Kim Finding Our Voice

A Vision for Asian North American Preaching
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68359-379-9
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

No one preaches in a cultural vacuum. The message of what God has done in Christ is good news to all, but to have the greatest impact on its hearers--or even to be understood at all--it must be culturally contextualized. Finding Our Voice speaks clearly to an issue that has largely been ignored: preaching to Asian North American (ANA) contexts. In addition to reworking hermeneutics, theology, and homiletics for these overlooked contexts, Kim and Wong include examples of culturally-specific sermons and instructive questions for contextualizing one's own sermons. Finding Our Voice is essential reading for all who preach and teach in ANA contexts. But by examining this kind of contextualization in action, all who preach in their own unique contexts will benefit from this approach.

Matthew D. Kim (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of Preaching and Ministry, Co-Director of the Haddon W. Robinson Center for Preaching, and Director of Mentored Ministry at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is a past president of the Evangelical Homiletics Society. He served as a youth pastor, college pastor, and senior pastor in Asian American congregations. He is the author of several books, including Preaching with Cultural Intelligence. He is married to Sarah and they have three sons. Daniel L. Wong (DMin, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is Associate Professor of Christian Ministries at Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto. He has served for many years in English Ministry in Chinese churches in Toronto. He has spoken at numerous venues in Asian and multicultural churches in Canada and in the United States. Daniel is married to Flora and they have two children and three grandchildren (the fourth is expected in July).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kim, Matthew D.

Leseproben

PREFACE

Matthew D. Kim and Daniel L. Wong

The sixth grade commences an unquestionably awkward time in any maturing boy’s life. It was during this precarious season that I (Matthew, a second-generation, American-born Korean) learned this sometimes hard to swallow, but very necessary, life lesson about living in the United States: I was not white.

Prior to this epiphany, I had grown up in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago, where my brothers and I were oblivious to this as one of two Asian families in our town. My younger brothers, Timothy and Dennis, and I naturally identified as being white. The only people we knew in school and in our neighborhood were white kids. My best friend, Nicky, was white. We spoke English with a standard, white, Midwestern accent, played white sports, and had crushes on white girls. We were white, or so we thought.

After my fifth-grade year, however, our parents moved us seventeen miles northwest to Palatine, Illinois, so that they could live closer to their dry cleaning business and transition us into a higher-quality school district. Post-relocation, my perception of my identity slowly began to shift. I noticed fellow Asians like Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Filipinos, and others in our middle school and high school who looked more like my siblings and me. My brain slowly transformed as I witnessed a new reality of a Korean American existence. It became increasingly clear that I was not white. In fact, I was a strange hybrid of American and Korean. I was not either one exclusively; I was both/and.

To be both American and Korean required a new identity. I discovered that I couldn’t self-identify as Caucasian. My countenance and physical features were unlike those of my white friends. My father awakened me to this reality when he had me look in the mirror one day, asking, “What do you see?” He answered his own question: “To the dominant culture, you’re Korean, and you’ll always be Korean.” Yet the breakdowns in my ability to feel completely at home in the Korean language and cultural context simultaneously exposed an inability to self-identify as entirely Korean. Rather, I was a strange mixture of American and Korean. Over time, I began to appreciate the ability to eat pizza one evening and kimchi and ramen on another. I could converse in English at school and communicate in my very limited Korean at home to my grandmother and parents.

Today, living on the North Shore of Boston in a very white New England suburb, I sadly continue to face bouts of insecurity. I sometimes still feel a sense of shame for being Asian and wish that I was white. Shortly after moving here, I heard a mocking voice shout out konnichiwa (“hello” in Japanese) from a neighbor’s window while I was walking down the street. When I spoke back to him in perfect English, he kept repeating konnichiwa in a fake, exaggerated Asian accent. This experience of being called out for my difference reminded me of my youth in Park Ridge. However, I try to remind myself that I needn’t be embarrassed for being ethnically Korean or for my skin color. In many ways, what I want to communicate in this book is that God desires for us Asian North Americans (ANAs) to celebrate our hybrid, hyphenated, both/and, bicultural, liminal, or perhaps even third-culture self-confidence—a distinct voice and experience reserved by God just for people like me and perhaps you.

