Asian American church as a Christian church is the community of liminal and marginalized Asian Americans who have experienced the God of unconditional acceptance and love through the transforming experience of communitas with Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. By that experience they have been empowered to live in their liminality and to exercise their liminal creativity in pursuit of the realization of the reign of God here on earth. The Asian American church has its roots in the liminal and marginalized people whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob called into being as God’s “servant people.” The Asian American church as a Christian church has its roots also in the new “family of God” into which Jesus Christ in his earthly ministry gathered those liminal and marginalized Galileans and others who experienced communitas with him. The Asian American church as a Christian church is also connected with the everlasting city in which God’s people will be gathered “before the throne and before the Lamb” “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9). It should be pointed out that making these assertions is deeply humbling in light of the serious imperfections of the Christian church as a whole and of the Asian American church in particular. It is the mystery of the church, however, that, in spite of its failings and weaknesses, the risen and exalted Christ is its head and is working in and through it to promote God’s own project of repeating God’s love and beauty in time and space.
CHURCH AS COMMUNITAS AND STRUCTURE
Victor Turner makes a distinction between “spontaneous or existential communitas” and “normative communitas.” The immediate experience of communitas is the “spontaneous or existential communitas.” Communitas, however, is transient and has to give way to structure. “Communitas itself soon develops a structure,” Turner writes, “in which free relationships between individuals become converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae.” The “normative communitas,” Turner explains further, “is where, under the influence of time, the need to mobilize and organize resources, and the necessity of social control among members in pursuance of these goals, the existential communitas is organized into a perduring social system.” Another term Turner introduces is “ideological communitas,” by which he means “the formulation of remembered attributes of the communitas experience in the form of a utopian blueprint for the form of society.”1
In light of ideological communitas, normative communitas is always inadequate. When spontaneous communitas evolves into a structure, those originally involved in the spontaneous communitas would attempt to have the features of spontaneous communitas be reflected in the structure. But as Turner points out, “spontaneous communitas can never be adequately expressed in a structural form.”2 From our theological perspective, however, we would not wish to say that spontaneous communitas is “never” adequately expressed in a structural form. Asian American theology must speak eschatologically about the day when God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit will bring about “a new heaven and a new earth” in which there will be no gap between communitas and structure. But on this side of the eschaton, the church as an institution can never completely reflect and express spontaneous communitas. Turner states further: “Structural action swiftly becomes arid and mechanical if those involved in it are not periodically immersed in the regenerative abyss of communitas.”3 In other words, for normative communitas to express the features of communitas (e.g., egalitarian relations between persons), the persons in a structure must from time to time be immersed in the experience of spontaneous communitas.
To use Turner’s terminology, then, the church is both communitas and structure, or a dialectic between structure and communitas. Turner defines structure as “the patterned arrangements of role sets, status sets, and status sequences consciously recognized and regularly operative in a given society and closely bound up with legal and practical norms and sanctions.”4 Structures are not imposed upon communitas; rather, communitas inevitably develops a structure, because “communitas cannot stand alone if the material and organizational needs of human beings are to be adequately met.”5 Communitas and structure, according to Turner, must maintain “the appropriate relationship” between them “under the given circumstances of time and place, to accept each modality when it is paramount without rejecting the other, and not to cling to one when its present impetus is spent.”6 As pointed out above, structure, according to Turner, becomes mechanical if the spirit of communitas is not periodically instilled into it. On the other hand, the almost “magical” power of communitas alone without “lucid thought and sustained will” cannot be “readily applied to the organizational details of social existence.”7
So human society is both communitas and structure. I borrow Turner’s concepts to think of Asian American church as both communitas and structure. In regard to an understanding of the church as communitas and structure, three observations need to be made.
1. The Asian American church conceived of as communitas and also structure can avoid the pitfalls of overemphasizing one at the expense of the other. Avery Dulles, in his book, Models of the Church, discusses as the first two of the five models “Church as Institution” and “Church as Mystical Communion.” Dulles points out that, on the one hand, an exclusive emphasis upon structure leads to institutionalism in which church as an institution exists for its own sake, and to clericalism in which the laity is left behind in passivity. If communion among church members is overemphasized, on the other hand, the church may become self-contained and distant from the larger world. According to Turner, “communitas itself soon develops a structure.”8 Communitas and structure go together.
