Church Community and Global Identity: An “It’s Complicated” Interview with Justin & Carolyn Fung

By AACC Editorial

To continue our It’s Complicated series, Emily Leung interviews Justin & Carolyn Fung about navigating family life, church life, cultural identity as a Mixed family.

We would love to hear about you and your wife's church background, and especially how you began to navigate that when you began your relationship. Was it challenging to find a church space that would be welcoming of the both of you? How did you decide what type of Christian community would be the best fit for the both of you? 

Carolyn: My formative young adult years were spent at a large evangelical church in North Carolina that had a focus on church planting. When I moved to DC, I wanted to find a church that was centered on preaching the gospel and cared about church planting, and when a friend brought me to the church where Justin was on staff (even though I didn’t actually know it for a while—it’s a long story), they were in the process of planting a second parish location, so that was one of the reasons I ended up staying.

Justin: My church background is a mix: raised in Hong Kong at a Baptist church, returning to faith in college at a charismatic church in London, and discovering the justice and peace traditions in my early/mid-twenties. I was part of the team that planted The District Church back in 2010 as a non-denominational, justice-focused, neighborhood church, and then subsequently joined them on staff.

In short, we both found the church separately and decided to stay for reasons not related to each other. By the time Carolyn joined the church, we’d grown into a pretty multiracial community, with several interracial couples. So on that front, we knew that as long as we both felt comfortable at the church individually, it would be a community for us as a couple.

As you blend together each of your own cultures and heritages, what have been some challenges and joys in creating a new unique mix for you and your family? Did you have other Christian friends and families who were also figuring it out, or did you find few examples of what this might look like in church spaces? Are there any anecdotes/fun (now but not in the moment heh!) stories of ways that y'all worked to bring your own experiences into your new family? 

Justin: We had a number of Asian American friends at the church who were also in interracial relationships and marriages, so we were never without companions when it came to processing dynamics with in-laws or integrating our Asian American-ness with our faith journeys or just eating well together!

Carolyn: There was definitely an awakening for me, having been brought up only within the Black-white binary of racial categories. One of the books I read early on in our relationship was Kissing Outside the Lines by actress Diane Farr, who shares about the lessons she learned being married to an Asian American man. That was eye-opening, though not from a faith perspective. As Justin said, having good friends in our church community who were in interracial relationships and marriages was invaluable.

One early memory from when we were dating was my first dim sum experience. It was something he did very regularly with a core group of friends, while also inviting others (especially who hadn’t experienced it before). Not having had dim sum before and being a bit sensitive around different textures and tastes, I knew that if this was something that was really important to Justin—something that was ‘home’ to him—then it was something I would choose to work at in order to grow to love it—and I have!

What Bible passages have been essential in shaping your views and perspectives on faithful witness and living as a mixed family? And how has your lived experience given you new insights or perspectives on passages that previously seemed foreign or less relevant to you? 

Carolyn: I didn’t come from a church where race or ethnicity was considered—and I’ve come to recognize the white normativity and colorblindness there. But being part of a multiracial and intentionally diverse community has helped me see how much more is in that statement that humankind is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) and helped me discover how the fullness of a person’s identity gives so much more texture to a story—like the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7) or the women mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy (Matthew 1) or the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). At our church, one of the passages that gets named often is Revelation 7, where we see people from every nation, tribe, and language worshiping God together. That’s the day I hope for and what we try to live out right now—in our community and in our family.

Pastor Justin, as you lead in an intentionally multicultural church, how do you and your fellow ministers balance the embrace of diversity while creating space for individual members' unique cultural/racial experiences and belongings in living out the beautiful diversity of the imago Dei in your congregation? 

Justin: For me, there’s beauty both in uniqueness and in commonality—that complementarity is found even in the Trinitarian DNA that makes up the imago Dei. So we try to make room for both and recognize the need to cultivate spaces for both individuation (to use the psychological term for when an individual develops their own identity as distinct from whatever group, usually family, they came out of) and integration (where we bring our uniqueness into a mixed space and grow and learn from one another). Just as everyone has their own individual spiritual journey and ultimately has to make decisions for themselves, so also faith must be lived out and practiced in community. That applies to ethnicity, race, and culture too. 

