Gathering the Scattered, Part I
Faith, Church, and the Institutions of Diaspora Life
By Dr. David C. Chao, Director of the Center for Asian American Christianity.
What happens to Christian faith when a people are scattered by war, migration, labor, resettlement, and memory? What forms of church life become necessary when families are separated across continents, pastors carry burdens that exceed the usual categories of congregational ministry, and young people inherit more histories than they yet have language to name?
These are some of the questions we carried with us when the Our Story, Our Faith Steering Committee returned to Indianapolis on May 1–2 in preparation for the 2026 Our Story, Our Faith Conference. We came to continue listening to pastors, denominational leaders, community organizers, and local partners in the Burma Christian diaspora. This visit followed earlier fieldwork that led to two public essays, one on Chin National Day in Indianapolis and another offering a broader portrait of the Burma Christian diaspora in the city. Those essays helped us begin to see the community through memory, refugee resettlement, public health, political aspiration, church life, and the complexity of naming.
This essay offers the first of a two-part reflection on what we are learning through an ongoing process of listening. It does not attempt a comprehensive history or a definitive account of the community. It proceeds as a field report shaped by sustained engagement, in which we take our place as guests, collaborators, and learners. Our observations emerge from conversations with pastors, denominational leaders, staff from community organizations, leaders from Falam Baptist Church of Indiana, and members of the OSOF Steering Committee. These conversations unfolded across offices, breakfast tables, shared meals, car rides, and debrief sessions, often in the midst of planning for the August conference. The planning context remains important, and the meetings consistently opened into something more expansive. They became occasions of encounter, in which the community’s faith, institutions, wounds, and hopes came into view as ongoing processes of formation under the conditions of displacement.
As our listening has deepened, a more integrated picture has begun to emerge. The Burma Christian diaspora in Indianapolis comes into view as a transnational Christian social world whose life takes shape through interwoven practices of prayer, migration, labor, kinship, remittances, worship, trauma, education, mission, political memory, and institutional imagination. These dimensions do not stand alongside one another as separate descriptors. They belong to a single field of social and theological activity in which communal life is continually being formed, sustained, and interpreted across distance and displacement.
This first essay focuses on faith, church life, vernacular formation, and the institutions that sustain diaspora life. The second essay will turn to the community’s social pressures, joys, pains, and witness to the wider Asian American church.
Faith as worship, survival, and sending
One of the most consistent patterns to emerge in our listening is the central place of Christian faith within the life of the Burma diaspora. Faith operates as a generative structure through which the community has endured displacement, organized its common life, interpreted suffering, and oriented itself toward the future. In this sense, faith names an ongoing set of practices and commitments that hold together survival, meaning-making, and collective imagination.
Church is where people worship on Sunday. It is where families find social belonging, where pastors receive requests for help, where children learn language and Scripture, where people raise money for displaced relatives, where funeral support is organized, where mission offerings are collected, where trauma is prayed over, and where the next generation is formed.
Faith operates as a generative structure through which the community has endured displacement, organized its common life, interpreted suffering, and oriented itself toward the future. In this sense, faith names an ongoing set of practices and commitments that hold together survival, meaning-making, and collective imagination.
This became especially clear in our conversations with Chin denominational leaders. They spoke about conferences in Malaysia, visits to small Chin Christian communities in Europe, emerging ties with churches in Australia and India, and efforts to connect scattered Christians through international alliances. The body of the pastor in diaspora is a traveling body: jet-lagged, underfunded, carrying news, visiting small congregations, encouraging local leaders, convening conferences, and trying to gather people separated by war, resettlement, language, and geography.
These leaders also described mission as one of the deepest sources of joy in their community. Mission work connects Chin Christians in North America to evangelists and missionaries in Burma/Myanmar and beyond. Diaspora churches support mission fields, church construction, evangelists, and humanitarian relief. For many laypeople, financial support becomes a way to participate in ministry when they cannot return physically to the places from which they came.
The body of the pastor in diaspora is a traveling body: jet-lagged, underfunded, carrying news, visiting small congregations, encouraging local leaders, convening conferences, and trying to gather people separated by war, resettlement, language, and geography.
