Was John Chau’s life lived in obedience to God and the spread of the Gospel or was it, as his pastor feared, pursuing “a fantasy"?
Cross-cultural Identity and the Gospel in The Mission
Help us continue the work of empowering voices. Give today.
Yet the beauty of it is learning that all of those pieces, even the painful ones, fit perfectly together to create the masterpiece that is me. Stories, pain, conflict, joy, resilience, creativity, courage, and even anger have all brushed their unique strokes and colors onto the canvas of my life and invite me into an opportunity to become whole as I welcome all of the pieces of myself.
Was John Chau’s life lived in obedience to God and the spread of the Gospel or was it, as his pastor feared, pursuing “a fantasy"?
Yet the beauty of it is learning that all of those pieces, even the painful ones, fit perfectly together to create the masterpiece that is me. Stories, pain, conflict, joy, resilience, creativity, courage, and even anger have all brushed their unique strokes and colors onto the canvas of my life and invite me into an opportunity to become whole as I welcome all of the pieces of myself.
Here we have a story; that doesn’t live happily ever; after but goes on, nevertheless. We don’t know exactly; what happened to grandma, only; she is with them like voices in leaves.
Films that disempower East Asian women tend to fall short because the house of cards was built upon a shaky foundation.
In this article, we interview Tina Cho about her work as a children’s author and the value of diverse representation in children’s literature, which characterizes much of her work.
Discipleship in the Korean American immigrant church wasn’t just a way to transfer knowledge and information, but an invitation into a new way of life in a new community—especially as so many people had to rely on each other just to survive in a society that wasn’t really designed with them in mind.
Throughout her book, Jun continues to pull on the theme of coming home to yourself—and the way that journey looked for her uniquely as a biracial Korean woman growing up in the States.
A flourishing church does not mean a church devoid of problems and issues. It does not mean there will be no suffering in unknown times. However, a church that flourishes will require a different kind of sacrifice. Flourishing requires the participation of both men and women. It requires the young and old
In order to fix the divisions in our churches and our country, we not only have to understand what is broken but how it is broken.
When I think about my grandmother, I wonder, “Wasn’t her life also a ministry?” Perhaps she was not welcome to hold a title or a position in the church, but I believe my grandmother’s life looked a lot more like the life of Jesus than the lives of some of the male church leaders.
The most important thing non-females can do in a ministry setting is to empower and acknowledge the talents they see in their congregation, and this can be done through language
Pastoring has been the soil on which I have met the Lord, over and over again. This calling invites me to be saturated in God’s presence and in God’s Word, year after year. It stirs up all of my insecurities and fears and my imposter syndrome, and those things become the ripe soil on which Jesus meets me, over and over again, to speak his words of love.
Though many Asian American churches and ministries often sing worship songs from the likes of Hillsong and Bethel, or Western hymns for the older generation, with a bit of digging, I’ve discovered that worship songs written by and for Asian American Christians have been around for at least a few decades.
I was a stranger in the country, which had been home for so many years. People had moved on, and I was no longer a little child. My friends were no longer there, and my parents had a new routine as empty nesters. I had become more South Indian than they wanted me to be, and they found my new habits different. I had learned to move adeptly between two cultures, but I was neither here nor there.
Dad, a white man born in Kansas—
grew up in a time when plenty
folks who looked like them
were not allowed to wed,
I felt that I existed as a series of masks, appearing as others wanted me to, but without any sense of who I actually was. I waded through a depressive fog, wondering if there was any hope to feel at peace in the body that felt so foreign to me.
No matter how hard I tried to explain my Indonesian origins to those around me, my face erased my story.
Enjoy your cultural tapestry
Embrace your ancestral terrain.
Remember they once had nothing
Remember from whence you came.
I couldn’t see myself as both
not because I did not want to
but because society told me I couldn’t be
both