slowly learning, that I’m gaining new skills in both God-sight and church leadership. I’m sure there will be more times when I’m exhausted, but I’m glad for those that come alongside and share my burden and help me get back on my feet to continue what Eugene Peterson calls “a long obedience in the same direction”.

can you see me now?

The big take-away from this year’s Grace Retreat was that we can develop our God-sight, resulting in more God-sightings.

Dave Evans gave us a couple of tools to help us develop our God-sight: the prayer of examen and the lectio divina. They’re simple tools. “Examen” is just a fancy word for a 10 minute reflection on where God has been most present or absent in our day (or half-day if you do the examen twice a day). And we did a “divine reading” of the story of Jesus healing the blind man Bartimaeus in Mark 10, i.e., Dave read the passage slowly out loud 4 times and God spoke to us. Pretty simple.

Simple is good. These are things that we can do every day. One website suggests that couples could do the examen together, which sounds like a great way of getting to know each other by hearing from the other person how God has been present or absent in her/his life.

My prayer is that this retreat will have more of an impact than just being a pleasant memory. Not that I have anything against pleasant memories, but Dave has given us some time-honored ways to develop our God-sight that I pray will become a part of our individual and community prayer life. (If you don’t have a copy of these tools, let me know and I’ll email you his handouts.)

The result will be more God-sightings. And who knows where that will lead? Better yet, who knows where He will lead?

personal but not private

Celebrating Maundy Thursday and Good Friday is a bother. It takes extra time out of a busy schedule and most of us have to work and/or get our kids to school on Friday so it’s disrupting to do anything religious on Thursday night.

Which explains why only 10 of us (including my 3 kids) showed up for the Maundy Thursday service at the church building. We had twice that number at our house on Good Friday: 11 adults and 9 kids. But we had a potluck dinner, the service was short (a little over half an hour) and interesting to the kids (they were happy to read Scripture if it meant they got to blow out candles afterward), and people felt free to hang out after the service since there wasn’t any work or school the next day.

But those two services taught me something. My faith may be personal but it isn’t private. It’s a journey that’s meant to be shared. And not just with people my age but also with people of other generations, including kids. In fact, it’s my responsibility as an adult to be a guide to the faith to those younger than me.

That feels awkward to those of us steeped in the American worldview of individualism. We farm out most of the shaping of our kids’ lives to outside experts like professional educators in schools. We would even rather get our early childcare help from experts in books rather than from people we know (and, for whatever reasons, don’t trust).

On Good Friday the shared journey of faith was “hammered” home to me. I was the first to place a nail in the cross as a means of meditation on the meaning of the Crucifixion. The kids were fascinated and crowded around to watch. Of course they wanted to use the hammer, too. I even held a nail so my 5 year old could hammer in a nail (my fingers remained miraculously intact). And all of the adults had to endure the scrutiny of 16 eyes (one of the kids was asleep) watching from up close their act of meditation.

The Maundy Thursday service was also invaded by kids’ curiosity and giggles as we washed each others’ feet and partook of the elements of the Lord’s Table. There wasn’t the usual quiet solemnity and deep introspection we normally associate with religious ritual (and, to be honest, I designed the services with the expectation that kids would be present and not exactly solemn and introspective).

But in those two services we were doing what Christian adults should do: giving our kids experiences that will shape their understanding of who they are as members of the Christian church community. I don’t expect my 5 year old to understand the depths of meaning inherent in Christ’s act of service that he provided as an illustration of humility and love for his disciples. But my 5 year old now has a tangible memory of foot washing that he can use as a focus for future reflection.

In the vows for baptism that we celebrated on Palm Sunday, parents promise to help their children become true disciples of Christ. As a parent, I want to continue to provide experiences such as foot washing and hammering nails into a cross as a foundation for my prayers that my kids (and all of the kids of Grace Community) will become true followers of Jesus. In the eyes of the world this may seem like an inconvenience and maybe even a bit foolish. But in the eyes of God, this is my joy and duty.

a good Lent?

Did you have a good Lent?

My fast this year was from listening to the stereo in the car. It wasn’t a big deal when my family was in the car: my kids can chatter incessantly with or without the stereo. But in my other travels it did offer a chance to cultivate an attitude of listening to God.

But during Holy Week I decided to change my fast to listening only to excerpts from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and “St. John Passion”. That listening experience has led me to a conclusion: I’ve been robbed.