2. Church is both communitas and structure, but communitas is primary. Turner wrote: “It [communitas] is the fons et origo of all structures and at the same time their critique.”9 For the Asian American church, too, communitas is the origin of its structure. As Avery Dulles points out, however, the church as community is more than a community of human believers. The church has a vertical dimension as well—namely, the believers’ communion with the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ.10 Historically speaking, the church is to be traced back to the small group of Galilean followers of Jesus. At the same time, the community of Jesus and his followers originates from and repeats in time and space the eternal communion in the internal life of the triune God.
The communal nature of the church is particularly important in the Asian American context because of the social isolation Asian Americans experience in American society at large. But the importance of the church as a community for Asian American Christians is all the more reason for not letting the church become a cozy social gathering that is detached from the rest of the world. An overemphasis upon church as community at the expense of structure can also lead to procedural and organizational chaos or crisis.
3. An appropriate emphasis upon church as structure implies the church’s responsibility to be concerned about society at large. According to Turner, communitas inevitably gives way to structure. Without structure and procedures, communitas cannot meet the human needs for organization. Now it would appear to be true that the structure which communitas acquires cannot but be connected to and be within the larger framework of the structure of the society as a whole in which the church’s structure is located. The church as structure is connected to the city’s water system and other infrastructure of the society. The church depends upon the police and fire departments. The members of the church individually participate in the election of the leaders of the society. The church as an institution, therefore, is ineluctably connected with the larger world. The church and the society it is in, then, will inevitably influence each other. The church must decide if it is going to let itself totally be influenced by the society or if it is going to challenge the society at times in terms of its own values as a community of Jesus Christ. I will return to this point below.
ASIAN AMERICAN CHURCH AS REFUGE AND LIMINAL SPACE
For the liminal and marginalized Asian Americans, the Asian American church serves as refuge where they find comfort, encouragement, and aid. The service that Asian immigrant churches have rendered to newly arrived Asian immigrants has been indispensable for their sheer survival during the first several months in their newly adopted country.11 The Asian American church is also a place of aid and comfort for those who have been here for many years. Throughout the week, they endure the cold stares, subtle and not-so-subtle put-downs, and other indignities. They come to Asian American churches on Sundays, and they find themselves fitting in. The fact that no one asks, “Where are you from?,” is a great relief. It is as if every cell in the body relaxes and is pleased simply to be at a place where everyone else is like oneself.
So the Asian American church as a refuge is a place of healing. And no one can deny that such a restorative effect which the Asian American church has on its members is an important function of the church. But the Asian American church’s refuge function is a good thing only to a certain point. If refuge becomes a place of escape, church as refuge functions as something that is detrimental to the church’s being church. Seeking comfort in church as a refuge sometimes is an expression of some Asian immigrants’ reluctance to face up to the challenges of their new environment by clinging to the ways of their home country. They insist on singing the songs, praying the prayers, and preaching the sermons they used to sing, pray, and preach in their home country. They resist any changes with the remark, “That’s not the way we used to do it back home.” Such an escapist nationalism is tragicomic because Asian immigrants’ homelands in Asia do not stand still but change everyday.
An Asian American church which is willing to face the challenges that its members face in America needs to see itself as a space of liminality and not only as a refuge. For one thing, the members of Asian American churches live in a de facto liminal situation in the United States. And if the church is going to minister to them, it must itself be a liminal place. The other reason why the church must be a space of liminality has to with the very nature of Asian American church’s being a church. From Asian American theology’s perspective, the church’s very own being originated in a liminal space—in the redeeming experience of communitas with God in Jesus in the infinite liminal space of his cross. And it is the church’s fundamental task to remember and reenact the life-changing experience of the original communitas experience in the liminal space of the cross.
The weekly Sunday worship in an Asian American church can be an experience of liminality and communitas. The participants in worship are at least relatively freed from their social roles and social status and their place in the social hierarchy. The sermons, hymns, and prayers could also be designed to evoke in the participants a sense of their liminality. Moreover, the members’ sense of being liminal in American life could be brought out to a more explicit consciousness and reinforce the sense of liminal space in worship. In daily life, Asian Americans’ de facto liminality usually remains dormant under their consciousness and they are not personally aware of it as their existential issue. The worship time in the church, where they enjoy group approval, can provide Asian Americans a reasonably “safe place,” or what Robert L. Moore called “containment,” in which they can allow themselves to be explicitly aware of the liminal and marginalized existence they lead in American society.12 In this way, the liminality Asian Americans experiences in their churches is directly related with the most basic existential issue they must face in their lives in America. The direct connection between Asian Americans’ liminality in society and their liminality in church would mean that what happens in the church can have a great impact on the way Asian Americans conduct their daily lives.
