Music by Kindred Worship, Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Murphy DX.
[/vc_column_text]DONATE TO THE PODCAST
Make a one-time or recurring gift of any amount to keep the Love Thy Neighborhood Podcast free for everyone.
Audio editing and mixing by Anna Tran.
Additional editing by Rachel Szabo.
Jesse Eubanks is our senior producer.
Music by Kindred Worship, Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Murphy DX.
[/vc_column_text]DONATE TO THE PODCAST
Make a one-time or recurring gift of any amount to keep the Love Thy Neighborhood Podcast free for everyone.
Written and produced by Anna Tran.
Audio editing and mixing by Anna Tran.
Additional editing by Rachel Szabo.
Jesse Eubanks is our senior producer.
Music by Kindred Worship, Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Murphy DX.
[/vc_column_text]DONATE TO THE PODCAST
Make a one-time or recurring gift of any amount to keep the Love Thy Neighborhood Podcast free for everyone.
CREDITS
Hosted by Jesse Eubanks and Anna Tran.
Written and produced by Anna Tran.
Audio editing and mixing by Anna Tran.
Additional editing by Rachel Szabo.
Jesse Eubanks is our senior producer.
Music by Kindred Worship, Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Murphy DX.
DONATE TO THE PODCAST
Make a one-time or recurring gift of any amount to keep the Love Thy Neighborhood Podcast free for everyone.
Christians say we are all foreigners in a foreign land, but what happens when our faith just needs a little taste of home? Stories of immigrants caught between two cultures and two generations trying to walk with God.
Transcript
#61: Where the Gospel Meets the Immigrant Church
Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode.
JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood is now on Patreon, which offers exclusive bonus content to members. For just 10 bucks a month, you can unlock bonus interviews, livestreams, eBooks, and more. By becoming a Patreon member, you’re helping us make more of the podcast content that you love and supporting our urban missions program. It’s really easy to join. Just go to patreon.com/lovethyneighborhood. We’d love to have you with us as we explore discipleship and missions in our modern times. Again, go to patreon.com/lovethyneighborhood, and sign up today.
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AUDIO CLIPS: Love Thy Neighborhood… Discipleship and missions for modern times.
ANNA TRAN: Hey, uh, Jesse, Rachel, can I share something with you?
RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, sure.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.
ANNA TRAN: Okay. Here we go. Let me play this clip for you.
AUDIO CLIP
RACHEL SZABO: Okay, what are we listening to?
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, what is that?
RACHEL SZABO: First of all, is that a cassette player?
ANNA TRAN: That’s right. Yeah. This is, uh – it’s from Radio Shack.
RACHEL SZABO: Whoa, Radio Shack.
JESSE EUBANKS: Nice.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. You remember that?
RACHEL SZABO: Okay. And what, what was that?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, so that was a recording of my uncle. He, um, was a pastor at the Vietnamese church that I grew up in.
RACHEL SZABO: Oh, cool.
JESSE EUBANKS: And wait – where was your church?
ANNA TRAN: Uh, so that’s in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So I grew up in Lancaster, and that’s the church that I went to growing up.
RACHEL SZABO: So is he – he’s, like, giving a sermon in Vietnamese?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. And I would’ve been there at the time.
RACHEL SZABO: So, so do you go to a Vietnamese church now then?
ANNA TRAN: Well now I don’t actually. Since I moved here to Louisville, you know, I’ve been committed to a church where majority of the people are not Vietnamese, but back home many of the church members – you know, like me and my family – are of Vietnamese descent or have, you know, family ties to Vietnam. And there’s even a Vietnamese church here in Louisville that I visit sometimes.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, wait, I’ve passed that before. It’s like on the south side of town.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Louisville is home to a lot of immigrant churches, churches from East Africa, Latin America, South Asia, the Caribbean. But today’s episode – it’s really inspired by my experiences growing up in a Vietnamese immigrant church. And because East Asian cultures are what I’m most familiar with, the stories today are gonna reflect that.
RACHEL SZABO: Man, that sounds awesome. And I think, you know, I’m just gonna sit back and, and listen.
ANNA TRAN: Cool.
JESSE EUBANKS: Alright. Well let’s get to it.
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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.
ANNA TRAN: And I’m Anna Tran. Every episode we hear stories of Christians trying to follow Jesus in our modern times.
JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets the immigrant church.
ANNA TRAN: And specifically we’ll be talking about immigrant churches here in the United States.
JESSE EUBANKS: We’ll be exploring what is an immigrant church, what’s it like to grow up in one, and what can we in America learn from other Christians following God in a land that doesn’t feel like home. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.
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MLK AUDIO CLIP: I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours in Christian America.
ANNA TRAN: Okay so Jesse, have you heard that quote before from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, we actually opened our very first episode of the podcast ever with that.
ANNA TRAN: Oh really?
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.
ANNA TRAN: Oh, cool.
JESSE EUBANKS: So it sort of feels poetic that, you know, you as the new producer are opening your first episode with that.
ANNA TRAN: That was not intentional, I swear.
JESSE EUBANKS: (laughs) Uh, yeah, when I hear it, you know, a lot of times we reference that clip and we think of, like, a picture of the multiethnic church, like this vision in Revelation we’re working towards. So wait, what does that quote exactly have to do with immigrant churches?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, you know, I think sometimes when people critique, you know, local immigrant churches this quote can get brought up because it seems to be reinforcing segregation.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Okay. So they’re talking about, you know, segregation in the sense that a cultural group is separating themselves, like that is really different than what Dr. King was addressing –
ANNA TRAN: Right.
JESSE EUBANKS: – in which we’re dealing with huge issues of oppression and, you know, forced segregation. It feels like apples and oranges, like not the same thing.
ANNA TRAN: For sure. So the other day I came across an article about this, and I decided to talk to the writer, Dr. Daniel K. Eng. He’s also a professor of New Testament at Western Seminary.
DANIEL K. ENG: Segregation is a politically loaded word. It causes a visceral reaction because of the Civil Rights Movement and so I encourage people not to use the word “segregation” when we’re talking about the church because that’s not the intent of, I would say, a lot of these churches and it’s unfair to drag them into a word that has so much political weight in America. I think it’s unfair because it’s not the intention to exclude people or to say that “we’re better than you.”
