| | First of all, I'd like to start this reflection by posing a question, and that question is: Roger, where's your Dan Huang post? Get on the ball man. (Just kidding.)
But given that I (Marian) live with a lovely lady named Natalene Ong and that this website is behind on its posting of student reflections, I have been asked to write a reflection on what Dr. Soong Chan Rah said to us a couple weeks back--probably the easiest thing to do because the talk was so awesome, and because at this point, anything is better than doing what I'm supposed to be doing (i.e. writing a 12 page paper).
Basically what struck me the hardest about Dr. Rah's talk was what he said about the white captivity of the Asian American church, and about how if we're ever go get out of this captivity, we need Asian American Christian leaders that are willing to humble themselves and go there--to be mentored by African American church leaders and to try to understand the African American experience and the way it has shaped their view of God and the values that they associate with him (racial reconcilliation, social justice).
It's so true. Dr. Rah gave the example of pastors' conferences--where all these AA pastors would go to these mainstream pastors conferences held by mostly white leaders and be all excited about them, and when Latino or African American pastors had a conference, no AAs would be present. While I certainly didn't know about the pastoring world and what goes on there, was that really news to any of us who grew up in an Asian ethnic church? Was it surprising? Probably not--could you really picture the pastor of your home church at a conference held by black Americans?
Even in AAIV, sometimes I think we're a model of what Dr. Rah was talking about--the perfect example of a Christian group in white captivity. Are we a community that's really willing to move and learn together, even if it means moving out of our comfort zone and learning from people with different cultures and church traditions, or are we forever going to be a group of people that will just do religion the way we were taught--the white way, with some Korean or Chinese or Japanese influence--and go eat at JK Sweets afterwards?
One thing that has really blessed me about going to my church, New Community, is learning from the way we worship there. It took some getting used to, but I've grown really fond of gospel songs after a while, because I feel like they bring in this whole other dimension of communal celebration. "Come and bless the Lord with me," we'll sing. Obviously that's not sung directly to God--that's sung to your neighbor. So there's this idea of the community encouraging itself, as opposed to most of the songs by white Christian artists that we in the AA church sing, where we have to change "I" to "we" in order to make it communal. There's that slight difference. And from my limited exposure to gospel and black church culture, I truly feel like the black church has the gift of praising no matter what--isn't that something so applicable to tired, overworked, jobless Northwestern students?
Now because I hate it when people only criticize and have nothing positive to say, I have to say this: AAIV, I think we're moving there. We're getting there, individually. I was doing all these interviews for my Asian American religions class, and after doing them, I found that lots of people in AAIV are starting to really value multiethnicity, starting to see value in what they can learn from other cultures, starting to understand the necessity of social justice (and starting to resent the fact that this huge part of the gospel was totally overlooked in our Asian churches!). But I think we still have a long way to go, and I feel like it requires us to make big changes and in order to put ourselves in a place where we can really begin to understand.
As a graduating senior, I'm thinking big future changes--what kind of church am I going to go to? What kind of relationships am I going to really work intentionally to build? (Because friendships--especially cross-cultural--don't always happen naturally.) What kind of mentors am I going to seek? Those are just things I'm thinking about for me. Who knows where God is leading you, in response to Dr. Rah's thoughts on the Asian American church. I think the important part is that we do respond, from wherever we're at in our lives. Maybe that means making a commitment to something (by the way, Carlyn, I never got to read the commitment wall and I'm still sad about that), maybe it means choosing MEIV, maybe it means staying in AAIV and trying to keep the value for social justice going in our chapter, maybe it means being intentional about relationships with people in other chapters, maybe it means changing churches and coming to New Community because it's freaking amazing  (sorry guys, a shameless plug, I know. You can plug your own church next time you write a reflection.)... but I'm excited to see where our chapter goes with this. And now I've run out of things say so I'm gonna end here. Props if you read the whole thing.
Good luck on finals! When one part of the body suffers, we all suffer. And we are all probably suffering right now. Remember that at 4 am tonight.
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| | Posted 3/7/2007 12:17 PM - 190 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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