Timothy L. Carson has pointed out that worship, if it is not sufficiently freed from hierarchy and status, degenerates into a mere ceremony that reinforces the existing social and cultural structure.13 Some worship services, especially those in which church officers are ordained and installed, display so much hierarchy in the church and the society that they cannot be called the kind of ritual that changes lives. Life-changing worship as a ritual has to be genuinely liminal. Those ceremonies of ordination and installation need to be seriously rethought and should be carried out differently.
The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is a time in the life of the church when liminality and the reenactment of transforming communitas with God’s love in Jesus can be most powerfully experienced. Everyone comes to the Lord’s table with the knowledge that they are all equal in being sinners in need of forgiveness and healing before God. Certainly, at the time of the Lord’s Supper, all participants must leave behind them, at least temporarily, their social roles and social status.
In the Korean American churches with which I am most familiar, however, the Lord’s Supper is often a time when the intrachurch dynamics and social status and hierarchy are most visibly displayed. Only the male elders and the minister in black suits and white gloves handle the white linen and the shiny plates and the sacramental elements, the bread and wine. The deacons and other church members sit in their pews waiting for the elders to bring bread and wine to them. In circumstances such as this, the church members are more likely to be thinking about the church hierarchy rather than the meaning of the sacrament. To be elected an elder, for many Korean American church men, is the highest status they can achieve in the Korean American community. “Will I ever be elected an elder and be able to serve communion in the church?,” these men are likely to be thinking. There are certainly more egalitarian ways of conducting the Lord’s Supper, and many churches are practicing such an approach so that status and roles are made less visible and the chances for liminal time and communitas become greater. Unless some steps are taken to make the Lord’s Supper freer from hierarchy and status, it is in danger of turning into mere ceremonies that reinforce the existing church’s and society’s structures.
More than a couple of decades ago, I attended the annual meeting of the National Presbyterian Council, the national gathering of all Korean American churches belonging to the Presbyterian Church (USA). More than five hundred Korean American clergy and lay leaders were at this great meeting. First on the program was the opening worship service with the Lord’s Supper. I was coming down the long escalator to go to the auditorium where worship was to be held. I noticed many circles of Korean American clergypersons in the hallway excitedly greeting each other and enjoying being together. There was also a lone, tall, white gentleman, whom I recognized as a very prominent denominational leader, whom I will call Dr. S. He was wandering slowly around those Korean American clergy circles, but no one paid him any attention. Even if anyone recognized him, the pastors did not seem to be ready to open up their circles and welcome him. He just walked around the hallway waiting for the people to start going into the auditorium for the opening worship.
I was sitting in the front part of the large group in the auditorium, and at one point got up to look back. I noticed Dr. S. sitting all by himself smack in the middle of five-hundred-plus Korean American clergy. He must have felt that for the time being he had left the structure, hierarchy, and certainly his social status in the denomination and American society. But then the Korean American ministers who surrounded him were also strangers and aliens in their newly adopted country, not fully belonging either to their homeland in Asia or to their new adopted country, America.
The leaders of the worship and those conducting the Lord’s Supper also did not exhibit much hierarchy. They all seemed as though they were local pastors in our host city. This gathering clearly was a liminal space, an in-between place, where people had left their ecclesial and social structure at least for a while. Those who served the communion also helped foster an egalitarian atmosphere.
After the service, I went to my room upstairs and later came down again to see some people. As I was coming down the same long escalator, I noticed again circles of Korean American pastors, this time talking to each other even more excitedly and jovially than they did before the service. But I did not see Dr. S. wandering around the hallway. He was in one of the Korean American pastoral circles, talking with them excitedly and waving his long arms. Communitas had occurred.
Commenting on the essential marks of the church, John Calvin wrote: “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”14 Preaching of the word and administration of the sacraments are essential to the being of the church in Asian American theology, too. I would have to add, however, that in a church, preaching, administering the sacraments, and all other things need to be done in such a way that they bring the congregation into the infinite space of liminality and the redeeming experience of communitas with God in Jesus Christ.
THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY OF ASIAN AMERICAN CHURCHES
Why Do Many Asian American Churches Shy Away from Their Prophetic Role?
To be located socially in the in-between space of liminality between two or more worlds is also to be located at the edge or periphery of both of those worlds. And to be located at a peripheral space is conducive to a prophetic critique of, and resistance to, the dominant center. The Asian American church, located socially and culturally at the periphery of American society, has as one of its central callings the prophetic critique of, and resistance to, the racist culture and practices of the dominant group in America.