ANNA TRAN: And Dr. Eng specifically makes a point in his article it’d be wrong to associate immigrant churches with the same spirit of segregation.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean, in actuality we see in Scripture that Paul shared the gospel to different people groups in different ways, in ways that would make sense to them.
So in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he’s writing to a church in conflict. They’re actually divided over leaders. People were retreating into their own tribe saying, “Hey, I follow Paul,” or “No, I actually follow Apollos.”
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. In our conversation, Dr. Eng talked about how Paul addressed those tensions with a message of unity.
DANIEL K. ENG: He’s urging these people who are in different house churches in Corinth to be united, to be together. And so within that, Paul actually expresses different ministry approaches. In First Corinthians is where Paul says, “To those under the law, I became like those under the law. Those who are weak, I became like the weak. To the Jews, I became like a Jew.” Again, Paul is writing to a bitterly divided church, and he’s talking about different ministry approaches to different demographics.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I like how the, uh, New Living Translation actually interprets this. So it says in chapter nine, verse 22, “When I am with those who are weak, I share their weakness for I want to bring the weak to Christ. Yes, I try to find common ground with everyone, doing everything I can to save some.”
ANNA TRAN: And one of the purposes of immigrant churches is to be this sort of, you know, common ground space where people can find common ground with their cultural upbringing. So an immigrant church – it’s exactly what it sounds like, a church mainly composed of or started by immigrants, people who’ve come to the U.S. from other countries. And in order to understand immigrant churches, I think we first need to look at what it’s like to be an immigrant. And for that, I talked to one of my former teachers.
FONG TRAN: Hi, my name is Fong Tran. I live in Philadelphia.
ANNA TRAN: I don’t think I really knew your last name until like recently.
JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, wait. So hold on. Like, you guys had the same last name, but you never knew that?
ANNA TRAN: We do. I didn’t know that.
JESSE EUBANKS: That’s so funny.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, I essentially called him Mr. Fong all my life. He taught Sunday School. Um, he cared for the teenagers and the young adults in my church. And so Fong – he grew up in Vietnam in the southern city of Saigon, um, which is now called Ho Chi Minh City.
FONG TRAN: My parents, uh, migrated from, uh, North Vietnam to South Vietnam in 1954.
ANNA TRAN: His father was a devout Catholic, and as a result Fong went to mass almost every day. He was born in 1964 during war times.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh yeah. So like right in the middle of the Vietnam War?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, it was already in full swing.
JESSE EUBANKS: Wow.
ANNA TRAN: Once the war ended, the Northern Vietnamese troops – they seized the capital of South Vietnam, and, you know, it triggered a mass exodus. U.S. troops and Southern Vietnamese people started to flee.
NEWS CLIPS: The American airlift only took a fraction of those who wanted to leave… The order to evacuate American nationals is given.
ANNA TRAN: So Fong and his family – they had originally planned to leave by airplane to the United States.
FONG TRAN: We waited and waited until the very end. By that time, all the airline and all the airport was shut down. So therefore, the only mean for us to escape or to leave Vietnam was by sea.
ANNA TRAN: So it was in the morning on April 30, 1975. The uncle of a family friend had connections to a merchant ship, and so he arranged for Fong, his older brother, his older sister, um, to leave Vietnam by boat. His parents didn’t come because it would just be too hard for their age and then they got on the boat and – get this – the ship was packed with over 4,000 people on board.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh, that is a ton of people.
FONG TRAN: We was like, uh, a sardine. We sit back to back.
ANNA TRAN: And here’s the thing – you know, not only was it super packed, but the journey was also super dangerous. Their ship was damaged, it was taking on water, and they floated in the ocean for about four days.
FONG TRAN: There was no waters, no food, and, uh, the beating of the sun and everything else is begin to take toll. And for some people, they begin to pass out because of the dehydrations. Most of us believe that we cannot die in the oceans.
ANNA TRAN: But then, you know, after four days, the boat was finally spotted by a Danish merchant ship. The ship took everyone to Hong Kong and dropped off those 4,000 people at a refugee camp. And then Fong stays there for about six months, and then he gets resettled to the United States in El Paso, Texas.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh, like he has been through so much. So, what happened to him next?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, so he’s still with his siblings, his older brother, his sister. You know, but shortly after getting resettled into El Paso, you know, his sister gets married, his brother finds work so he’s not around a lot of times, and so Fong – he really just ends up raising himself.
FONG TRAN: I put myself to bed, uh, wash my clothes, cook, uh, as well as do my homework all the same time when I was 11, 12 years old.
JESSE EUBANKS: Gosh, that, that is a lot for a 12-year-old boy to take on. I would imagine too, like, you know, this 12-year-old boy comes with these idealized hopes, these dreams of what life in America is gonna be like, and instead, like, he ends up with this really difficult life here.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Being an immigrant in the United States – it can be a pretty isolating experience. So I just wanna leave Fong’s story here for a moment. We’ll put a pause on that so we can hear from a woman named May Wong who articulates this really well.
MAY WONG: I think the only knowledge I know about America is almost like from the show that I watch on the TV. Uh, a lot of heroes, a lot of beautiful people, so it is a very desirable place. Of course, I have a lot of positive expectations.
ANNA TRAN: So this is May Wong.
MAY WONG: I’m married, and as a matter of fact, uh, I am quite married. I’m a grandmother now. Uh, right now I guess I consider I am entering the senior year.
ANNA TRAN: Okay, so May grew up in Hong Kong in the early 1960s. She had a family of eight – mom, dad, six kids – and she actually went to a Christian school and that was pretty common. You know, Christianity was pretty well accepted in Hong Kong.
MAY WONG: Well, I finished high school. I was not a good student at all. I did not do well with my grades, uh, at the entrance exam to college. So I was not in any good place, uh, after high school graduation.
ANNA TRAN: So at the time, May’s older siblings were in college in the U.S. so it just made sense for her to go there as well. And to May, the U.S. was the place to be. You know, she was so excited to go. She even joined an English club in Hong Kong to help prepare herself. And to be honest, she thought she wouldn’t have any problems fitting in.
