We Can’t All Leave
On Staying in Immigrant Churches When It Hurts
By Mina Song Lee, Master of Theological Studies student at Candler School of Theology.
In addition to being a Master’s student, I currently work as a fellow at The Candler Foundry – shout-out to Ryan Bonfiglio, the team, and all the good work being done to make seminary-level education accessible for everyone! As part of one of the ongoing projects, I had the opportunity to sit down for a filmed roundtable discussion with a handful of Candler seminary students and professors.
We were talking about church. When it was my turn, I found myself asking the same question I feel I have asked every teacher, mentor, professor, peer, pastor, and person with a listening ear and any shred of wisdom to offer.
But, first, some context. I grew up in a Korean immigrant mega-church in Queens, NY. After a dramatic and resentful exit in high school, I found myself rooting deeply into the community during the pandemic my junior year of college. When I had to return to school the next year as things started to open up again, I remember telling my old youth pastor that I was really going to miss home. She replied, Oh, wow. What a testimony, Mina. For you to miss this place.
But the church nevertheless continues to fill me with so much grief and confusion. Serving in the youth group gave me a front-row seat to the conflict between the elder first-generation powers that be and the quickly hemorrhaging second-generation body. Moreover, in the fraught political landscape of the 2020 election and the 2021 uprising, I was infuriated and confused by the church’s response (or, lack thereof.) Even now, as a community of immigrants, our indifference to the suffering of other migrant communities baffles me.
In these spaces, I feel crazy. It is easy to feel like no one around me finds objectionable the dissonance between the confessional love we preach and our resounding silence on the brokenness both within and without our walls. I sometimes feel like maybe I am the difficult one, or that I am the problem for wondering why, why, why are we the way that we are? And why are we not talking about it?
This is the thing. This is my death by a thousand cuts. It is all the questions that go unasked and unanswered. It is all the qualms that I feel like I carry alone. It is all the hope that I feel, that we could be more than this: more loving, more compassionate, more forgiving, more graceful. Couldn’t we?
I asked a friend recently what he thought it meant to be Korean-American and he said stuck. And I feel so strongly that it does not have to be this way; that the world is wide and expansive and full of the immanent, ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting, life-giving, terrifyingly-loving presence of God. We are free! We are alive! We are!
I was in high school when I first began to feel like a pariah. It wasn’t that I asked too many questions, it’s that I was asking all the wrong ones – about cussing and drinking, sex and sexuality, power and doctrine. For if the world is bigger than this one church, then surely God is bigger than our specific doctrines or long-held traditions.
There is a semi-opaque, viscous quality to the relationship between particular manifestations of Christianity in individual churches and the imagined community of the Global Church – the Body of Christ, if you will. Much scholarship in the field of World Christianity resides in this thickness and asks questions about the co-constitutive nature of the local and the global.1 My favorite thing about this field of study is the dual task of identifying the specific qualities of each church, practice, or tradition in order that it may be seen more clearly in the larger tapestry of the Body. To me, this is the essence of a truly ecumenical project: to lovingly confront the reality of difference and from there continually articulate and re-articulate a vision for the community of God’s people.
“Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?” - 1 Corinthians 12:14-19 (NRSVUE)
But in churches like mine, and in many others in the U.S. and beyond, we operate presumptuously from a net-zero point of culture. In our claims to be the proprietors of the truth, we feign the elision of our cultural particularity while inevitably making it the standard by which we measure others and their religious commitments. This masquerade of neutrality infuriates me beyond words! Like, what are we doing!
Or, the question at the heart of that question, and at the heart of all my questions about church: what do we do?
Huddled together in the back of a ramen shop in Koreatown, I ask my friend this question and she responds by telling me our church is like a snow globe. Now that she’s on the outside, she says she can still hear the people she’s left behind whispering about how they’ve lost her soul, how they’re still praying and petitioning for her return, for her salvation. But here she is, on the other side of that thin glass wall, feeling for herself the shocking cold of real snow as it melts on her tongue and between her toes. The lie that the world beyond this sequestered space would break her was just that – a lie.
