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.