But why is it that most Asian American churches—with quite a few exceptions, I am sure—are reluctant to be involved in the issues emerging from the world at large? One reason is the still-persisting influence of St. Augustine’s City of God in which the city of God and the city of man [sic] are sharply distinguished. The church has to do with the spiritual realm of God and not with the mundane matters of human society. The “things of Caesar” and the “things of God” are not to be mixed. The traditional association of religion with the Platonic conception of soul as not only distinguishable but also separable from body has only deepened the dichotomy between the transcendent and the this-worldly realms.
The second reason for the church-world dichotomy is the interpretation of the Bible as teaching passivity in regard to worldly matters. One is reminded of Jesus’ statements such as: “Do not resist an evildoer. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt. 5:39); “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). A careful exegesis of these statements will show that Jesus was not recommending a passive attitude to an evil that is done to a person.15 But Jesus’ statements have been taken simplistically for so long as meaning a passive attitude to all political matters.
The third reason for many Asian American churches’ apolitical stance has to do with the individualistic conception of faith that many of their ministers and members have. The emphasis is on the “personal relationship with God.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with this emphasis. The problem is that often such a relationship is taken as not including many other kinds of relationships—for example, relationship with one’s neighbors, relationship with God’s creation, and so forth. What matters is that one “accepts Jesus Christ as one’s personal Savior and Lord,” and then one stops right at that point. Practicing what one believes, taking care of the world that God created through Christ, showing one’s concern about all other persons who are also the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ—these and other important matters are not stressed. Everything seems to stop with the act of accepting Christ. That is indeed the central and indispensable act of a Christian, but that act contains or implies so many other actions.
There is still another reason why most members of Asian American churches are reluctant to see their churches get involved with political issues. Sociological studies have shown that one of the several reasons why many Korean immigrants choose to attend church is because being associated with churches is considered as “being American.” So belonging to a church is related to the immigrants’ desire to be “accepted” by the American public and to belong to “mainstream America.” Persons who are anxious to be regarded as “good Americans” are not going to be willing to express any criticism of American society. These persons and their churches would naturally tend to be apolitical.
In Chapter 4, I discussed how Jesus spoke vigorously against the political and the religious authorities that were exploiting the village peasants. Jesus’ attitude toward political engagement was not one of passivity but, rather, a nonviolent resistance against all forms of injustice and oppression.16
A hopeful development in recent years is that some evangelical younger-generation Asian American church leaders are calling for the church’s paying greater attention to justice issues. Theologian Peter Cha, for example, writes about how his reflections on the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, when many Korean American businesses were targeted by African American rioters, have made him keenly aware of the matter of justice facing the church. Speaking specifically of the Korean American church’s work of reconciliation with African American brothers and sisters, Cha writes: “It was becoming clearer that this ministry of reconciliation required the church’s commitment to the Biblical understanding of social justice, that calls God’s people to identify with the poor and the marginalized and to seek justice on their behalf.”17
Equally noteworthy is Asian American pastor David Gibbons’s pilgrimage of discovering the central place of justice in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Gibbons is the founding pastor of the evangelical and multiethnic Asian American church New Song Community Church, in Irvine, California. Under his leadership, New Song has launched largescale ministries of social justice and racial reconciliation.
In search of an understanding of the place of justice issues in the church, Gibbons turned first to the Bible itself. Gibbons confesses, “I knew the call for justice was in the Bible, but didn’t know that it was this clear.” He told his congregation: “I feel that this [social justice] is at the very heart of God, and if we don’t do this, then we are not embracing the whole gospel.” Gibbons comments further: “I think the church received the call to social justice well because it has a high view of Scripture.… I don’t think any one can argue against it from a biblical perspective; it’s just too clear.”18 It is a good thing that both Cha and Gibbons discovered the centrality of God’s call for justice in the Bible. Most Asian American Christians have a high view of the Bible, so perhaps the call for justice will make just as strong an impression on them as it did on Cha and Gibbons.
The church, of course, should not engage in such partisan politics as endorsing specific candidates. For one thing, the democratic process of competition among candidates should be respected by the churches. Further, the members of a congregation may have different views, and their differences of opinion should be respected. Theologically speaking, the church should not influence the public on how to vote when the church itself has no way of attaining a complete certainty as to the qualities of individual candidates.
