Listen folks, both asian and non-asian – Christ came to reconcile ALL things to Himself. Why is that such a difficult thing? I am Irish, English, French, German, and recently found out Portuguese and I am a Pastor, so…, whom do I hang with? Whom do I reach out to? Whom do I call my community or body? It is whomever God puts in our path.

One Lord; One Body; One Love! Just start living it out and stop fighting over the scraps – cuz all of stuff is like filthy rags anyway. Stop fighting and start LOVING – let Francis do his thing. If that is what God called him to do, then let him be. He is in my humble opinion doing what God has called him to do. Jonah did not want to go Ninevah either, but God had him go. We are not always called to do what we think WE think we should.

I dont’ want to receive any more follow up comments to this, so.., please remove me from that if you could. It is a bit ridiculous at this juncture. Thanks!

Peace and One Love.

Richie

“Ethnicity, assimilation, identity, racism and reconciliation” exists with all immigrant communities. Many of the problems within English-speaking Asian American churches are problems that all churches face.

I do not pretend to (as you have written) to have the “truth.” I am curious which statements prompted your reactions, though it is understood that directly responding to your comments probably is not something you are seeking.

You are correct that I have a simple Faith, though it has been augmented by my studies of apologetics with teachers such as Josh McDowell. I hope that all your described past experiences and education (that far exceeds mine) will eventually provide the means to find the answers you are seeking.

To “elderj” – when iron sharpens iron, sometimes it results in “heated” responses from some of the participants.

I agree that often ethnicity, race and/or stereotyping/racism serves as a factor of separation by becoming the highest priority resulting in clouding one’s vision of what God wants to provide us on a personal basis.

To “Alpha Hayward”
“if you don’t purpose to reach a culture, then you simply won’t reach them” is a thought-provoking and insightful viewpoint. A possible alternative way to view this is that a church/ministry must reach out to meet the needs of the people they are trying to reach. Maybe a more “on-point” answer to your listed question then could be the following: what needs am I not meeting with people, who happen to be Black, within your comgregation.

To “Cricket”
In many English-speaking Chinese/Asian American churches, their selection of pastors/leaders could provides a tangible indication of the importance/priority they place on ethnicity vs Christian leadership

To “Annika”
Within the general Chinese/Asian American Christian communities, there are few problems considering the many requests he’s received to speak. He is called to be a pastor to the people attending his Simi Valley church and to all people. He has guided Cornerstone (his church) to have a great focus on evangelism, as noted by the expenditures of the church’s resources.

Merry Christmas to everybody!

+1 David on the responses and everybody else too. Certainly this post has generated a lot more responses than many, thought I’m not sure why, or rather I’m pretty sure why, but wish it weren’t that way. Ethnicity and race discussion of any kind make evangelicals nervous. Isn’t this focus a distraction from the “gospel,” why do we have to focus on race, and the more we focus on this the worse it is, so can’t we just move on?

Well, I wish the artificial construct of race were not a salient reality, and I wish we didn’t have a history of segregation and legalized discrimination in this country and I wish that racial stereotyping and racism hadn’t accompanied the proclamation of the gospel during the great missionary movements of the last two centuries, and I wish that Euro-American norms of behavior and ways of doing church had not become conflated with the “Christian” way, and I wish that we all were perfectly reconciled in actuality as we are spiritually in Christ, and I wish that I didn’t have to consider the impact on my children of being raised Black in a world that devalues Blackness, and I wish ten thousand other things, but wishing doesn’t make it so and further, in the sovereignty of God, he has allowed the present situations to exist and to persist.

It is God who confounded the languages and dispersed the people at Babel for their disobedience to his command to fill the earth and thus ensured that linguistic and ethnic diversification would take place with the subsequent result that cultures would develop along different lines. It was God who established the boundaries and the times for all people so that they would perhaps seek after him. It was God who at Pentecost inaugurated the miracle that the proclaimers of the gospel were enabled to declare the glories of God in divers tongues rather than those who were foreigners being granted a miracle of translation, it was God who made me (and all of us) thus, and how can the pot say to the potter, why did you shape me thusly, and it is God who declares the vision of people of every tribe, tongue, and language worshiping around the throne in resurrected ethnic bodies at the end of time. And it was God, whose incarnation we celebrate, who chose to bless culture by inhabiting it as a 1st century Hellenistic Jewish carpenter, who spoke a language, and used cultural idioms of his people, and who by his specific participation in one group became the messiah to all.

This stuff matters to God and it always has; from creation till eternity still to come, and we as his followers wrestle with it. Imperfectly, and with clouded vision, “as through a glass darkly,” but wrestle nevertheless so that we might more fully live in light of the glorious gospel of which we are all inheritors. I need to listen to David, and hear him declare the works of God through his own story, his own culture, his own Exodus / Exilic narrative, and I need to know that his story is not his alone — for we are not only individuals but we are families and groups (ethnos) in God’s view — but I need to know that his story has a people and a legacy and a journey behind it.