So, for example, we have race-based affinity groups, which might seem counter to the idea of a multicultural church, but actually the purpose is (1) for healing from racial trauma in a shared space of understanding; (2) for relationships to be cultivated that encourage racially-aware Christian discipleship; and (3) for identity formation and healthy differentiation so that we can better engage together in kingdom-reflecting community as a whole church. We want to know ourselves more fully so that we can more fully appreciate who God has made us to be and bring that fullness to share in community with others who are likewise bringing all of who God has created them to be.

For my family, we became more intentional about celebrating my Taiwanese heritage and my wife's Italian heritage when we had kids (now 6 and 4), so that we could pass it down to them. How has having kids changed your perspective on being a mixed family, and what are ways that you are trying to help celebrate each of your diversities in your family?

Carolyn: Having kids has definitely led us to be more intentional in engaging our heritages. One way we engage is definitely through food. So, with part of my family being from Maryland, Justin has learned to pick crabs at a big family crab feast. Or, in addition to trying to enjoy the foods that Justin grew up eating and encouraging our kids to do the same, I’ve also tried my hand at making homemade custard tarts, and we’ve started learning and trying recipes from his mom—things he grew up eating.

Events are also a space to engage, especially as there are always fun things to teach the kids. Lunar New Year is an example. This year, we got to not only share with our kids (well, our three-year-old at least) about Chinese New Year and Justin’s experience of it growing up in Hong Kong and about the animals of the Chinese zodiac, but we also got to participate with our kids in a Korean American friend’s dumpling-making (and eating!) party.

Justin: Relationships that have shaped us have become more important since having kids. Since we had kids—and especially since the pandemic shifted our rhythms—we’ve FaceTimed with my parents twice a week, partly so that my parents will get to see my kids grow up even though they live on the other side of the world, but also so that my kids will get to see the grandparents whom they don’t get to see as often. That’s felt like an important rooting practice. It’s also been an opportunity to be more intentional in learning and recording family stories, stories that have felt more important to know, understand, and pass on as I’ve pressed into my own ethnic and racial identity.

Pastor Justin, if you have experience growing up or serving in majority-Asian church or Christian spaces, what lessons or insights do you have for how they could be more welcoming to mixed folks and families? In other words, to Asian Christians who are not mixed, what do you wish they knew about how to best love and serve those who are mixed (personally, or through their relationships)?

Justin: I understand how and why more homogenous spaces come to be, especially for migrants, minorities, and people of color. Finding, creating, and protecting spaces where those who have not been part of the dominant culture feel seen, heard, and known has been—and continues to be—so important; in that way, the affinity groups that we have at our church are sort of a microcosm of majority non-white churches or Christian spaces.

At the same time, the story of the Bible through a Christian lens is that of God making a new family of faith, one that is characterized by grace and faith in God and the love of God for all, and so if that’s the throughline, if the vision from Revelation 7 is of a multilingual, multiethnic, multicultural community of worshipers, surely part of our calling as Christ followers is to try to live into that now. The way I see it, it isn’t just nice to worship Jesus and be formed in Christlikeness with people who are different from us; we actually need each other to experience the fullness of God—we cannot do it without each other. I guess that’s not as practical but it’s the mindset and attitude that forms the foundation for any sort of welcome or inclusiveness; it’s not something that’s just nice to have.

What advice and encouragement can you share for Mixed folks and families who are navigating how they can both honor/celebrate their own culture/heritage while creating a new integrated Mixed family space of their own?

Carolyn: There are always things to learn—and especially those moments of realization can be hard, like you aren’t as far along as you hoped or thought you were. But you’re not going to figure it out overnight; growth and growth together take time. Getting to know yourself, getting to know another person, building a new thing—all of that is a lifelong journey, which is already true in a marriage but feels even more so when it relates to culture and history—and then add kids in too. So I’d say that open and gracious communication is key.

Justin: And don’t give up. Keep trying, keep talking, keep forgiving, keep learning.

You can watch an interview with Pastor Justin below:

Photo by Daniel Tseng on Unsplash

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Justin serves as the Pastor of Leadership & Spiritual Formation at Christ City Church, where he gets to live out his passion for discipleship and spiritual formation that is evidenced by justice and peace, particularly in multicultural, multiethnic, and multiclass contexts. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he lived in London for eight years and Pasadena, CA for three years before relocating to the District in 2009. Justin lives in the Trinidad neighborhood of Washington, DC, with his wife Carolyn and their two kids.