The diaspora is receiving care and sending care. It has been wounded by displacement and has become missionary through the very conditions of scattering.
This matters for how Asian American Christians understand refugee communities. Refugee Christians are too often framed primarily as people in need of rescue, services, or assimilation. The Burma Christian diaspora complicates that story. Its members have been displaced by persecution and violence, and they are building churches, training leaders, supporting missionaries, funding humanitarian aid, and creating institutions across continents. Their faith is a collective force for survival and service.
The church as social infrastructure
A second major lesson is that churches in the Burma Christian diaspora carry far more than conventional congregational responsibilities. They are spiritual communities, social service centers, educational hubs, mutual aid networks, and transnational support systems.
In our debrief after meeting with denominational leaders, the Steering Committee returned again and again to the role of the pastor. We asked whether pastoral training in this community can be understood only as preparation for preaching, teaching, and biblical interpretation. The answer is clearly no.
Pastors are often expected to serve as caseworkers, marriage counselors, social workers, immigration guides, funeral coordinators, conflict mediators, and interpreters of American systems. They help people navigate employment, legal paperwork, Social Security, health care, family breakdown, trauma, addiction, and youth crises. The key issue is not whether pastors care deeply. They do. The question is whether they can be equipped and supported for the range of burdens they already carry.
The church also participates in systems of mutual aid that blur the line between spiritual belonging and social protection. During one conversation, we learned about death-benefit practices in which member churches contribute funds to support families when someone dies. Such practices resemble life insurance, benevolent society, and ecclesial care all at once. They reveal how church membership can carry practical consequences for family survival. They also reveal why the social and the spiritual cannot be neatly separated in this community.
Pastors are often expected to serve as caseworkers, marriage counselors, social workers, immigration guides, funeral coordinators, conflict mediators, and interpreters of American systems.
The same is true of remittances. Giving flows through churches, denominational associations, ethnic organizations, village networks, mission funds, and direct family appeals. The needs are urgent: war, displacement, medical care, destroyed villages, refugee support, and humanitarian relief. People give voluntarily, and their giving is also shaped by social obligation, kinship, grief, and responsibility. To give is to remember. To give is to remain connected. To give is to carry a moral burden that resettlement in America has not erased.
From an ethnographic perspective, the church is more than a religious institution. It is a base camp for diaspora life. It gathers people spiritually, coordinates resources, preserves memory, protects families, translates systems, and sustains ties across borders.
Vernacular theology and the work of indigenization
One of the most striking discoveries from the site visit was the extent of vernacular theological and educational work already taking place. Leaders showed us curriculum materials, theological writings, commentaries, and practical resource books. Some materials were translated from English theological sources. Others were written by Chin leaders for their own communities. These materials included Sunday school curricula, theological resources, and practical guides for new arrivals learning how to live in America.
One book included ordinary and important instructions about household practices, food storage, gardening, school systems, domestic violence, and food stamps. In our debrief, we recognized this as a kind of lived theology. It was theology translated into kitchen practice, home safety, public systems, family life, and survival in a new country.
This work deserves attention. The Burma Christian diaspora is not merely importing Christian resources from Burma/Myanmar or adopting American church materials without alteration. Leaders are discovering that materials from Burma/Myanmar do not always fit life in the United States, while American materials do not fully fit Chin cultural, linguistic, and theological needs. The result is contextual production: curriculum, translation, online theological education, and practical discipleship resources created for diaspora life.
…we recognized … a kind of lived theology. It was theology translated into kitchen practice, home safety, public systems, family life, and survival in a new country.
This is one of the most important theological lessons of the site visit. Diaspora communities preserve tradition by interpreting tradition under new conditions.
They ask: How do we teach our children when they speak English at school and inherit Chin, Falam, Hakha, Karen, Kachin, Mizo, Tedim, Zomi, Zophei, Mara, Lautu, Zotung, or Burmese family histories at home? How do we train lay leaders who work full-time jobs and still desire theological study in their own language? How do we form Christians who live in American legal, educational, and social systems while carrying memories of Burma/Myanmar, Malaysia, India, and refugee camps?