Prophetic Ministry to the World from the Periphery
Jesus spoke prophetically against the oppressive and exploitative practices of the Roman Empire and the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus’ prophetic position was at the periphery or, in Richard Rohr’s phrase, “the edge of the inside.” The church is ineluctably inside the world. Whether the church is in or outside the world is not an appropriate question. The church should be both inside and at the edge of the world. The Asian American church’s social location is de facto the edge or periphery of the world.
In relating to the world from the periphery of the inside of the world, there are several advantages:19
1. Since the church at the periphery is not tied to the ideas of the dominant or mainline group, it can suggest to the dominant group ideas and possibilities that the dominant group cannot come up with on its own. If the idea suggested by the church is critical or subversive of the dominant group, the church may indeed be criticized in return or even be oppressed or persecuted. The church must always be willing to take such risks.
2. If the church is willing to stay independent from the prevailing values and imperatives of the dominant group, the church can avoid a situation when it will have to act against its own principles in order to go along with the prevailing values of the dominant group. The church can hold its own system of values if it maintains a certain distance from the mainline groups of society and remain at the periphery.
3. If the church is at the periphery and not at the center of the dominant group, then it does not end up having to carry out the agenda of the society’s dominant group. The internal pressures of the dominant group would be hard to resist for a church that is part of it, and the church would completely forfeit its real mission. In order to preserve the integrity of the church’s true mission, the church has to be located at the periphery of the society though not out of it. If the church were totally out of society (not in the world), it would become irrelevant to society and the world.
4. If the dominant group oppresses or attacks the church, the church at the periphery would have the possibility of not reacting in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” principle of fighting evil with evil, and thereby becoming just the same as the enemy. The church and its members at the periphery will be able to keep their own perspective on things and resist evil in a way that does not perpetuate evil. By being on the periphery, a church and its individual members have the ability and freedom to respond to evil on terms other than those that the aggressor defines. By operating from the periphery, the church can resist evil without becoming like the oppressor and without selling out its own system of values and perspective on life.
5. The church’s peripheral location enables it to establish a solidarity with those who are marginalized. The ministry with and for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed is a particularly important aspect of a Christian church that has Jesus Christ as its Lord. Without being located where marginalized persons are, a ministry with them is not possible. As Pastor David Gibbons says, “Greater connection with other communities, though, comes through our pain, not our successes. Our shame, marginalization, and invisibility—that is the connection.… I found that as I talked in the city, as I shared the pain of my parents’ divorce, the interracial issues I worked through, the prejudice I faced, a heart connection happens right away.”20 Gibbons was convinced that his church should be located where the marginalized people are, and persuaded his congregation to relocate the church to a commercially less desirable area of the city. Gibbons wanted his church to be a church of the “misfits” so that it could serve those who are excluded by mainline society as “misfits.”21 Pastor Gibbons knew that the church of Jesus Christ had to be at the periphery.
A few examples of Asian American churches and church members resisting racist practices, working from the peripheries, may be mentioned. The first is the story of Russell Jeung, a professor at San Francisco State University and an evangelical church leader, who, in the 1990s, together with several other Christian laypersons, helped to rectify a terrible owner-neglect situation in Oak Park, a low-income housing development in Oakland, California, occupied by mostly Cambodians and Latinos.22 Having learned that the poor conditions in the apartment complex were due to an active, calculated neglect by the owner, Jeung moved into the apartment complex to work with the tenants directly on the premises. Soon Jeung was joined by a collection of whites, Latinos, Chinese Americans, and other volunteers, loosely organized as Oak Park Ministries. After working with the tenants to build trust and solidarity among themselves, the group finally filed a lawsuit in 1998. After four years of perseverance, the tenants received $950,000 in damages.
A young Korean American girl was harshly ridiculed and called names by her white schoolmates. The harassment got to the point where the Korean American girl, out of sheer desperation, yelled out, “Stop, or I will kill you!” White students immediately reported to the principal only what the girl said, and she was instantly expelled from the school. About a dozen Korean American lawyers and civic leaders (some of whom were quite possibly church members), went to the principal and explained the desperate circumstances into which this Korean American girl was forced. She was immediately reinstated.
The Church of All Nations in Minneapolis in the early summer of 2009 sponsored a hearing with a panel of community law-enforcement leaders on the practice of police profiling Asian American persons. Many church members spoke to the panel about how they were stopped frequently by the police for no reason at all. A detailed and fact-filled report was subsequently prepared by the panel.
