• Daniel’s upbringing in a Korean American church in Northern Virginia, and how growing up alongside non-Korean Asian American friends—while navigating an abusive father—shaped his early pull toward a broader Asian American identity

• His campus ministry years as “Grace Man,” and the pushback he got for it

• Going to Princeton to study Karl Barth and, for a time, trying to leave Asian American ministry behind entirely in pursuit of becoming “a legitimate theologian”

• The unraveling of that plan: unresolved family patterns, disillusionment with Tim Keller’s Redeemer model, and a friend’s blunt observation—”all you do is talk about Asian American stuff”—that brought him back

• Arriving at Fuller, starting the Asian American Theological Fellowship as a lone ThM student, and the years of institutional confusion that followed (mistaken-identity emails, “what language will you teach it in?”)

• The financial and political cost of building the Center—years on food stamps, a breakdown in an empty office, HR complaints, and resistance from unexpected places, including fellow Asian Americans

• The founding commitment to a truly pan-Asian American Center—not a “wink-wink” Korean or East Asian program—built around Asian heritage, migration experience, American culture, and racialization

• Where the Center is headed next: the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, the Korean American Ministry Initiative, South Asian American work, and the shift from research toward resourcing

This one’s a little different—less history lecture, more origin story. Thanks for listening, and thanks for walking this whole micro-series with us. We’ll see you at the 10th anniversary celebration this October.

More From this Series

• Forgotten Leaders and Why History Matters: A Conversation with Tim Tseng

• Asian, Asian American, and the Making of a Center: A Conversation with Jane Hong

• Faith Imagination and the Fight to Belong: A Conversation with Ken Fong

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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As a second-generation British Chinese Christian and psychotherapist, I have seen firsthand how British East and Southeast Asian (BESEA) stories are diverse, shaped by different histories, families, migrations, cultures, and communities. While I do not speak for all BESEA people, I share my story in hopes that it may resonate with others who are navigating their own identity journey.

Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here

For much of my life, being British Chinese felt like living between worlds—not British enough in wider British society, not Chinese enough in Chinese spaces. I learned to adapt, code switch, and read the room while carrying what often remained invisible to others: migration history, intergenerational and family inheritance and trauma, family expectations, racialisation, silence, shame, food, language, faith, and longing. I became skilled at moving between worlds whilst rarely invited to bring the whole of myself; in Nigerian American writer Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s words, I was “too foreign for home, too foreign for here.”

For me, the Chinese diaspora church once offered a place where I could feel closer to my Chinese heritage. I heard familiar languages, shared food, and experienced intergenerational community. It was a way of being near Chineseness and experience a sense of cultural belonging and echoes of home when broader British life often made that part of me feel invisible.

However, it also became a place where I experienced significant wounding. Incomprehensibly, the place that helped me access my heritage also became the place I experienced spiritual abuse. I had to face a painful question: what does it mean to reclaim a part of your identity when one of the places that helped you access it also wounded you?

Facing Abuse

Some forms of spiritual abuse in East Asian diaspora church contexts can be difficult to name, especially when they are tangled with culture, faith, family loyalty, honour, and belonging. I share some of my own story—not as a representative account of all Chinese diaspora Christians, but in the hope that it may help others make sense of experiences they have carried.

Alongside experiencing some of the gifts from my heritage, I also came face to face with some of the traumas carried by preceding generations. In my experience, migration-shaped survival strategies, shame, silence, fear of dishonour, and pressure to endure became tangled with church life. When married with spiritual authority, these dynamics could make speaking up feel disloyal and questioning feel dangerous and unacceptable.

As a child, I was hit by an adult in Sunday school but I never told another adult. Somewhere along the way I had learned that talking about harm experienced was not what you did. Years later, as an adult in the same church, I was hit across the face by an older, influential person after sharing part of my personal story. My first instinct was not only shock about what had happened, but the expectation I had already internalised and the feelings of dread—that given this person’s standing, even if I told someone, I feared nothing meaningful would be done.

I already knew the familiar explanations: “that’s just what they’re like” or “you know what they’ve been through.” I had also learned how spiritual language could be used to shut down a conversation. When legitimate questions were met with “don’t get in the way of what God is doing,” the message I absorbed was that questioning people in power could be framed as resisting God or being disobedient, and my place was to remain silent.