I grew up in a Christian tradition that didn’t observe Lent and that saw Good Friday as mostly a speed bump before Easter. The desire was to focus on the joy and triumph of Easter.

In contrast, Bach’s two musical reflections on Christ’s Passion (his suffering and death) don't end with glorious Resurrection scenes. They are both comprised of songs of lament, grief, and reflection, ending with exhausted lullabies to Christ’s body in the tomb. And they have helped me glimpse the experience of a deeper appreciation of the joy and victory of Easter through the lens of sorrow and suffering. It’s only a glimpse because I have so little personal tradition to draw on. It makes me feel like a woefully inadequate guide to helping Grace Community understand Easter more fully, kind of like a little kid trying to explain the complexities of the adult world.

Some of this ignoring of the depths of the pain of mortality comes from a Protestant shying away from things that seem too Rome-ish, i.e., staying away from “graven images” (the second Commandment) and wanting to say that our empty crosses are better than the crucifixes that still have the suffering Christ stuck on them. And then there's the American preoccupation with avoiding anything having to do with death (except, for some odd reason, slasher movies and the various iterations of CSI).

The fact that I grew up in a Chinese American church community may also have something to do with this. When European missionaries first went to China they found that their devotional paintings of Christ’s suffering didn’t evoke the expected sense of sympathy. Instead the Chinese thought that a suffering person was just getting what s/he deserved. The missionaries had to change to images like the holy family, ideas that resonated more with the Chinese worldview.

Whatever the causes, I’m realizing that I can’t really celebrate Easter until I have a deeper appreciation for Christ’s emptying to take on my human-ness, including my experiences of suffering and death. These are terrible and repulsive things that I’d rather not be reminded of. But that’s the purpose of Lent. I’ll try again next year to have a good Lent.

catholic

"I believe in the holy catholic Church."

In our contemporary Evangelical Covenant version of the Apostles' Creed we've changed the wording to "the holy Christian Church" in order to avoid sounding like we're pledging allegiance to the Pope. But the change has always bothered me.

I like the idea of the Church as being catholic in the original sense: universal, for everyone. God's Church is not an elitist group. The twelve that Jesus chose included tradesmen (fishermen) and professionals (the well-heeled Judas Iscariot), a religious fundamentalist (a Zealot) and someone who had turned his back on religion (a tax collector), commoners and those with friends in high places (John, with family connections to the high priest). Jesus, a Jew, even reached out to the hated Samaritans and other Gentiles.

"Catholic" today is a kind of mark of separation: Catholics v. Orthodox v. Protestants. Even the name Christian can be seen as a call to division: Christians v. Jews v. Muslims, etc. But Jesus came to break down walls of separation. Christianity isn't just for those with enough willpower to live a pious life, or for those smart enough to articulate the theistic arguments or build an irrefutable case for why an omnipotent God allows evil and suffering in the world. I'm a follower of Jesus because he offers to me the grace I need. Through him I have new life, something I can't earn, something which must be given to me as a gift because I'm completely unable to attain it on my own.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8)

kids in worship

This week is Holy Week, celebrating the most significant events of our salvation history: Jesus washing the disciples' feet and giving us the command to "love one another", Jesus' institution of the Lord's Table, Jesus' crucifixion, and Jesus' resurrection.

How do you celebrate these events with little kids?

I was curious about billboards for "Catholic Radio 1260" so I tuned in for a few minutes. The radio host (I have no idea who she was) was answering someone who called to ask how she could get anything out of worship when she was so distracted by her kids. Since most Roman Catholic churches expect that the entire family is together during the worship service, I could understand why this mother of young kids (they were in the 2-7 year old range, if I remember) was seeking some advice.

The host started by saying that it was pleasing to God that the mom (and dad) were bringing their kids to worship and getting them started on the right track. The host even said that if there were any times when the mom felt like she was getting anything out of the worship it was "triple grace" for the mom.

Then the host gave some very practical tips: pray, practice, and prepare. Pray for your kids, that they will sit still and maybe receive something from the time in worship. Practice what happens in the worship service ahead of time with the kids. Young kids love to role play and it will make them more alert to what's happening during the worship. And prepare: bring coloring sheets and small toys in case they're needed.

We Protestants can learn a lot from the Catholics. At least, from Catholic radio.