Growing Healthy Asian American Churches, 5

 dialogue, journal
Mar 272006
 

We’re making steady progress in our blog-based book discussion of Growing Healthy Asian American Churches Growing Healthy Asian American Churches . This week we delve into Chapter 4, which is titled, Healthy Leaders, Healthy Households: Practices and Values.

For those of you tuning in, but don’t attend an Asian American church or even a church with significant proportions of Asians, you should find this book helpful for non-Asian church contexts as well, since it describes fairly universal characteristics for any healthy church. Note that this book is not a theological exhortation, per se, the way Mark Devers vigorously challenges contemporary churches in Nine Marks of a Healthy Church.

Discussion questions for Chapter 4:

  • 4 ingredients are listed for building healthy leadership teams: choose and use team members well, build trust among leaders, pursue conflict resolution vigorously, and cultivate the vision. Would you add some other ingredients that have been helpful in building a healthy leadership team?
  • 4 values were particularly descriptive of Asian American church leaders: pursuing a balanced life, demonstrating vulnerability, valuing team ministry, and recognizing God’s leadership.
  • The closing part of the chapter makes a noted distinction between building a household (where redemptive relationships are flourishing along with right doctrines and programs) versus building a house (where right doctrines and right programs are maintained). What steps can your church take to move from a functional house towards a fulfilling household?

[related elsewhere]

  • While it may be an extreme to divide Asian Americans into subcultures, I think that perhaps there is some merit into categorizing our experiences further for more strategic ways of approaching cultural church contexts.
  • Sometimes western culture is presented as merely that kind of self-ish individualism that seeks to satisfy ones own pleasures, which instrumentalises and attacks life for the consequential maximization of pleasure. But surely this is just a slanted characterization. As an Asian I have great admiration and draw much profit from the (distinguishable) good stuff that comes out of the West.
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