- [Michael Lee] What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced
in ministering to Asian-American millennials?
- [Steve Bang Lee] Yeah, you know, one thing I think I've seen is they're...
So I speak on behalf of Korean-Americans obviously. But, you know, every
Korean-American has pretty much grown up in the church or had some church
experience at some point in their life, and a lot of them they go back to their
youth days when at the last night of the retreat, things get emotional, and they
cry, and they think something happened.
And so the rest of their faith journey moving forward almost becomes a...
They're trying to reclaim.
"Hey, what was that experience?
What happened there?
And how come it seems, like, everything just fell off the map after that point?"
And so a lot of the experience I think is there's this utter confusion of what
is Christian spirituality.
"What is biblical spirituality, and how come I don't feel what I once felt?"
And so I think it's kind of hard to map out a spirituality, a biblical one,
where they're trying not to go back to a past experience.
- [Steve Bang Lee] That's good.
- [Alex Choi] I think for me there's a couple of thoughts, a couple of things.
One, there's been a big challenge is being bicultural.
Sometimes we're the best of both worlds, sometimes we're the worst of both worlds,
and then sometimes we just selectively choose when we're Asian,
when we're American.
So for example, like, our welcome ministry, I noticed at least at our church
the Asians at our church, like Americans, like their autonomy.
They don't want you chasing them with clipboards, they don't want you
bothering them, haggling them for their info.
They want that space.
But when I go to a lot of white American churches, they have ministry booths, so
when I'm ready to engage, I will engage.
But for Asian-Americans, they want the autonomy on the front end
like an American, but on the back end, when they're ready, they want you
to call them out.
They want you to ask them to serve, ask them to help.
So when they move between cultures like that, I find it hard to kind of okay,
like, what are we dealing with here, you know.
Who are we dealing with?
Probably a better question but... The other thing too, for me, is the concept
of becoming an adult, right, because if discipleship is, you know,
helping people become fully formed Christians, we become
adults very differently.
So in American, white-American culture, 18 is a rite of passage into adulthood,
but in Asian culture, it's marriage, when you get married.
They add to that millennials are getting married later.
So you're not seen as an adult from the first generation until you're married, and
so I think that just complicates becoming your own person, thinking about things
on your own.
I think that it's been hard to kind of pinpoint how do we then help them
become mature Christians.
Yeah.
- [Michael Lee] Yeah.
For me as a pastor, I think right now, like, a big buzzword amongst young adults
and millennials in the church is community.
This idea of community and I think as Asian-Americans, the cultural, you know,
traditional historic experience of community it can get really confused.
And so I think for some there's, like, an idolatry of community, and a real
misunderstanding of what biblical community is when in reality, they're just
trying to replicate maybe a youth group experience. They have Confucian influences
on what does it mean to be a neighbor, or friend, or be in relationship with one
another. And so for me that's been a real difficult thing because I would say number
one reason why people are leaving their churches, they'll just throw it out there,
"Oh, a lack of community," you know, "I'm looking for a different kind
of community," and you always have to flesh out like, "What do you
mean by that?"
And it just means so many different things that as a pastor, for me, it's been tricky
to navigate and really trying to build up a biblical foundation of what a
gospel-centered Christian community is and not just, like, feed into... Yeah.
- [Alex Choi] Yeah.
And that's kind of, like, not just community, but also, like you said,
they're looking for that experience again.
Or if when you say the feeling again.
So that's another reason I think people leave church like, "I don't get that
feeling here, community and experience."
Those are the ones at least mark a lot of our exodus when people are transitioning
out of our ministry.
So yeah, I think those are good thoughts.