MAY WONG: When I first come here, I start to speak English. It was so shocked to know the people in the shop they don’t understand my English. I realize they don’t understand my essence. They don’t get my Brooklyn English. So it was a humiliating discovery. I realized, “Wow. I, I thought I’m quite prepared for a new country, but actually I couldn’t even manage the language at the beginning.” So it was a rough start.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh, like her experiences versus her expectations, like the gap is, like, so wide.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: You know, and you hear her say like, “I was humiliated,” like it’s just, like, heartbreaking.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, I know. It was such a jarring experience for her. You know, at this point, she’s 21 years old and she’s a freshman in college, so she’s a lot older than most people in her classes. You know, she’s going through major culture shock. You know, the food is different, the city feels different. May was just so used to Hong Kong’s crowded shops and streets.
MAY WONG: When I first came here, I said, “Where are the people?” I would just say, “How come nighttime nobody get on the street? Where are they?” So I think that emptiness without people really brought me a lot of homesick. So it, it was a lonely adjustment.
ANNA TRAN: Okay, so May thinks to solve her problems she needs to become more quote unquote “American.” So to do that, May and her friend visited an American church, but what they didn’t realize was that it was a Pentecostal charismatic church.
MAY WONG: So very emotional, very expressive, with tears, with song. At that time, I said, “Wow, what is this? Is this what American church – what are they doing?” It almost scare me when I see they’re so emotional. Uh, they broke out with tears, with words that I have no idea what they’re talking about. So we were totally lost, me and my friend.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. I cannot imagine that scene. Like what an experience to accidentally stumble on.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: Like that is quite the subculture American experience.
ANNA TRAN: Right. Yeah. And in a lot of East Asian cultures, intense expressiveness is, it’s just not common, especially in religious context. And to be clear, this is not to put down Pentecostal churches. It was just such a shocking church experience for May, and she really wants to be a part of a church. And at this point, she’s starting to develop a personal relationship with the Lord for the first time, but she doesn’t have a church to turn to.
JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, wait, so hold on. So did she end up going back to that Pentecostal church?
ANNA TRAN: No, definitely not. But one day, May’s on the phone with one of her Chinese friends, and he invites her to his church, First Chinese Baptist Church of LA.
MAY WONG: So when I walk in, I feel so excited. I said, “There’s all the people that I miss,” and they all under one place and we all sing Chinese song is a song that I can recognize. And then the pastor when he preached, I can actually understand and I get to hear my own Cantonese language again. So it brought so much home to me. Immediately I fall in love with the church. I said, “This is the place I want to be.”
JESSE EUBANKS: Ah, you can just, like, hear her coming alive, like you can hear so much excitement in her voice.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Yeah, I know. It’s so sweet. You know, not only is she hearing her own language, but she’s also around people who look like her, who’ve had similar life experiences.
JESSE EUBANKS: And there’s like so many, like, cultural things that are unspoken that she doesn’t have to interpret. It’s just she understands. They understand.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for May, she was able to engage right away. You know, on Sundays she attended Sunday morning services, Sunday evening services, she ate lunch with the church friends. She went to trainings, workshops, and even attended Sunday School.
MAY WONG: For me to attend Sunday School every Sunday is a high point of my week. I just love to sit in the class to learn more and learn more. So I think through those year learning Sunday School really speak to me in a very personal way ’cause in Hong Kong I grew up, I attend church, I always thought that I was a Christian. I think not until that moment I rededicate my life in, uh, one of the revival meeting that happened in that church. I consider that is the beginning of my spiritual walk with Jesus.
JESSE EUBANKS: Wow. It’s like being, you know, in a church that was like her own culture, her own context, like it really made a difference in her life.
ANNA TRAN: Right, and the same ended up being true for Fong. So, after the break, we’ll get back to his story. Stay with us.
COMMERCIAL
JESSE EUBANKS: It’s the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.
ANNA TRAN: Anna Tran. Today’s episode – “Where the Gospel Meets the Immigrant Church.”
JESSE EUBANKS: So we’re following the story of Fong Tran who came to the United States from Vietnam as a refugee fleeing war. Okay so Anna, where exactly did we last leave Fong?
ANNA TRAN: Right. Okay. So when we last left Fong, he was in El Paso. He was feeling pretty lonely. You know, after three years in El Paso, he and his brother, they moved to New York. He’s now around 15 years old. While they’re in New York, they get word from some of their friends they had back in Vietnam, and actually these friends were the ones who helped them get passage on the boat.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, okay.
ANNA TRAN: They found out that their friends have resettled in a town called Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is about three hours from New York.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, Lancaster, where you are from.
ANNA TRAN: That’s right. Correct. So Fong – he would make the trip as often as he could to Lancaster to visit those friends.
FONG TRAN: When we learned that they not too far away, my brother would, uh, drove me from New York to Lancaster and later on I took the train down pretty frequent to Lancaster.
ANNA TRAN: And so he spends time with his friends, and he finds out that they’ve become Christians. And when he would visit his friends, you know, they’d ask him, “Hey, do you wanna go to church with us?”
FONG TRAN: Well, with nothing to do, I said, “Sure.”
ANNA TRAN: So at this point, you know, Fong – he’s a lapsed Catholic, so going to church in Lancaster – it’s really just about hanging out with his friends.
FONG TRAN: First of all, we grew up together back in Vietnam, so we know each other. And the most enticing aspect of it is there’s a lot of girls in church.
JESSE EUBANKS: (laughs) So basically he’s like a teenage guy.
ANNA TRAN: (laughs) Right. Fong – he’s going to church just to be social. He just wants to hang out with his friends. You know, in New York he didn’t have other Vietnamese people to hang out with. So because this was a Vietnamese church, Fong – he could get a little taste of home there, things like people talking in his heart language.
JESSE EUBANKS: So wait, wait, what do you mean by heart language?
ANNA TRAN: Right. Heart language is, you know, the first language a person learns to speak and communicate with. It’s the language that they can emotionally resonate with. In Fong’s case, you know, as a kid he learned to communicate and speak in Vietnamese, but once he moved to the U.S., you know, he learned and spoke English. He’s bilingual, but he still considers Vietnamese to be his heart language.
JESSE EUBANKS: I see. Okay.