I ask my question again at this round table filming for the Foundry, surrounded by peers and professors, and the conversation begins to move in the direction it always does: what it might look like to leave. One of the professors is talking about her church: where her children feel safe and welcomed, where they participate in community work together, where there is love and grace and mercy. She is telling me I might like it there. I am crying. There is an awkward moment where they are not sure whether or not to stop filming.
But I need to explain myself. So I gather my voice as quickly as I can in protest.
I already know there are places out there – religious and non-religious alike – that would be easier for me. They love each other; they love this world; they ask questions. I would not be a pariah for wondering or asking for more. I would not feel so alone. I could go somewhere else, anywhere else, and be a part of a new community, or even start one of my own. I know all that. I do.
But we can’t all leave. What would we be leaving behind?
“As it is, there are many members yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect, whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” - 1 Corinthians 12:20-26 (NRSVUE)
I have no bitterness towards those who leave. We can’t all stay either.
The more I learn about the transnational history of Korean immigrant churches, the more compassion I feel for my community’s aversion to questioning the way things are or ought to be. For so many first-generation Korean immigrants, the fortifying hope of the Gospel was indispensable to their survival. They flocked to early morning prayer services and there poured out their sorrows, anguish, and desperation. They enthusiastically believed that service to the church would reflect their dedication to God, and in this way, they supported each other wholeheartedly through the trials and tribulations of immigrating, running small businesses, navigating legal troubles, learning a new language, and raising American children. The promise of the goodness of God was alive and enlivening.
Even many in the second generation find their sense of self and their primary source of community in immigrant or pan-Asian churches. The routine of clear-cut doctrine, the security of a static guide for good behavior, the predictability of familiar songs, prayers, and people: all these provide significant scaffolding in an increasingly unstable and rapidly shifting world.
To ask too many questions – or to ask the wrong questions – would be to challenge the very ways of life that have sustained this people. You pull one thread too hard and the whole thing might very well unravel. What’s at stake is not simply doctrinal, political, or theological. What’s at stake is tradition, identity, and belonging.
Yet, in my own life, I have experienced over and over again the overwhelming security of a God who is too big to be shaken by my doubt, too deep to dismiss it, and too kind to leave me with nothing to believe in on the other side of all my questions – whatever those questions may be.
I want us to ask questions. I want us to have some faith. I want us to see more of this God who has done so much, and can do so much more.
What do we do?
I am still learning to accept that some people never change; and that I am never responsible for the change itself. Plant the seed, till the ground, etc. etc. But I will never be satisfied with an answer to my question that presumes my best option is to detach from the people I love in my own esoteric pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I am asking because I intend to stay. I am asking in faith (and fear and trembling.)
God, it sucks to feel like the only one asking. But I know I am not really alone.
For further reading, I find the introductory chapters to the following edited volumes to be helpful: Joel Cabrita et al., Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith (Boston: Brill, 2017); Jehu J. Hanciles, World Christianity: History, Methodologies, Horizons (New York: Orbis Books, 2021); Arun W. Jones, Christian Interculture: Texts and Voices from Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).
Mina Song Lee is currently pursuing a Master of Theological Studies at Candler School of Theology. Her interests include Christian Nationalism, globalization, gender, and practices of diaspora. She is also a fellow at the Candler Foundry and has a deep love for public scholarship. She earned her B.A. in History at Princeton University.
Hi Mina!
My husband sent this to me a while back. I just got around to reading it, and I wish I had read this 7 years ago!!! I got whole body chills at the gym lol.
Your thoughts and words are perceptive. Truly. This is a vulnerable reach, but would you be interested in having dinner with us?
We actually might be neighbors-ish (we live in Atlanta and Stan works at Grady/Emory and mentioned something about following the same faith group thing…CAAC?)
Anywho, would love to hear more on this from you! Let’s see…how should I leave my contact info on this public space lol…
eileensonu@gmail.com I guess we could start there if you were open to it!