I have come to understand these incidents not only as physical harm but as part of a wider pattern of spiritual abuse and misuse of power. The harm was not only contained in individual incidents, but were imprinted in the in the systems around them: who appeared to carry authority, whose behaviour was more readily explained away, whose pain was minimised, and those with the least power who were expected to absorb the cost in silence.

In that environment, culture and faith became tangled. Respect for elders, honouring those with standing, and preserving harmony can become forms of cultural coercion when they discourage truth telling or made it easier to explain away the behaviour of influential people. In my experience, these cultural and spiritual explanations often shifted attention away from the harm itself and onto whether the harmed person would stay quiet, forgiving and compliant. What may have been described as patience, loyalty or being a “good Christian” often felt, to me, like learning to submit, stay quiet, and not question those with more power and status.

Over time these patterns become formational for me. Compliance was praised. Questioning felt unwelcome. Silence became safer than speaking. Parts of me learned vigilance long ago—to scan the room, manage risk and relational safety, and protect myself from the cost of truth.

Frameworks of Healing

That is why Internal Family Systems (IFS) became such a healing framework for me to understand what happened to me. Through IFS, I began to see that these parts were not weak, bitter, or overreacting. They had been formed in a system where belonging often seemed to require self-abandonment, and where speaking honestly could feel more likely to bring danger than protection.

Pixar’s Inside Out films offer a way into understanding why the IFS model of therapy became such a healing framework for me.

In the films, we are invited into Riley’s inner world as she navigates change, loss, growing up, and life just becoming more complex. Her inner emotions are personified—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust—and the dynamics among these determine the Riley’s decisions, behaviors, and reactions.

In the first film, Joy works hard to keep Riley positive. Sadness seems inconvenient, even disruptive. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Sadness cannot simply be pushed aside—Sadness needs room to express herself and be validated. Without her, Riley cannot fully grieve, connect, or integrate what happened to her.

Through training in IFS, and experiencing it personally as a model of therapy, I found language for something Inside Out had brought to life for me: the sense that our inner worlds are made up of different “parts.” We are not a single, simple monolithic self. We have different parts of our personalities that carry different emotions, memories, fears, longings, and strategies for survival, helping us belong and make sense of our lives. Some parts work very hard to keep us functioning. Some try to protect us from pain. Some hold grief that has not yet been witnessed.

Finding Compassion

IFS helped me notice the different parts of me with compassion. There was a British part that had learned to fit in. A Chinese part that longed to belong. A grieving part that missed what was lost. An angry part that wanted distance. A protective part that said, “Stay away from anything Chinese; it is not safe.”

Before IFS, I might have suppressed those parts. I might have judged the angry part as bitter, the grieving part as weak, or the protective part as overreacting. But IFS helped me compassionately listen to each part’s story. Each part was trying to protect something precious which needed validating.

This became deeply connected to how I experienced my BESEA identity. For much of my life, I had felt pressure to choose: British or Chinese, grief or gratitude, anger or compassion, faith or truth. The pain of spiritual abuse intensified that split.

Part of me wanted to reject anything connected to the culture and community where I had been hurt. Another part of me grieved that rejection, because my culture and heritage were not defined by the abuse. Through IFS, perhaps for the first time, I discovered I did not have to choose between disparate pieces of identity and emotion—but rather, all parts of me were given room to be. They were no longer pushed away, shamed, or exiled, but welcomed home in the loving presence of God, who does not reject any part of us.

Abundant Wholeness

IFS deepened my appreciation of 1 Corinthians 12: one body, many parts. I began to see it as a picture not only of the body of Christ, but also of our inner worlds. Just as Sadness is necessary to Riley’s wholeness in Inside Out, the parts of us we may deem unsightly, embarrassing, or shameful also carry something vital. Individually and collectively, they deserve their rightful place, with honour and dignity.

While processing the grief after experiencing spiritual abuse, I cried out to God, “I don’t want anything to do with Chinese people.” In the silence, anguish, and turmoil I sensed God saying, “I have not forgotten the Chinese.”