Online theological education in Chin languages is one answer. It serves lay leaders and students who commit significant weekly time to theological study, including students beyond the United States. It is more than a seminary program. It is a vernacular formation system for a scattered people.
BACI and the rise of civic institutions
If churches reveal the spiritual infrastructure of the Burma Christian diaspora, the Burma American Community Institute reveals its civic infrastructure. BACI was founded in 2011 to serve a growing Burma-origin population in central Indiana. Its mission centers on advocacy, education, and employment, and it operates programs in areas such as resettlement, legal support, citizenship, health, employment, afterschool education, youth development, and community advocacy. BACI began with the conviction that the community needed an institution “for the community” and by the community, so that community members could become self-sufficient, integrated, and able to contribute to society.
BACI is a non-sectarian civic institution. As a 501(c)(3) supported in part by federal, state, and foundation funding, it serves clients without regard to religion, and its programming is structured accordingly. Its work in central Indiana reaches Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Burma-origin ethnic groups, Afghans, Ukrainians, and other refugee populations.
What we observed in the field is the thick relationship between BACI and the surrounding Burma Christian diaspora. Pastors in the community refer congregants to BACI for resettlement, legal, employment, and health services. Members of the diaspora — many of them Christian — volunteer for, work at, and pass through the leadership pipeline of BACI’s youth and afterschool programs. Several community members we interviewed described their participation in civic work in moral terms drawn from their own traditions, including the language of love of neighbor. The pattern, as we read it, is not that a Christian organization performs civic services. It is that Christians in the diaspora help build and sustain a non-sectarian civic institution that serves the wider refugee population, and some describe their participation in vocabulary their faith helps them articulate.
BACI helps explain how the Burma Christian diaspora in Indianapolis is moving from early refugee survival toward long-term civic institution-building. It works with federal agencies, local government, foundations, employers, universities, health departments, and community partners. It helps people navigate the complexity of American life long after the initial resettlement period has ended. Its staff described the first months of refugee support as far too short for the complexity of the transition. New arrivals need housing, employment, paperwork, interpretation, school navigation, health care access, and long-term community guidance. BACI exists in that gap between arrival and belonging.
The organization also embodies a striking leadership pipeline. Many young people who participate in afterschool, college preparation, scholarship, and mentoring programs later return as volunteers, interns, staff, or public advocates. Middle school students may be mentored by high school students; high school students by college students; and college students by young adult leaders. Through this pattern, BACI is not only serving youth. It is producing future community leadership.
This matters for the August conference. The OSOF Conference is for pastors and scholars, and also for young adults, college students, high school students, lay leaders, parents, and community servants who are asking how faith, identity, history, and future vocation belong together.
Continuing the story
What we are learning in Indianapolis is that diaspora life is not held together by one institution alone. It is sustained through churches, associations, nonprofits, families, pastors, youth workers, teachers, community advocates, denominational leaders, and ordinary people whose giving, labor, memory, and prayer make communal life possible.
The Burma Christian diaspora carries a story of displacement and a story of institution-building. Its churches are spiritual homes and social infrastructures. Its leaders are producing curriculum, translating theology, supporting missions, organizing mutual aid, and building civic organizations that serve far beyond the boundaries of any single congregation or ethnic group.
These institutions do not remove the burdens of diaspora life. They reveal them. They show us the pressures pastors carry, the fractures families endure, the complexity of language and belonging, and the joy and pain of a people still being gathered.
Part II will turn to those social circumstances more directly: work, family separation, language, youth mental health, pastoral overload, internal conflict, and the witness this community offers to the wider Asian American church.
Dr. David C. Chao is director of the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. He teaches courses related to Asian American theology and organizes programs in Asian American theology and ministry. His research and writing focus on the faith and practice of ordinary Asian Christians in diasporic context as well as the uses of Christian doctrine for liberation, the convergence and divergence of Protestant and Catholic dogmatics, and the theology of Karl Barth. His research on Asian American religious life and politics is funded by The Henry Luce Foundation, the Louisville Institute, and APARRI.
Read more about the director of the CAAC here.