ANNA TRAN: So Fong continues to go to church whenever he visits his friends in Lancaster, and he also starts going to events outside of just Sunday service. His favorite event of the year was this church family’s summer camp, and because everything is in his heart language, you know, one year at this camp he’s able to have, you know, a life-changing conversation with a pastor.
FONG TRAN: And he asked me how long have we been, I been in church. I said, “Well, uh, I’ve been in church on and off because I live in New York and I just come down to Lancaster, uh, once in a while, then that’s when I go to church.” And finally he said, “You know, if something happened to you, you know, uh, uh, where you go?” So I told him, you know, “For sure. I know for sure that I would not go to hell because I believe in God. But to heaven? I doubt it.”
ANNA TRAN: You know, the pastor goes on to share the gospel to him in Vietnamese. He goes through Scriptures, shares Bible verses with him, and he goes on for two hours.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. Two hours is a long time.
ANNA TRAN: I know right.
FONG TRAN: All I want to do is just to get out of there, get showers, and get something to eat. But he sit down. He explained to me step by step, and finally he asked me, “Do you want to accept Christ into your heart as your Lord and Savior?” I said, “No.” I said, “I already have God. I don’t need to reaffirm that anymore.”
ANNA TRAN: But that same night, there’s an evening service. That same pastor he had just talked to was preaching, and Fong – he’s kind of zoning in and out as per usual. But then that pastor makes an altar call.
FONG TRAN: I begin to remember what he, uh, said to me, uh, during our time together about how Jesus died for our sin and because how sinful we are. Especially with me growing up in a, uh, in America by myself, there are not much love, there’s not much, uh, relationship. So I long for that. So that’s one of the reason that I stood up and I accepted Christ that night.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean, on one level like that makes so much sense to me because we need to hear things in a language that we have the most depth in.
ANNA TRAN: Mm-hmm. Like I understand Vietnamese, but I came to understand the gospel in English, so I’m able to really resonate emotionally with English as well as Vietnamese. So it kind of depends for me. But for Fong, through being at a Vietnamese church, you know, being around Vietnamese people, you know, someone was able to share the gospel to him in his own heart language, you know, in a way he could understand and resonate with.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s beautiful.
ANNA TRAN: So after the camp, you know, Fong is still spending a lot of time in Lancaster. And later, you know, in his early twenties, he goes to college, he actually becomes a pastor, and he really commits himself to serving other Vietnamese churches.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so like there can be some real benefits to being able to be a part of a church that is your own sort of – for lack of a better term – like default culture.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, but that doesn’t mean that immigrant churches don’t come without struggles or hardship. You know, for one thing there’s a concept of first generation and second generation immigrants.
JESSE EUBANKS: Which is what? What is that concept?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, so first generation – you know, I think of my parents. They were born in another country, and then they came to the United States. You know, for me, I would be second generation ’cause I was born in the United States. So my home culture is of my parents’ culture, but I live my daily life in the majority American culture. And so this tension between, you know, first generation and second generation – that’s something that May talked about in our conversation. You know, so May’s been attending the same Chinese church for a while. You know, and naturally May and her husband – they decide to raise their kids in the church. But she also shared with me some of these tensions that she experienced when it came to, you know, faith and parenting, even small things like music.
MAY WONG: For me, Christian music is, pretty much should be the mainstream of music. But for them, hello. There’s another world of music out there. So they brought in different kind of music. It almost shock my ear. I said, “How could you listen to that kind of music? Did you know what they’re singing?” And so I, I, I think that’s already shocked me, and also my ignorance shocked them.
ANNA TRAN: May, you know, she assumed that her kids would just work out their faith just like she would.
MAY WONG: I pretty much came to Christ without my parents. They can do the same too. So I send them to church. I make sure they attend Sunday School. They will love Sunday School just like I did. So there should be no problem.
ANNA TRAN: And she also noticed that, you know, the way she experienced God in church was super different from what her kids experienced.
MAY WONG: I strongly believe that Bible is the absolute truth and our God is the only one and only one God of the universe. Believing in Jesus is something that is very logical, very simple. For me to live for God, to serve my church, to love my people, I thought that is, is just so easy, so natural. But I feel like for my children, their journey of faith is very, very different, a lot more complex. Their mission in life is really goes beyond their church or community, and they try to look for God in the non-Christian world. I look for God, I find God in the Christian world, but they want to see God’s footprint in the non-Christian world.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean, Anna, like what do you think when you hear that? Your parents raised you in an immigrant church. Do you think that they felt similar to May, like that tension of their experience versus what their kids are gonna experience?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. I, I really resonated with, you know, what May said. It’s like her kids wanting to find and experience God in a non-Christian world. ‘Cause it’s like I was in this, like, Christian Vietnamese world, so like when I went to college and, you know, throughout high school, I was, like, looking for things outside of, you know, like that Vietnamese church.
JESSE EUBANKS: Mmm. Yeah.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. And so I can’t relate as much to May and Fong’s story, but my experiences are a lot more similar to this guy I talked to.
DAVID LEE: My name’s David Lee, grew up, born and raised in New York City.
ANNA TRAN: Okay, so this is David. He grew up in Flushing, Queens, where over half of the population is Asian. So David – he’s Korean, and he went to a Korean church growing up. His mom – she’s a devout Christian, and she went to almost every event and church meeting. And, you know, naturally David went along to all of it.
DAVID LEE: That means going to church almost every morning at 5:30 to just pray by yourself in a dark room surrounded by other people, and then you gotta hit up the Wednesday night, the Friday night, and, like, the all day Sunday. Like I didn’t watch any football until I got to college ’cause Sunday – like there was just no time to go home and watch football.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. He gets like the, uh, the gold pass for church, you know, like –
ANNA TRAN: Right.
JESSE EUBANKS: – That is some serious church hours.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, totally. David – he was at church a lot. And in immigrant churches, it’s common that there’s a linguistic gap. So oftentimes it’s almost like there’s two congregations in the same church – so one in the heart language, and the other one in English. David – he can understand and he can speak Korean, but most of the time he went to services and youth gatherings in English.
DAVID LEE: Like I felt like I was living two very separate, like, lives ’cause I was really involved in school, did a lot of stuff in school, but then my entire weekend was always filled up with church. I remember when I was like 15, our whole youth group read through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. Either every week we either had a test or a paper on, like, that chapter.
