Asian American Christians church attendance; where are they?

What can be said about Asian Americans and church attendance? What would you like to know?

When I heard this statistic at a June 2023 presentation in Chicago, I was perplexed and provoked. Dr. Jerry Z. Park shared a statistic that 74% of Asian American Christians attend churches that are not Asian majority!! (defined as less than 50% Asian in composition) cf. twitter.com/djchuang/status/1668636452849156099

It’s been over a year since that was shared, and that presentation was embargoed for a future publication, which should have happened already, but I might have missed the memo and I wasn’t notified about it.

An email dated May 2024 from Dr. Park noted the statistic’s source:

… the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey was a national stratified random sample survey and included a large oversample of Asian Americans where I asked those who attended a place of worship more than “never” to estimate the racial composition of that place. From the responses I set the bar at 50%: respondents who said they attended a place of worship that was 50% Asian or more were considered attending an Asian church. I distinguished those who identified as Protestant (including nondenominational) and Catholic and all other faiths. Of the Protestant Christian Asian Americans who attended a place of worship more than “never” about 75% attended a church that was not Asian. This surprised me to no end and this is the only racial minority Christian subgroup that exhibits this pattern. Black and Latino Protestants generally attend churches that are 50%+ Black or 50%+ Latino. I am going to ask this same question in the CMPS2024 which will be fielded in 2025.

So let me ask Dr. Park to invite more feedback. (at the risk of posting this information prematurely, but that’s the nature of the internet, eh? anyone can most anything online instantly, and people fact check it later; so, I’ll post an update right here as soon as I get more info.)

When you see this statistics, what do you think? How does it make you feel about Asian American churches that try to intentionally (or unintentionally) minister to an Asian majority? It might prompt you to question its veracity and validity too. Maybe the sample data set is too small? Is it accounting for both Protestants and Catholics? Is it just self-reported data from a random survey, so there’s no verification of actual church attendance?

about Asian churches and ministering to Asians

Here’s another data point, from Dr. Kaz Hayashi: “63.6% felt their ministerial training at Bible school, seminary, or within the local church, did not teach them how to contextualize the biblical message to their Asian audience.” (cf. “Empowering local Asian American churches“, April 2024)

Dr. Peter T. Cha said this about the ethnic Asian churches, sometimes also known as immigrant Asian congregations: “How does one institution facilitate both maintenance of the ethnicity from the homeland and also the process of adaptation and acculturation into American society? The effectiveness of immigrant congregations is precisely because the same institution provides both roles.” (cf. “Off the Court, a Film’s Lens on Asian-American Faith,” New York Times, 2013)

and, there’s more

Other explorations about topics in this space:

• “The Asian American Movement and the Church: Laying the Foundations for Asian American Theology” (Dr. Jane Hong, Theology Today, 79:4, January 2023)
• “New Missions with a New Generation: The Experiences of Korean American Churches and Missions” (Dae Sung Kim, International Bulletin of Mission Research, 44:2)
• The Identity and Mission of Korean Immigrant Churches 한인이민교회의 정체성과 선교 (Fuller Dialogues)
• Asian American Christians’ Secret Affair with Whiteness
• Being an Americanized Asian in an immigrant church
• 2 (kinda) related discussions from Facebook Live with John Shin, in 2018:
  • Asian American Culture and Gospel Culture
  • Asian American Discipleship
• “Preaching to the Heart of the Asian American Experience” – an excerpt from Finding Our Voice: A Vision for Asian North American Preaching by Matthew D. Kim and Daniel L. Wong
• “Why Asian Americans Struggle to Feel at Home in White-Majority Churches” (Steve S. Chang in TGC Blog)
• “Being Asian American in a White Church” (Tim Chiang in 9Marks blog)

As for the 3 pie charts at the top of this page, that was presented at a Fuller Seminary’s Asian American Center APAHM 2024 Theology Lecture, cf. “Religion Among Asian Americans,” (Pew Research Center, 2023)

why do few Asian American Christians care about being Asian American?

This extended conversation at the Erasing Shame podcast explores this question at length, almost 2 hours long.