WOMEN AND THE ASIAN AMERICAN CHURCH
Perhaps the severest critique that I can direct upon Asian American churches has to do with the position of women in many of those churches. In spite of the feminist movement’s vigorous and worldwide advocacy of women in recent decades, women are still second-class citizens in many Asian American churches and are not accorded the same respect as men. Many stories are reported of women in Asian immigrant churches being elected as elders or appointed as committee chairs, only to have their male peers meet without their knowledge and make decisions without them.23
Peter Cha and Grace May note that recent studies show that the strong ethos of gender hierarchy in the English-speaking congregations are “particularly offensive to second-generation women who are well-educated and have professional careers.”24
It is not, however, that Asian American women have remained merely as passive victims of the gender oppression in their churches. Sociologist Jung Ha Kim has done an interesting study of Korean American church women in which she found that these women are not mere victims but are active agents who engage in a variety of “subtle and indirect actions” of resistance.25 Learned silences, quiet refusal to comply with the pastor’s unilateral directives, maneuvers behind the scene, and other actions or nonactions, all of which resemble what political scientist James Scott has called the “weapons of the weak,” are some of the ways in which Korean American women in churches resist various oppressive powers both within and also outside their ethnic churches.26
How does liminality of Asian American women function in their resistance against patriarchy? In Chapter 1, I briefly discussed the liminality that women experience when they reject the patriarchal world and leave it behind in search of a new and not-yet-articulated world. Women writers describe this liminality in various ways: “in-betweenness” (Teresa Hak Kyung Cha), “ambiguity and separation” (Penelope Washburn), “nothingness” (Carol Christ), and “awakening” (Inn Sook Lee).27 Liminality means communitas, although it may be experienced covertly and subtly. And in liminality and communitas, there is an impetus toward a prophetic stance against the existing order of the society. So just as women experience a double marginalization, they also experience a double liminality/communitas (between Asia and America, and between the old patriarchal order of society that women reject and the new order of relationships that they seek). Could we not then expect in women an energy to change the present-day order of society double that in most men? Could we not also say that women have the particular calling, by virtue of their situation, to be the pioneers in the church’s work of reforming the patriarchal nature of human living both inside and outside the church?
Women’s role as pioneers is amply illustrated by their leadership at crucial times of Jesus’ ministry. Mary, the mother of Jesus, had the foresight that in his ministry he was going to “fill the hungry with good things,” and send “the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53). The women disciples and followers of Jesus are clearly visible in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry. The Gospel according to Luke mentions Jesus’ women “followers”: Mary, called Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, “and many others who provided for them out of their resources” (Luke 8:1–3). And as New Testament scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza points out,
Just as in the beginning of the Gospel Mark presents four leading male disciples who hear Jesus’ call to discipleship, so at the end of the Gospel he presents four leading women disciples and mentions them by name. The four women disciples—Mary of Magdala, Mary, the daughter of wife of James the younger, the mother of Joses, and Salome—were preeminent among the women disciples who have followed Jesus, just as Peter, Andrew, James, and John are preeminent among the twelve.28
A Syro-Phoenician woman was a factor in Jesus’ widening of his vision for his mission (Matt. 15:21–28). Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus with oil, thus preparing him for his death on the cross while the male disciples had no idea of what she was doing (Luke 7:36–50).
When it comes to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death on the cross and the resurrection, the role played by Jesus’ women disciples and followers was truly remarkable. With the eleven male disciples embarrassingly absent from the scene of the crucifixion, there were women “looking on from a distance … and many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem [from Galilee]” (Mark 15:40–41). According to John’s Gospel, “Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25). When Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus’ body in a tomb, “the women who had come from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid” (Luke 23:55). That was not all. During the night, these women prepared spices and ointments.
After the Sabbath, on the first day of the week, it was Mary Magdalene, according to John’s Gospel, who was the first to go to the tomb and find it empty. Not only did she discover the tomb empty, Mary Magdalene was the first to receive a resurrection appearance. Jesus appeared to her in front of the empty tomb and gave her the commission to “to go to my brothers” and tell them about Jesus’ coming ascension (John 20:1, 16–18). Schüssler Fiorenza comments, “Thus in a double sense she becomes the apostola apostolorum, the apostle of the apostles,” and “thus she is the primary apostolic witness to the resurrection.”29
Schüssler Fiorenza also makes a more general observation: “Those who are the farthest from the center of religious and political power, the slaves, the children, the gentiles, the women, become the paradigms of true discipleship.”30 Asian American women have as their particular calling to become the paradigms of true discipleship. It is imperative that Asian American churches do not delay in making the necessary changes in their life and work so that their women members may carry out their God-given vocation as pioneers.