I did not hear rebuke. I sensed assurance that in God there was abundant space to hold and welcome both my pain AND my people. God was not asking me to minimise abuse in order to reclaim my culture, nor was God asking me to reject my heritage in order to heal. In God, there was abundant space for all of who I am: British and Chinese, grieving and hopeful, angry and tender, wounded and beloved.

IFS helped me stop exiling parts of myself. It helped me appreciate and welcome that the parts of me that felt ashamed, afraid, furious or disconnected were not problems to fix or eliminate. They were places where pain needed to be witnessed. They were parts of me waiting to be welcomed home.

This is also shaping how I think about those who harm others in church communities. I can hold compassion for people who may not fully recognise the impact of what they are doing and who may themselves be acting from old survival strategies, inherited pain, and legacy burdens. An IFS-informed Christian imagination allows me to wonder what fearful, protective, or defended parts may be at work in them too—but compassion does not mean minimising harm and the far reaching impact, and grace must not become a way of protecting those with power from accountability.

The invitation of Christ, I believe, is not to bypass truth but to bring what has happened into the light. For those who have caused harm, healing and redemption require turning towards the impact of their actions with repentance, repair, accountability, humility and appropriate consequences. Without consequence, survivors are often asked to carry the cost of grace while those who harmed them are spared the cost of change.

Reclamation and Redemption

Reclaiming culture and heritage, for me, has not meant pretending the harm did not happen. It has meant slowly separating my Chinese identity from the spiritual abuse that had become tangled with it. It has meant allowing food, language, memory, faith, and community to become invitations again, rather than reminders of danger. It has meant discovering that BESEA identity can be spacious enough to hold rupture and repair, exile and home, sorrow and joy.

This continues to unfold in my life. I am learning that healing does not mean becoming less complicated; it means becoming more whole. It means trusting that God does not shame the parts of us that have been silenced, pushed away, or forced to carry too much alone.

This week, consider where culture, faith, and belonging may have become tangled with pain, for you or for someone you accompany. Which part of our stories has been silenced, shamed, or pushed away? What might happen if in God’s presence, those parts were listened to with compassion, and welcomed home in spaciousness? And where harm has been named, what would it look like to turn towards truth, accountability, and repair with humility?

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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• Ken’s path to Fuller in 1978, and the wave of Japanese American and Chinese American students who shaped the seminary’s Asian American presence in that era

• Why Japanese American churches—shaped by the incarceration camps and shifting generational leadership—became, in Ken’s words, a reluctant “vanguard” of pan-Asian ministry

• Evergreen Baptist’s decision to hire its first Chinese American associate pastor, and Ken’s framing of the church as evolving from a “Japanese restaurant” to a fusion menu still cooked by Asian American chefs

• Ken’s early clashes over “new wineskins” for American-born Chinese ministry, and the “30 years too soon” conversation that followed

• The founding and dissolution of Fuller’s earlier Asian American Initiative—including the racism Ken and Daniel encountered while trying to institutionalize the program, and why Ken ultimately stepped down so the Center could be funded

• Ken and Daniel’s reflections on the emotional toll of that transition, and what it meant to rebuild afterward

• Why Asian American women students were consistently among the strongest in Ken’s classes—and how few went on into full-time ministry

• Ken’s shift over time from megachurch ambitions to a more communal, formation-centered vision of Asian American church

This one runs long on institutional history, but it’s essential context for understanding what the Center stands on. Thanks for listening!

More From this Series

• Forgotten Leaders and Why History Matters: A Conversation with Tim Tseng

• Asian, Asian American, and the Making of a Center: A Conversation with Jane Hong

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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Forward Together

This year, we are celebrating a decade of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary—through Centering: the Asian American Christian Podcast, we are embarking on a journey tracing the broader histories of Asian American Christianity and identity formation on through the formation of the first Asian American student groups at Fuller; and in October, our festivities culminate with an anniversary gala in Pasadena, Forward Together: A Decade of Cultivating Leaders for a Flourishing Asian American Church.