JESSE EUBANKS: What is he talking about as like a 15 year old reading Wayne Grudem and taking tests?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: At church.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. I definitely never did that. And just to clarify, this is not representative of all Korean churches, but one thing that is really common in Korean churches is a passion for prayer.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I mean, I remember David saying something about, you know, praying by himself in a dark room surrounded by other people, like that, that sounds like super specific.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. In my research, you know, I talked with Pastor John Lee. He grew up in a Korean church and he was a pastor’s kid and he’s done a lot of writing and thinking about immigrant churches. So he explained to me that in the early 1900s, you know, missionaries came to Korea, they shared the gospel, planted churches, and they hosted these prayer meetings.
PASTOR JOHN LEE: And then what happens is at a prayer meeting, um, everyone begins to pray together out loud, kind of this congregational vocal praying. And then what started happening – which was so countercultural to Korean society – was people began walking up to the front and just publicly confessing their sin in front of other people.
ANNA TRAN: And here’s a clip of what one of those prayer meetings could sound like.
AUDIO CLIP
JESSE EUBANKS: It’s fascinating. It’s like, um, like there’s so much emotion in the room simultaneously, like so many people crying out to the Lord all at once.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. It almost kind of sounds like a cacophony as well.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.
ANNA TRAN: It’s like, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on. You kind of hear, like, there’s music in the background, there’s, like, someone on a microphone, but then also the congregation is, like, praying out loud.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but there’s, but there’s like a fervor in the room. You know?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Yeah, so much energy.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like it’s so different than, like, the world that I’ve come from, which is like a lot of the white evangelical church where it’s like everything’s very orderly, you know.
ANNA TRAN: Mmm.
JESSE EUBANKS: Like we pray one at a time. You know, there can be sort of a formality to it. And that has, like, just an air of, like, raw expression.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s even like, you know, different from other, you know, East Asian cultures too. You know, like in May’s case, she was really alarmed by all of the emotion from, you know, the Pentecostal church that she visited. You know, but in this case, there’s intense expressiveness coming from a different East Asian culture. So these prayer movements – it started like a mass spread of Christianity in Korea.
PASTOR JOHN LEE: And then through this kind of prayer movement you see evangelism spread. And so that really is kind of at the heart of Korean Christianity in a lot of ways is this, uh, passion for prayer and desire to see the spirit move, kind of similar to the way that it had when it first arrived in Korea.
ANNA TRAN: And this is how David came to know Christ. At the time, his parents – they were going through a divorce, and it was during one of these long prayer meetings at a retreat that he really felt God reaching out to him.
DAVID LEE: But every night I would just pray so much that, like, God would fix my family, that God would make things better, you know, all these things, uh, interspersed with zoning out and naps and things that happen when you’re 12 and in a dark room for four hours. And I really feel like the Lord met me there, and I really feel like after a while I had this deep feeling of feeling like God was better than the brokenness in my life and that God’s love was more powerful than the hatred in my family.
JESSE EUBANKS: Man, that, that, like, resonates with me. Like I went through a really difficult time around that same age, you know, that he was, and like the church in so many ways was like a family for me, you know, where my own home life was, like, pretty broken. And, uh, and it feels like, you know, his church really helped him to experience the love of God in a way that he really needed at the time.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, but we also know that being part of a church also comes with, you know, its hurts and pains. You know, and immigrant churches aren’t impervious to that. You know, fast forward, and David’s now in high school, he’s 18, and one time he and a few other guys and girls from his youth group – they go out to eat.
DAVID LEE: We took three girls from our youth group and we went to this Korean barbecue restaurant bar type of thing that we knew, like, didn’t card and we just drank a ton and we all just got absolutely plastered.
ANNA TRAN: You know, when talking with David, he totally owns up to his actions as a teenager. You know, but then he goes back to church on a Wednesday as normal. Everything seems fine. But then…
DAVID LEE: I showed up to play basketball, and then they told me to, the leadership told me to leave and that I wasn’t welcome there anymore.
ANNA TRAN: Essentially, David didn’t really go through any formal process of church discipline. They just told him, “Hey, you’re not allowed to come back here.”
JESSE EUBANKS: Hold on. That escalated really quickly.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: What happened just now?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Essentially, David – he doesn’t get any counsel or formal church discipline. They don’t, like, sit him down to tell him like, “Hey, this is what’s going on.” You know, he is just told, “Hey, you’re not welcome back here. You’re not allowed to come back.” So, you know, a little time goes by, maybe about a week, and then eventually they just say again, “Hey, you can just come back to Sunday services, but…”
DAVID LEE: Like only Sunday service, but I had to come right before and leave right after and that I was not welcome at any other church activities or events or – and like these people that I considered to be some of my closest friends, they just stopped talking to me. So very minimal communication, just the sense of getting kind of scarlet lettered, like I was suddenly a pariah.
JESSE EUBANKS: Gosh, that was fast. And I feel so bad for him, like with the church having played such a huge role in his life to suddenly have so many relationships, you know, on the line.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, like he goes from spending so much time at the church, he’s hanging out with his friends there all the time, to just like being kicked out.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, to being like cast out.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, and sadly this isn’t an uncommon experience. You know, this makes me think of, you know, honor/shame culture, and New Testament scholar Michael Gorman – he defines it as “ongoing attribution or loss of esteem by one’s peers, family, social class.” You know, essentially personal approval – you know, whether positive or negative – you know, it’s defined by peers, your family, and social status.
JESSE EUBANKS: And from my understanding, you know, the U.S. – like we are not an honor/shame society as a whole.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, for sure. You know, based on data from Global Mapping International, honor/shame – it’s the dominant culture for most people in the world, and this often becomes really heavy-handed in immigrant churches because people in immigrant churches are often holding really tightly to specific values ’cause they’re just trying to feel at home in a foreign country. There are pros to this, but for sure there are cons. Again, here’s Pastor John Lee.
PASTOR JOHN LEE: Parents are coming into a new land, uh, hopefully seek a better life for their children and for themselves, and they’re wanting to hear the gospel in their own language. So they come together to be able to worship together, to encourage one another as kind of one big, kind of, communal immigrant family, uh, in order to care for their own children. Part of the difficulty with that though is that you have a community of Christians that’s inevitably kind of unified and identified by one thing in addition to just their unity in Christ.
JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so in this context, like, so David, like, got the boot basically. Like what ends up happening to him?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, so essentially he really doesn’t have the time to process this because a few weeks after he gets kicked out he goes to college. And this was really challenging for David. He was so used to being around, you know, Korean people, Asian people. That was just his environment in New York. But in college he is in Illinois, and the city that he’s in – it’s only, you know, nine percent Asian. It’s predominantly white. But David – he ends up finding community and belonging in an unexpected way. Stay with us.
COMMERCIAL
JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks.
ANNA TRAN: Anna Tran. Today’s episode – “Where the Gospel Meets the Immigrant Church.”
JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve been hearing the story of David. He becomes unwelcome at his church, he’s just started college, and he doesn’t really know where he fits or belongs.
ANNA TRAN: That’s right. But while in college, a couple people decide they’re going to befriend David, but these people – they aren’t Korean.
DAVID LEE: And then these, like, nice white people would, like, come knock on my door and, like, invite me to play dodgeball or to eat pancakes or to go ice skating. They were so nice, and they were so unrelatable to me. They were a different species, these white guys, and I felt so uncomfortable with them, like I really hated it. But I was so thankful that they wanted to hang out with me, that they were willing to invest in me, that they reached out and, like, to me when no one asked them to and no one else did. And so I kind of, like, pushed through that discomfort I would say for about two years until I kind of started really feeling like I could integrate and I had real, genuine relationships and friendships, uh, as a part of that white evangelical community.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, so these friends were part of Cru.
JESSE EUBANKS: It’s like a campus ministry.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, exactly. It really gave David a place to belong, but like he said, it felt like he had to integrate and adapt to be able to relate to those friends. He didn’t have trouble accepting the teaching he experienced at Cru. Those were similar enough to his Korean church. It was just these small cultural things he started to notice, things like music or what they talked about in their downtime.
DAVID LEE: Like I had to watch Hot Rod and Napoleon Dynamite just so I could understand half the things that people were saying, you know? And like, you know, I, I learned about baseball, you know. I don’t know, all these, like, kind of seemingly minor things.
JESSE EUBANKS: These are, like, such, like, classic college guy movies, like Napoleon Dynamite and Hot Rod. Oh my gosh.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, I’ve never seen those. And they may seem like, you know, inconsequential things, but, you know, those small cultural similarities that, you know, David didn’t share – it contributed to some of the bigger questions that he was processing through.
DAVID LEE: Why do I feel so uncomfortable at church? Like where do I belong in the world?
ANNA TRAN: There were points throughout college where David was wrestling and processing his thoughts about his identity, you know, as an Asian American. He talked about how at times, you know, he felt resentful to Korean people because of his past experiences. But one friend at school who was Korean – she had similar family and church backgrounds, and they talk about their experiences. It was just so helpful for David to have someone who was able to understand and affirm his experiences.
DAVID LEE: Like I’m not crazy, right? Like the fact that I feel so betrayed or that I kind of hate Korean people, even though I love being Korean – like I’m not stupid, right? And I feel like that was really helpful. That friendship was really valuable to me.
ANNA TRAN: You know, after a lot of discomfort, David – he was able to become friends with the people at Cru, but he talked about this tension that he felt when he compared himself to other Korean people he saw.
DAVID LEE: I would look at Korean people from afar and I’ll see them all hanging out together and I would kind of judge them for not being able to be as, like, open. Like I thought I could judge them just after three seconds of looking at them from afar, and I thought that I wouldn’t be accepted by them and they are not accepted by me. Now I’m, like, realizing how much more nuanced it is and, you know, I would’ve been just like that if I had not been kicked outta my church.
JESSE EUBANKS: That’s interesting. Um, I wanna be thoughtful how I ask this question of you.
ANNA TRAN: Sure. Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: Um, but, like, you have gone out and experienced a lot of different kinds of cultures in the United States.
ANNA TRAN: Mm-hmm.
JESSE EUBANKS: Like, is there a time where you’ve ever looked at other Vietnamese people and felt similarly to what David is sharing?
ANNA TRAN: Mmm. Yeah, I think, um, what he said that last part about, you know, judging other Korean people for not being able to kind of be like him. There were, you know, many times where I would be either a little bit frustrated of Vietnamese people or just like me being Vietnamese in general because it wasn’t in line with most of the culture that I was around. Like on Sundays my parents would take me to church at our little Vietnamese church and at home our culture was Vietnamese, but during school and at some point through middle school and high school, um, I went to like a large, predominantly white megachurch. And that just seemed to be way cooler and much more with the times than, you know, the little Vietnamese church that I went to. I mean, there were times where I was not – I didn’t celebrate, you know, my Vietnamese heritage and in some ways similar to David, like, looked down on even other Vietnamese people my age because they weren’t, um, being, yeah, like open-minded to, like, leaving those comfort zones.
JESSE EUBANKS: Mmm.
ANNA TRAN: So, going back to David, he goes through life and he’s able to vocalize and notice some of these cultural tensions. For example, he started noticing that his mom expressed her faith much differently than him. David said that at home he and his parents – they rarely talked about faith.
DAVID LEE: When I ask her a question like, “What is the Lord teaching you lately?” like she just doesn’t have the upbringing or the tools to, like, kind of digest that question properly. And the same thing when, like, sometimes I’m at home and I start eating before I prayed. She’s like, “I cannot believe that you just did that. Is he even Christian?”
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, like that kind of reminds me of, uh, May’s example when she was talking about her and her kids as it relates to, like, music. Like, she was like, “Why do you not only listen to Christian music? It’s the best music,” and her kids are like, “Why would you only listen to Christian music?”
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, the communication breakdown is totally there. You know, a lot of times with both first and second generations, you know, life continues to move forward even while living in the misunderstandings. But even with all the cultural tensions and struggles, at the end of the day, the immigrant church is still the church. And there’s some things about the church that just cross cultural boundaries, which is something that, you know, Fong Tran discovered. So like I said earlier, after becoming a Christian, you know, Fong – he goes on to be a pastor so he could share the gospel with other Vietnamese people. But like David, he quickly discovered that even immigrant churches have their own share of tensions. You know, one time in his early twenties, Fong and the senior pastor he worked for had disagreements of how to effectively minister to the church.