The Nicene Creed (originally adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 but edited into roughly its current form at the Council of Constantinople in 381) states that the church is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” The “notes” or “marks” of the church are both descriptive and imperative. Asian American theology must interpret the meaning of these “marks” in its own context.
1. What is the one-ness or unity of the Asian American church? Like churches in other contexts, the Asian American church has its fundamental unity in “one Spirit … one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all” (Eph. 4:4–6). The church as the “body of Christ” has one head, Jesus Christ the one Lord (1 Corinthians 12).
In actual practice, however, the churches of Jesus Christ are not united. The Protestant church is divided into hundreds of denominations. Closer to home, Korean immigrant congregations, which have served the causes of Christ in so many important ways, have also experienced embarrassingly frequent internal conflicts and divisions. Whatever the reasons for this divisiveness may be, it has brought to the members of the divided congregations, especially the young people, an untold pain and agony, and is nothing less than a serious scandal. Christian churches across racial and ethnic lines still suffer from lack of unity. In the United States, eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week. The unity of the churches, therefore, is not yet a historical reality but a goal to be achieved. This lack of unity, however, does not nullify the ultimate unity of the church rooted in the unity of the three persons of the Trinity. The historical realization of this unity of the church, however, is yet to be actualized.
The particular meaning of the unity of the church for Asian American churches is the unity of the communitas of the congregational members that emerges out of their experience of liminality in the worship and life of their churches. In the experiences of communitas with God in Jesus Christ, all the differences between persons are neither ignored nor eliminated but embraced and celebrated in a loving communion. Whether the unity of communitas is actually being experienced by Asian American churches or not, their liminal predicament is at least then capable of achieving such a unity. This kind of unity as communitas could be experienced by the members of different denominations if they meet each other in a liminal space in which they are temporarily freed from as many ecclesial and societal structures as possible.
The unity of communitas is actually being experienced across racial and ethnic lines to both small and large degrees in many Asian American churches. Many Asian American churches are finding persons of different racial and ethnic backgrounds joining them both for worship and fellowship. The general commonality of marginalization and liminalization of racial ethnic minority groups in American society, and the use of English in all Asian American churches, may explain, at least partly, the ease with which non-Asian American minority persons join with Asian Americans for their church life.
Consider the case of the Church of All Nations in Minneapolis. This church is “Asian American” only in the sense that its pastor is an Asian American and that it began as an Asian American church. Of its 250 members, 37 percent are white, 20 percent African American, 33 percent Asian American, and 10 percent Latina/o. According to Pastor Jin S. Kim, some white American persons join Asian American churches for two major reasons: first, because those white American Christians are attracted by the lively faith of Asian American churches, and, second, because many of the post-boomers (forty and younger) find all white Caucasian churches “unrealistic” in light of the increasingly diverse nature of American society.31
One might ask, Don’t the white American members of Asian American churches find the superior power position of white people in America questioned or challenged? One white member of the Church of the All Nations mentioned that any sense of the supremacy of the white people that he might have had in his way of thinking was thoroughly challenged by his minority status in the Asian American congregation and that he felt an acute sense of “self-displacement.”32 Some white persons cannot deal with this challenge and soon leave the Asian American church. Those who end up staying now live with a healthy awareness of the particularity, not superiority, of white people among the many peoples who make up America.
The sense of self-displacement that the white persons in this church experience is an awareness of their liminality. With their sense of liminality, white American persons enter the space of liminality that the racial ethnic minority members of the church already occupy. Out of liminality emerges communitas. During my visit to this church I felt an authentic communal fellowship among its people. Liminality was functioning as a means of grace through which the unity of the church was being realized.
2. The second mark of the church is “holiness.” In ordinary English, the term holiness has associations with such concepts as “morality,” “sanctity,” and “purity.” But the most elemental meaning of the Hebrew word for holiness, qadhosh, is “being separated” or “that which is withdrawn from common use.”33 Alister McGrath sees in the original meanings of the term holy “strong overtones of dedication: To be ‘holy’ is to be set apart for and dedicated to the service of God.”34 Following McGrath’s interpretation of the term holy, the “holiness” of the Asian American church may be seen as its being set apart for the particular vocation of exercising the creative potentials of liminality for God’s purposes for creation. As noted earlier, like Galileans in the first century, Asian Americans have the particular vocation of being the “first responders” to Jesus’ invitation for people to repent and believe in him. By becoming incarnate as a Galilean and by conducting his ministry primarily in Galilee, God chose to appeal first to the liminal and marginalized Galileans. Galileans were not any better than anyone else. But their liminality made them at least more open to Jesus’ message.