As part of our festivities we also collaborated with renown Asian American graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang and 1587 Sneakers (an Asian American-owned brand rooted in culture, identity, and community) for a limited-edition commemorative t-shirt designed around a phrase that sits at the heart of our voice: I Speak Asian American. The back of the shirt features the closing scene from Yang’s American Born Chinese graphic novel.

We chatted with Yang last fall about the t-shirt collab, his work, and the backstory of the design that we chose to feature on the back of our shirt.

AAC: For people who may not be as familiar with your work, how do you typically introduce yourself?

Gene Luen Yang: My name is Gene Luen Yang, I’m a cartoonist and a comic book writer. The book I’m most well known for is American Born Chinese, which came out 20 years ago about the Asian American experience. Since then I’ve written for Super-man and Shang-Chi at Marvel, and now I’m doing Ninja Turtles.

AAC: Could you share the story behind the cafe scene illustration, and what you were thinking when designing it?

GLY: That panel comes from the very end of American Born Chinese. The story revolves around this friendship—there’s a young man named Jin, who’s a Chinese American, and he becomes friends with this immigrant kid named Wei-Chen. And there’s a lot of tension between the relationship all the way through, mostly because Jin has a hard time accepting himself as an Asian American. So that scene in the cafe is the reconciliation scene. It’s where Jin kind of asks for forgiveness from Wei-Chen, and it’s also where Jin finally accepts himself.

AAC: What does this collaboration with 1587 and the Asian American Center mean to you?

GLY: I think it’s pretty amazing. I think it’s amazing that Asian Americans have our own clothing brand now, and I think it’s amazing that there’s an entire section of a campus that is devoted to Asian Americans and Asian American issues. That’s not something that I could have imagined when I was a kid. I think it kind of shows the progress that we as a community have made. I have kids now—my oldest is 22—I talk to him about whether he struggles with the same emotional realities that I had, and he doesn’t. The idea that you might have shame about who you are is just not a thing for him. I think places like the Asian American Center and movements like 1587, they all contribute to that.

AAC: The shirt includes the phrase, “I Speak Asian American.” What do you think about that idea in relation to the design?

GLY: I did not come up with that, you know, I only did the drawing on the back. I think it’s a great motto because one of the things that divides Asian Americans from each other is language. I think early on in the Asian American movement, we had Japanese Americans and Filipino Americans and Chinese Americans, and we all came from different language groups. So ultimately, we had to overcome that in order to become unified, and the phrase “I speak Asian American” kind of points to that current reality, that we have overcome that. We have found things that have tied us together, things that have unified us as a community.

AAC: Is there a detail in the illustration or in your creative process that you especially want people to notice?

GLY: The scene takes place in a cafe—490 Cafe. That cafe is actually based on a real cafe that my friends and I used to go to in college. I went to Berkeley, and we used to drive into Oakland Chinatown on the weekends to get Chinese food. This cafe isn’t there anymore, but back in the ‘90s, there was a cafe called ABC Cafe, it was right in the middle of Oakland Chinatown, and it served really unusual food. So it served American food—hamburgers and spaghetti—but everything would taste a little bit off, at least to us, as Chinese Americans and Asian Americans.

Later we found out the history of that cafe. I think in the ‘70s and ‘80s in Taiwan, there was this explosion of American food—like American food became very popular. So all the young people would go to these American-style cafes and eat hamburgers and spaghetti. But the food was made with local ingredients, so it was made with Asian ingredients, right? So everything would taste a little bit different than how things would taste here in America.

Eventually, those students grew up, they went to college, they went to grad school, a lot of them came to the Bay Area, and ABC Cafe opened to serve American-style food made with Chinese ingredients to these students, because when they tasted actual American food, it tasted kind of strange to them. So we as Asian Americans would go there, and it would sort of be familiar, but not familiar to us. And even though that cafe isn’t around anymore, I still have distinct memories of hanging out there with my college friends. So that’s part of it.