FONG TRAN: He’s much older and I’m much younger, so it’s get to the point that, you know, I said I couldn’t deal with it.
ANNA TRAN: The senior pastor wanted Fong to be present at the church building the majority of the day, while Fong thought that he could be out and about meeting people around the city. And one day, you know, Fong goes out to lunch with a church member, but he comes back and the senior pastor confronts him saying, you know, “You’re supposed to be at church. You’re not supposed to be out to lunch.”
FONG TRAN: I said, “What? I can’t have lunch?” So that’s when everything escalate into a situations that I said, you know, “This is too much, and this is not something I sign up for. I can’t do ministry like this.” So I just pack up, and I left.
JESSE EUBANKS: I feel like I see, like, versions of this all the time. You know, at the time – like, what? Fong was in his early twenties?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. He was around, you know, 23, 24.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. And so, and then he’s serving under this older pastor and, like, on the outside, like, we’re hearing, “Oh, like they broke up the ministry over lunch? Like that doesn’t make any sense,” but, like, there’s all these much bigger issues at play. Like there’s cultural issues, generational issues, values, ways of seeing, there’s issues of power and influence, and, like, there’s just so many things at play. Like it’s kind of a wonder that any church kind of holds itself together.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, this situation – it just wasn’t about lunch. It was just, like, the tail end of many other, you know, church tensions and conflicts, difference of leadership styles. So after he leaves the church, Fong still wants to do ministry, but just not the way that he had been doing it before. So he just comes to the conclusion that he needs to be free and have his own control. And in his mind, the way to do that is with money.
FONG TRAN: I thought to myself that the only ways I can serve effectively – if I am rich, then I don’t need the church.
ANNA TRAN: Okay, so Fong goes back to New York City, and then a friend of his one day takes him down to Atlantic City to gamble at the casinos. And after a few trips, you know, Fong starts to think to himself, “You know, this is a way to make quick money.”
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh man, I have lost money myself as a young man in Atlantic City. It is a painful experience.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, and this wasn’t just a one-time thing.
FONG TRAN: I would go to work from nine to five, and at 5:00 I would take a bus from New York to Atlantic City and gambles throughout the night and get back to New York at eight, shower, go to work.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. Wow.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. You know what’s crazy is that, like, when I interviewed him, that was the first time I was hearing these details about his story. You know, growing up I heard his name, but the only thing that my parents really told me about him was “he got into some stuff in Vegas.”
JESSE EUBANKS: Well, it turns out that his stuff was that he was a high-stakes gambler.
ANNA TRAN: I know. It was pretty wild. You know, this lasted about four months, and then one day he decides to bet all of his money once and for all.
FONG TRAN: My goal was a million dollars. A million dollars at that time was pretty big. So I bought a one-way plane ticket from New York to Las Vegas. After eight hours of gambling, I lost everything. I have no dollars in my bank account. I got nothing left. Now my dilemma is how in the world I’m gonna get back. So as I wander, somehow I found a $10 bills on the floor of the casinos. So I just figured, “Oh, okay, let’s get something to eat.” But I took two step, I put the 10 dollars into the slot machine, and – lo and behold – I hit a jackpot for 1100.
ANNA TRAN: No way. Oh my God.
FONG TRAN: This is unheard of.
ANNA TRAN: No way.
FONG TRAN: Then I run straight back to the table and after, uh, four more, five more hours – that’s about, like, 6:00 in the morning – I get back all my money plus more and that’s how I got stuck for 14 years.
JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, wait, wait, wait. 14 years.
ANNA TRAN: I know, right?
JESSE EUBANKS: But what does that mean? Like what does he mean when he says he’s stuck for 14 years?
ANNA TRAN: Alright, right. So essentially from that time he won that jackpot, he stayed in Vegas for another 14 years. He didn’t leave, he didn’t go anywhere, basically getting addicted to gambling.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. And throughout those years, you know, he won some money, he lost some money, he was homeless for the first few years, but eventually he made his money back to several hundred thousand dollars. Y’know, but after years and years of this, he just gets fed up. One time, you know, after three days of gambling straight, the house at the casino – they set him up with a really nice penthouse suite at the Bellagio, but then he walks up there with a bottle of Cognac.
FONG TRAN: And that’s when it’s dawn on me that this is the life that I’m in. And I said, “If this the life that I’m in for the rest of my life, I don’t want any part of it because now you are sick and tired of doing this every single day.”
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like this is so sad because, like, Fong’s original thing was, “I wanna be a pastor. Like I wanna serve people, I wanna tell people about God,” and then he comes up with this, like, really bad idea, you know, which is like, “I just need a lot of money to be able to tell people about God, and I need to find money fast.” But, like, his story has gone so far off script from where he first wanted to go and who he wanted to be.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. And at this point, you know, no one from his family or the church back in Lancaster has been in touch with him. But then, you know, out of the blue, Fong gets a phone call from his brother.
FONG TRAN: Somehow he found me. And the thing is he said to me that, “Please come home.” So I said, “Okay, this is one way for me to come home, just to show people that I’m still alive.”
ANNA TRAN: Fong’s brother and his friends from church – you know, they took Fong back to Lancaster. There he would have Christian brothers and sisters, you know, to support him. And those years had really taken a toll on his body. You know, he was 90 pounds when he returns, 9-0.
JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. Wow.
ANNA TRAN: Just skin and bones.
JESSE EUBANKS: Wow.
FONG TRAN: They hug me. They asked me to come to dinners. They didn’t ask me how I was, where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, why I’m wasting my life, and all of this things. All they do was just hug me and then ask me to have dinner with them. At that moment, it began to dawn on me that’s what I long for – the love and the, the forgiveness and other things.
JESSE EUBANKS: That is, like, so beautiful. It, it actually reminds me of, uh, this quote from the author Philip Yancey. He says, um, “I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.”
ANNA TRAN: Mmm.
