The challenge of establishing an effective English Ministry in Chinese churches is neither new nor unique.  I have frequently heard of similar issues faced by other ethnic churches, and I have suspected that these issues were present in the past as well.  I took a special interest in German speaking churches in the U.S. in part because some of my ancestors came from Germany and in part because Germans formed one of the largest immigrant groups in the early history of the U.S.

Through the Google Books project I have been able to access some of the earlier books on the German Lutherans in the U.S. and it has made interesting reading.  In A brief history of the Lutheran church in America by Juergen Ludwig Neve (1916) we read about heated debates in the early 19th century over the introduction of English language worship services.  Some of the immigrant generation saw English worship as essential to reaching the next generation while others feared it would lead to the abandonment of their German language and culture.  Neve’s section on “The Language Question” on p. 82 is worth reading.  In this case the English worship service proposal was voted down and the English speaking group left to form a new church.

Change a few of the details and it sounds like what has taken place in many other immigrant churches.  Although most Chinese churches now accept the importance of having an English worship service, I have been told that in the 1980’s there was considerable controversy over this issue.  It seems like there is something here that may apply to many different immigrant churches.

Most immigrants desire to hold on to their language and culture, and to gather with others from their homeland.  It is understandable that they also want to pass their heritage on to their children.  But it is also understandable that their children want to adapt to the culture of the new country so that they can fit in there.  When this tension inevitably shows up in the church it makes it challenging to reach the next generation.

It is usually encouraging to know that the challenges that you face are not new, and it is even better if you can learn from the experience of others.  Do you know of examples from other immigrant churches, either contemporary or in the past?  If so, I would be very interested in hearing about them.

I spent a little more time with the U.S. Census Data Ferret, and came up with an interesting comparison of the age distribution of ABCs and OBCs in 2000. I think that this helps to explain a particularly challenging leadership problem in U.S. Chinese churches in moving to the parallel stage and beyond.

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One question that I explored in working on my dissertation was the age structure of the ABC population. Since turning in my final draft, I have finally figured out how to use the U.S. Census Data Ferret to get the information that I wanted. The graph below shows the number of ABCs for each year of age in the 2000 census. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
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In April I did a 2 hour presentation of a summary of my dissertation research on Reaching the Next Generations in Bilingual Chinese Churches. The audio is finally ready to share with you here.

I have set up the presentation on slideshare.net so that the audio portion is synced to the presentation slides. You can see the presentation here. I hope that this will be of benefit to those of you who were interested in the presentation be were unable to attend. There is one place where the audio seems to skip. That is due to a 40 second section of the file that had been corrupted, which I deleted.

Meanwhile, work is progressing on the video file. When it is ready to be viewed, I will update this post with the link.

Please share any comments or suggestions that you have on the presentation in the comments here.

Update: The video of the presentation is now available: Part I and Part II. Thanks to Vinci for all his hard work in putting this together!

DJ Chuang over at his L2 Foundation Blog has two interesting posts related to Asian churches. In Advantages of an immigrant Asian church he sums up an article by Daniel Eng about the benefits of being a part of a bilingual immigrant Asian church.

Then in growing autonomous churches via duplex model he describes the ministry direction taken by the Young Nak Korean church in Los Angeles. The “duplex model” is one of a number of possible solutions the the challenge presented by having two or more different congregations with different languages in one church. In the “duplex model” the different congregations function largely independently but share a common facility, much like a duplex housing unit includes two separate homes under one roof. DJ’s article includes a link to the proposal submitted to the leadership of the Young Nak church in 2001 outlining the rationale for and structure of a duplex church model.