The other part, the name, I decided not to name it ABC Cafe in the book, because I thought it was just a little too on-the-nose—to be in a cafe with that name in a book called “American Born Chinese” was just too much. So I ended up naming it 490 Cafe. 490 is a number from the Bible—there’s a moment in the Gospels where Jesus is asked how often you have to forgive your brother, and his answer is, in certain translations, at least, 70 times 7, which is a way of saying, you always have to forgive, you always have to work towards reconciliation. Because what happens in that cafe in the book is this reconciliation between Jin and Wei-Chen, and also between Jin and himself, I felt like 490 was a perfect name for that cafe.

AAC: If you had to describe this design for someone seeing it for the first time, what would you say?

GLY: I think that design shows a lot of heart. It obviously comes from a place of pride in Asian America. And as an Asian American, I really appreciate that.

Click here to order this limited-edition t-shirt!

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Forward Together Gala: You Are Invited!

Ticket sales are open for our gala celebration! The event will gather community leaders, alumni, and partners for an evening of commemoration, gratitude, and vision-casting for the next decade. We’ll honor AAC alumni whose faithful service has shaped communities across the country, present the inaugural AAC Catalyst Awards, and hear from keynote speaker Gene Luen Yang. Sponsorship opportunities are also available—contact AAC@fuller.edu to become an event sponsor.

Listen to Our Anniversary Micro-Series on the Centering Podcast

Episode 1: Forgotten Leaders and Why History Matters, a conversation with Tim Tseng
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Substack

Episode 2: Asian, Asian American, and the Making of a Center, a conversation with Jane Hong
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Substack

More episodes to come!

About Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang is a National Book Award finalist, Printz and Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His graphic novel American Born Chinese was adapted into an acclaimed Disney+ series.

About 1587 Sneakers

Named for the year the first Asians—Filipino sailors—set foot on what is now the continental U.S., 1587 Sneakers is an Asian American-owned footwear and streetwear brand founded in 2022 by Adam King and Sam Hyun. It is the first sneaker brand in the U.S. that is owned, designed, and inspired by Asian American culture—empowering Asian Americans to be unapologetically themselves.

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees—grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

• How Jane’s research originated—partly from a 2017 gathering of Asian American Christians processing the 2016 election, and partly from trying to understand her own family members who voted for Trump across three elections

• Why anti-communism, generational trauma, and disinformation help explain (without excusing) political conservatism in many Asian immigrant communities—and how to hold disagreement with grace

• Fuller’s “vaunted” place in white evangelical history, and the untold story of its growth since the 1980s through Asian, Asian American, and international student enrollment

• The institutional tension between “Asian” and “Asian American” identity at Fuller—including the assumption that Korean international programs could simply stand in for Asian American ministry

• Key figures and flashpoints: the 1965 Immigration Act, the 1992 LA Uprising (Saigu), the “Silent Exodus” article, InterVarsity pioneers like Jeanette Yep, and the funding disparities between Black, Hispanic, and Asian pastoral programs at Fuller

• Jane’s hope for the next generation: that Asian American history becomes a normal part of the curriculum, not a side note—and that understanding racial structures helps Christians navigate the world with wisdom, not blindness

A rich, detail-filled conversation for anyone wanting to understand how Asian American evangelicalism took shape—and why Fuller has been more central to that story than most people realize.

Order Jane’s Book

Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion by Jane Fong, PhD: [link]

About Jane Hong

Jane Hong is professor of history at Occidental College and the author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Hong’s forthcoming book, An Ambivalent Presence: Asian American Evangelicals and the Problem of Race (Oxford University Press, 2027), explores how post-1965 Asian immigrants and their children changed the optics and economics of U.S. evangelical institutions and politics without fundamentally changing their power structures.

More From this Series

Forgotten Leaders and Why History Matters: A Conversation with Tim Tseng

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

Being Taiwanese is complicated in a world that does not recognise the country. In many overseas settings, I am often thrown into a Chinese overseas community where people from mainland China are the majority. While I love that the chance to speak Mandarin, it is hard when I have to change words to be more understandable—or worse, being scolded (even within the church) when I would say I am from Taiwan. I have memories of carrying a map on my phone so that I could stop each person who shouted China to me and show them where Taiwan is. Too often, they were just confused and thought it was Thailand.