JESSE EUBANKS: And I feel like that summarizes the church so well.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: It’s like the church can be so horrible at times and drive so many of us away, and yet at the same time, it is totally God’s conduit for love and grace. And, like, you see that in this moment.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Yeah, just because, you know, a church is made up of one specific ethnic group or it’s started by immigrants, you know, it’s a church. And I just love how this story is just an example of, you know, the church being the church. And while he was in Vegas, you know, Fong – he lost all of his ID cards, and he really had to start from square one, start from scratch. But, you know, it was the people from church that really stepped up, helped him, gave him housing, food to eat, place to stay, and welcoming him back into the church.
FONG TRAN: I can’t imagine how I’d be happy in my life or I am at peace with my life, uh, because ever since I was young I’m always away from my family. So without the church, I think I’m lost in this world. I might be successful, I might be rich, I might be a lot of different things, but I still think, you know, I would not be at peace as I am right now.
JESSE EUBANKS: Like in Fong’s story in Vegas, in so many ways, any kind of Christian could have rolled up and loved him well and been a path towards, you know, reconciliation, but like –
ANNA TRAN: Mmm.
JESSE EUBANKS: – but in his story it was a church, you know, that he had these deep cultural ties to.
ANNA TRAN: Mm-hmm.
JESSE EUBANKS: Why do you think that played a special role in his redemption story?
ANNA TRAN: Yeah. Yeah, I just think about how immigrant churches are so family-oriented and, you know, in Fong’s story the presence of a steady family was absent in his early life and the Vietnamese church I think just, like, really filled that gap. And also, like, these were people who knew Fong’s story. They are like a direct representation of his heritage. And for his Vietnamese community to welcome him back, to love him, to care for him, it, like, offers a particular kind of healing and it’s just like a specific experience when the people of your roots comfort you and genuinely accept you as you are.
JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. It’s like a specific kind of depth compared to like a new community, you know, coming and loving him but they’re not part of his roots.
ANNA TRAN: For sure.
JESSE EUBANKS: And us talking about, like, sort of being loved by the people of your roots, you know –
ANNA TRAN: Yeah.
JESSE EUBANKS: Like, for David, did he ever end up reconciling with his Korean church from New York?
ANNA TRAN: Overall, yes. You know, it’s been 10 years since, you know, David got busted for getting drunk with his friends. You know, he said people have generally moved on, but his interactions, you know, are generally on this, like, spectrum. Some acknowledge the incident. Some pretend like it never happened. But as a whole, his experiences in college and his relationship with the Lord – those really helped him move past this strong experience.
DAVID LEE: And honestly connecting with God himself and just God really, uh, opening my heart and expanding my worldview and understanding what it might mean to have forgiveness or to acknowledge my fault while also acknowledging that I was wrong, like, simultaneously.
JESSE EUBANKS: You know, there’s that old phrase, uh, “God doesn’t waste our pain.” And in this scenario, like, it makes me think of, like, David had this really painful experience where his own community sort of thrust him out because of the mistakes that he made, but God seems to have used that actually to open up his eyes to a broader movement of the Lord, you know, outside of just his Korean church.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, for sure. David told me when he was 23 he decided to commit to being an overseas missionary in East Asia. In his experiences in college and at his Korean church, it’s given him the ability to navigate, you know, different cultures. It’s really helped him in his missions work.
DAVID LEE: I can go to Asia and feel so comfortable. I’m already so culturally malleable just by virtue of the way that I grew up. I think there’s so much beauty to be had there in this ability to kind of be cultural liaisons, to experience multiple, multiple sides of things. Um, I can go to my Korean church and, like, talk to them about what it’s like to be a missionary and I can go to this, you know, white evangelical church and do the same thing and, like, that’s a really special thing and I think immigrant churches really foster those kinds of environments.
JESSE EUBANKS: I think, like, after hearing all of these stories – man, I think there’s a real beautiful space that immigrant churches fill that is really needed. All of your default ways of doing things – suddenly you have to question them and you have to adapt them. And for immigrant churches to offer a space where people can worship in their own heart language, where they can discuss those specific tensions in a way that other people are gonna understand and empathize with, and the way in which you see, like, the Lord show up, like, “You are a stranger in a strange land and I’m gonna be faithful to you and I’m gonna show up and I’m gonna walk with you and I’m gonna give you this community of people to journey with you.” And to even see that transition happen from, like, first generation to second generation because first generation, it’s like, it seems like a very particular set of hardships.
ANNA TRAN: Mm-hmm.
JESSE EUBANKS: But then second generation bear the burden of even more so being bridges between the old culture and the new culture. And I think in both those contexts, like, immigrant churches play a really special role as a community just spurring people to walk with Jesus in this new country.
ANNA TRAN: Yeah, and immigrant churches are another part, another member of the church body here in the United States and in countries all around the world. You know, whether or not we belong to an immigrant church or not, whether or not we are immigrants or we’re born here in the U.S., you know, the Bible says that we’re all foreigners in a foreign land. As Christians, Earth here is not our heavenly home, and the immigrant church is a great reminder of that. And, you know, at the end of the day, immigrant churches, non-immigrant churches, multi-ethnic churches – we’re all working towards building the kingdom of God.
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JESSE EUBANKS: If you benefited at all from this podcast, please help us out by leaving a review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Your review will help other people discover our show.
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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode – Fong Tran, May Wong, and David Lee. Also, a special thanks to Dr. Daniel K. Eng and John Lee.
ANNA TRAN: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.
JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Anna Tran, who is also our media director and producer and who I caught trying to jam her hand up into the vending machine the other day.
FONG TRAN: And that’s how I got stuck for 14 years.
ANNA TRAN: Additional editing by Rachel Szabo. Audio engineering by me, Anna Tran.
JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Kindred Worship, Lee Rosevere, Poddington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.
ANNA TRAN: If you want a hands-on experience of missions in our modern times, come serve with Love Thy Neighborhood. We offer internships for young adults ages 18 to 30 through the areas of service, community, and discipleship. You’ll grow in your faith and your life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org.
JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”
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CREDITS
Hosted by Jesse Eubanks and Anna Tran.
Written and produced by Anna Tran.
Audio editing and mixing by Anna Tran.
Additional editing by Rachel Szabo.
Jesse Eubanks is our senior producer.
Music by Kindred Worship, Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Murphy DX.
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