Asian Americans are not better than any other group of people. It is, rather, because of Asian Americans’ social location of liminality and marginalization that God chose to appeal to them first and hoped that they would be the “first responders.” Some women followers fulfilled this vocation of being “first responders” in a remarkable way. A woman was courageously receptive to giving birth to a baby in response to an announcement by God. Women supported materially Jesus’ busy ministry. A woman first anointed Jesus preparing him for his death. Women told male disciples of Jesus’ resurrection.
Asian American Christians are like the Jewish Christians who lived as exiles in Asia Minor. The author of 1 Peter addresses them as a people “who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ” (1:2). The author goes on to declare: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (2:9). To be chosen by God is “in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of God.” To be chosen, therefore, is not a privilege to boast about. To be set apart by God is always for a purpose. To be chosen is to have a particular vocation and responsibility to carry out. To be so chosen would certainly give a group a sense of cohesion as a group, a sense of belonging, and a sense of purposefulness.35 To be chosen by God, however, is no reason for pride in oneself.
All Asian Americans, like all Galileans, by virtue of their social location, have been called to the vocation of exercising their liminal creativity for God’s purpose in creation. The church, then, is the fellowship of those who respond to this call. The holiness of Asian American churches refers to the fact that they are called and set apart by God for a particular purpose and vocation.
3. The third mark of the church is “catholicity.” A Christian church is a community of persons who worship the God whose lordship extends to the entire creation. The originating or foundational experience out of which the ecclesial community is born is the experience of God’s love and acceptance in Christ that is offered to everyone and anyone who in faith enters into Christ’s liminality on the cross. Although the church belongs to a particular culture, nation, or ethnic group or groups, it cannot be limited by boundaries of any kind. All persons are presumed as possible members of a church that is founded upon God’s unlimited love. As Edward Farley has put it, the distinctive trait of ecclesia’s intersubjective life “derives from the strange way in which the human being who is not a participant in ecclesia is present to those who are participants.” “Co-intending strangers,” in other words, is “its mode of bonding.” And, as Mark Kline Taylor points out, to say that Christian community is marked by the cointending of strangers “is to say that its communal life, ranging from explicit corporate activities to its members’ pre-reflective intentions of will, has this feature.”36 Such a posture toward others without boundaries makes a church always decentering, and thus always liminal.37 The church cannot be catholic without being at the same time liminal.
Fumitaka Matsuoka remarks, “Perhaps the severest critique we can direct upon Asian American churches is that to a certain extent they have been co-opted into the very racist structure of society and thus have come to neglect the most alienated people in society, the poor and the underclass, even among our own Asian Americans.”38 Catholicity of the church, therefore, must begin right where the church is located.
4. The fourth and final mark of the church is apostolicity. The fact that the bishops of the church succeed the first apostles cannot be the mark of the essence of the church because what matters about a church cannot be simply the external matter of the apostolic succession of the bishops. What the church is in faith and life would also be essential. Nor should the clergy alone be considered as a part of the essential nature of the church because all members have the calling to follow in their life Jesus Christ, the head of the church. What truly matters must be that the church in faith and life is continuous with the gospel. The church truly succeeds or is faithful to the apostles when the church, in its proclamation and its life, is consistent with the gospel to which the apostles witnessed.
From the perspective of Asian American theology, we recognize in the gospel of Jesus Christ the God who became incarnate as a liminal and marginalized Galilean and appealed first to Galileans because of their liminal openness. The gospel was proclaimed from and embodied in the liminal and peripheral space and not at the center. It was in the space of the extreme liminality of Jesus on the cross that the believers were united with the forgiving and accepting God in Jesus. The church must provide liminal spaces in which the liminal believers can again be united with the loving God in Jesus in Jesus’ liminality on the cross.
The gospel of Jesus Christ to which the church must conform is a decentering, countercultural gospel. The gospel is liminal, and those in liminality can approach it. Liminality is the way to the gospel. At the same time, the gospel will lead its believers into liminality, into peripherality. From the perspective of Asian American theology, the gospel is the liminal gospel to which the church must conform. Apostolicity involves liminality. The liminality of the church in its faithfulness to the gospel is its apostolicity.