My (Daniel’s) story is similar, but also different from Matthew’s. I was born a third-generation Chinese in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, California. As one of the few Asian Americans in my elementary school, echoes of “Ching-Chong Chinaman” are engraved on my heart and mind. My parents took my older brother and me weekly to a Chinese church in San Francisco’s Chinatown in my formative years. I vividly recall sitting in worship services where the preacher would preach in Cantonese, which I did not understand. The sermon would be translated into English by someone with such a thick Chinese accent that I couldn’t understand that either. Ventures into Chinatown were scary. Strangers chided my parents that their children didn’t speak Chinese. I am sure I received looks of horror when I poured sugar into my Chinese tea. After various negative experiences from inside and even outside the Chinese community, I would cry out to God, “Why didn’t you make me one way or the other?” I look Asian, but I feel Caucasian. Some use the term “banana” to describe people like me: one who is yellow on the outside but white on the inside.

My journey swung from loathing my Chinese heritage to embracing it. I eventually found my roots. I took my first Chinese language lessons in college and enrolled in courses like “The Relationship between the US and China” as well as “Chinese Arts and History.” In retrospect, I can see how God used some of these experiences to shape my perspective on life, ministry, and preaching. My both/and existence equips me to serve in a both/and world. Particularly, I appreciate the body of Christ analogy, where each person can have and express gifts with a different culture, language, and experience while being a part of the whole.

PREACHING AND ANA IDENTITY

How do these self-revelations relate to the matter of preaching? Every preacher possesses an identity and communicates out of his or her identity. If you were driving your car and surfing stations, you might stumble upon some different radio preachers. Most of us can distinguish between preachers from African American, Hispanic American, and European American backgrounds based on their distinct preaching traditions, styles, accents, and cultural traits. However, could the same be said of Asian North American (ANA) preachers? Do ANA preachers have a preaching voice? Is there anything that makes ANA preachers and ANA preaching distinct? How does our preaching reflect our both/and identity? What does ANA preaching look like today, and what could it look like in the future? These are the questions at the heart of this book.

We contend that ANA preachers are in need of a unique homiletical voice akin to other minority groups such as African American and Hispanic American preaching traditions. Preaching to listeners who embrace this both/and identity as ANAs requires apt contextualization with a culturally aware hermeneutic and homiletic. For this reason, we seek to name the hermeneutical, theological, and homiletical distinctives of ANA preaching in order to help preachers understand the specific characteristics and challenges that distinguish preaching in ANA contexts.

In order to clarify how to preach to ANAs, first we need to clarify what it means to be ANA, for that term encompasses a diverse group. Much of the literature uses the term “Asian American” to refer to those who emigrated from Asia or who are people of Asian descent born and raised in the United States. The term was coined by the historian and activist Yuji Ichioka and was “initially used to describe a politically charged group identity in ethnic consciousness movements of the late 1960s.”1 While this is a convenient and recognized term, few identify themselves as generically Asian or Asian American. Most identify with their ancestral country of origin or ethnic group and their current country of residence (e.g., Chinese American), especially for the second generation and beyond.

The term “Asian North American” has more recently been adopted by social scientists to identify those of Asian descent living in the United States or Canada. Unlike the older concept of “Asian American,” “ ‘Asian North American’ is a more useful umbrella term because Asian subjects who reside in the United States and in Canada face many of the same issues regarding identity, multiple cultural allegiances, marginalization vis-à-vis mainstream society, historical exclusion, and postcolonial and/or diasporic and/or transnational subjectivity.”2 A number of Christian authors have also taken up this newer nomenclature to describe those born and raised in North America whose parents and ancestors are from Asian countries.3

Along with a few others from Canada, Daniel was once invited to take part in a consultation at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School outside Chicago. He learned from this consultation that issues faced by ANA churches were similar whether one resided and ministered in the United States or Canada. There were also unique issues facing each congregation related to the geographic locale, the history of the group, and other factors. He came away with a greater awareness of the need to collaborate across congregations and learn with and from the larger family of ANA churches.

Within the broad category of ANAs, there are two distinct subgroups: “(1) first-generation Asian [North] Americans, that is, foreign-born Asian immigrants and refugees, and (2) second- and multi-generational US-born [or Canadian-born] Asian [North] Americans.”4 Some have used the label “Asian American” to describe predominantly those in the first generation. A preaching book from a first-generation immigrant’s perspective is Eunjoo Mary Kim’s Preaching the Presence of God: A Homiletic from an Asian American Perspective.5 This book is helpful for understanding immigrants’ experiences, in particular with reference to Korean preaching.

The focus of our book, however, is...