Gifts of the Asian American Church

By Julie Yeeun Kim

W

hen I was a young Asian American Christian, I was filled with longing. I looked at other communities of worship and wanted what they had. Compared to the theologies of the European reformers whom we revered, we Asian Americans appeared lacking, even illiterate, in doctrine and creed. Measured against the liturgies of African American churches and the vitality of their music, which we adored, we appeared dull and counterfeit.

What is our style? What can we offer?

I attempted to answer these questions repeatedly, sometimes with friends who were equally curious. In our childish zeal, we added vaguely Asian sounding melodies into our worship. We sat around our instruments and attempted to write songs in the Pentatonic scale used in traditional Korean music, that is until we wisely determined that our music sounded like a recreation of the Mulan soundtrack. It hardly moved us, a group of second generation Americans, children of immigrants who themselves didn’t listen to music with instruments like the erhu and gayageum. We had internalized our foreignness so completely that the search for our own identities led us to unfamiliar places. We were lost, without guides, eager to find a “sound” and expression unique to us.

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What is our worship? What can we offer the wider church?

I began seminary with these questions. But my theological education tossed me up in the air and spun me around the way pizza chefs play with dough. I began with an addiction to tidy conclusions and resolutions. But I found myself three years later trained in the art of asking meaningful questions that often didn’t come with closure. By graduation, I was far more habituated to silence and uncertainty, familiar with the spirituality of “I don’t know,” happier to journey through life in the company of my questions.

Six months into my seminary degree, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. While the rest of the world learned how to navigate a pandemic, people in Asian diasporas around the world like the United States learned how to co-navigate racism. Almost overnight, we had an urgent need for knowledge about race, ethnicity, and anti-Asian violence. Suddenly, the search for an Asian American “sound” felt pointless, idiotic, a florid distraction from real crisis. Why were they hurting us? Screw the style—do Asian Americans have a place in this country? A story? What does God have to say about this violence and discrimination?

Many pastors and leaders of churches did not say a word about the violence against Asian Americans, even if their congregations were 99% Asian American. Some of the very people who sat with me and daydreamed about Asian American worship avoided talking about our nearly daily confrontations with hate and contempt. We were sheep without a shepherd in our moment of panic.

I was shocked to run up against indifference among Asian Americans. In multiple conversations I was asked, “What did you expect?” Month after month, their detachment evoked in me a mix of rage, grief, and confusion. How could something that so deeply provoked and offended me be so coolly shrugged off by another? In the face of their persistent apathy, I questioned my sanity. Had I gone mad?

Then one day, I understood. I hadn’t gone crazy. On the contrary, my panicked responses were appropriate. I wasn’t crazy, but neither were those who dismissed me. I finally realized that my people did not know how to care. Many Asian Americans assume that the “immigrant mentality,” e.g., keeping our head down and quietly passing through American life, is why Asian Americans are unengaged or politically weak. But the truth is far greater than that. Our silence and apathy are structural consequences. We didn’t come to America quiet; we learned to become quiet here. After centuries of being cast as silent outsiders in this country and decades of swimming through education and media systems that minimize and erase us, our ability to recognize when we were being violated and to interpret and express anger had been disabled. We had internalized our powerlessness and insignificance, like a child who learns to stop crying because no one cares and nothing changes. We suffered from a functional despair.

We were sheep without a shepherd, for our shepherds had been taught by their seminaries, mentors, and theological books that what was happening to us did not matter or that it was “too political” to engage. In some other cases, church leaders desired to take action while lay members hesitated to draw attention to the issues and to themselves. As my anger dissolved into understanding, I gave up trying to convince anyone of anything and joined God’s call to lament.

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What is our story? What do we have worth offering?

These are hardly questions to answer but wounds to care for, a consciousness to awaken. The questions are simultaneously beautiful and awful. For one, it assumes that all people contribute something valuable to the body of Christ, and Asian Americans are no exception.

Where many Christians err is in assuming that the gifts of a worshiping community emerge without a story and situation, as commodities for consumption and hollow replication. Yet Black spirituals are not merely nice words set to pretty sounds by just any musician who sat down one day and created a product. They are theological and liturgical expressions birthed from a particular pain bound to a particular context. Similarly, liberation theologies developed in the 20th century in reaction to poverty, violence, and disenfranchisement. They called for a return to the God of Exodus who liberates and contends with oppressors, a God forgotten by a comfortable, privileged Church. Through liberation theology, people confronted the pain of their immediate situations and brought it to God. Like Jacob, they wrestled with God, and the fruit of their struggle became their gifts to the world.

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What is our story? Have we wrestled with God?

As a whole, we Asian American Christians have not done the hard work of articulating our racial, ethnic pain and bringing it before God. We offer up all kinds of spiritual things, yet we treat our identities as inappropriate, irrelevant to our faith, forgetting that we stand beneath the all-exposing, all-enclosing light of Christ in these very bodies. As I scan the landscape of Asian American congregations around me, I find it ironic that when we were blamed for COVID-19, many of us did not pray to the scapegoated Christ to help us. We are called “perpetual foreigners” in this country—our country—yet we rarely ask the reconciling God of Jews and Gentiles to mend this breach.

As a whole, we have not taken our existence as diasporic and migrant people in racialized bodies seriously enough, many choosing instead to spurn our stories along with our grief. We’ve been split in two—severed the way hyphens rupture identities held up in difficult balance. We’ve normalized discrimination, internalized racism, and pledged allegiance to a God we may unconsciously believe sees us as strangers, too. Perhaps we have been content to be spectators in our own homes, mimickers of our neighbors, and borrowers of their blessings. And I wonder: What would it take to make us care? If our resignation is learned behavior, a consequence of our unique structural disadvantages, how can we unlearn it and become brave?

I pray that we will wake up to our social and political realities as Asian Americans and, like Jacob, demand our blessings from God. We must demand from God our full inclusion and humanity in the presence of our enemies. Until we do this, I fear that we will have no gifts to give. Will the Asian American church awaken holy passion and rage? Will we confront the many pieces of our identities, troubled and scorned as they seem, so that we may worship God out of the fullness and wholeness of who we are?

What is our unique expression? What can we offer?

I don’t know the details yet, but I’m certain we’ll find them in the dirt of the wrestling ring, if only we have the courage to enter.

Originally published in Bearings Online

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

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Julie Yeeun Kim (@julieyeeun) is a Korean American writer, educator, and unabashed Angeleno. She likes to write about faith, family, and identity, and her stories have appeared in Inheritance Mag and Bearings Online. She works with an Asian American women's ministry called The Honor Summit and is the host of the Honor Summit Podcast.

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