All of these identities I hold—Taiwanese, Asian American, Third Culture Kid (TCK)—are all liminal identities. People fight for these in-between spaces to find safe ground. Yet with all these identities combined, I often find myself not fully belonging in any boxes, always hanging with one leg in the margin of already tight spaces. It is easy to feel isolated.

Born in the Margins

These interstitial tensions have been part of my story since childhood. As the child of an international student in the U.S., I am deeply grateful for how the Taiwanese immigrant church in California supported my family while my dad tried to finish school and my normally bubbly mom struggled to communicate in public. That church became our extended family, even after we returned to Taiwan. To this day, I have taken more holiday trips with the uncles and aunties from this church than my own relatives.

However, being a TCK going back and forth between U.S. and Taiwan meant I never fully belonged in either place. Every year on my birthday, my grandma reminded me she did not know my “real”(lunar) birthday because I was born in the U.S. Yet when I returned to my birthplace for holidays, some kids did not want to play with me because my English was not good enough. I was too Taiwanese for the kids at church, too American for my family, too in-between for both worlds.

Almost 30 years later, when I returned to California for graduate school, I was grateful for the ethnic studies centers that spoke directly about part of me. However, I always felt slightly off in each space as pieces of who I am scattered in different centers.

Navigating Ministry as a TCK

These early experiences of fragmented belonging followed me into my ministry. Serving in South Africa as a missionary within an organization shaped by a long history of Western and white normality did not ease this longing for connection. I once thought naively that when people claim to love Jesus, the spaces they occupied would be safe. Being in full-time ministry, I assumed, meant loving all people for all parts of who they are, especially coworkers.

But reality felt different: dry fish was no longer a comfort food, but instead, something to mock. I hesitated to share my honest family dynamics during team prayer sessions for fear of being labeled “strange.” Code-switching in meetings drained me. I constantly wondered which part of me could safely show up.

The hardest moments came with waves of imposter syndrome, when I would want to fight for my people, but doubted whether I could speak for communities where I still did not fully fit in.

Broken Pieces, Finding Wholeness

In the midst of these tensions, I hold on to the truth and comfort that God handles all my broken pieces—my cultural identities, family history, transitions, and the places I have lived—like a beautiful piece of kintsugi artwork, bringing fractured pieces together in God’s hands.

God knows all parts of us. We are never alone, and all of who we are matters to God. El Roi, the God who saw Hagar in her marginalization and intercultural struggle, still sees and cares for us today.

This truth becomes more real through the people God placed around me. During my time at Fuller, I was drawn to Rev. Mary Ellen Azada when she shared her story during an Asian American Women’s gathering—how she was unapologetically owned the complexity of who she was.

I gathered the courage to contact her. Sitting with her, I felt seen in a way I had not in years. After hearing my story, she reminded me that I may not find people with the same puzzle pieces as mine. Instead, she prayed that I would find those willing to appreciate my puzzle and help put it together alongside me.

After years of striving to fully belong, she offered me a new way to see myself: my complexity is not a burden but a calling.

Slowly, I have learned to trust again and to find people who embrace all of me. I remember the impact of and care I felt when South African colleagues checked in after the 2021 Atlanta spa shooting. My team learned about Taiwan history during a prayer meeting and supported protests through intercession. Friends made sure I had hotpot during Covid lockdown, when I was the only Asian in the house.

Cross-cultural ministry still requires bracing myself before meetings. Microaggressions still cut through my skin from time to time. Standing at the margins still makes it challenging to show up authentically.

I may never find someone with the same background, but I can look for those who value my puzzle pieces and love me even when they do not fully understand. I can rest in the truth that God sees all of us and holds it all together.

My voice and perspective, often different from those around me, is a gift from God. I may never fit neatly into a box, but God can use my complexity to sing a new song to the people who both God and I love and care deeply about.

Additional Resources

Kintsugi (feat. Dr. Kenneth Wang, Fuller Seminary Professor of Psychology and PhD Program Chair, Clinical Psychology Department)

The Silent Asian American Majority by Daniel D. Lee and Denise Peñacerrada Kruse
”…even in Asian American Christian spaces, there are still voices and identities that get marginalized and tokenized.”

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees—grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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• The origins of PACTS: a 1972 gathering of Bay Area pastors trained in mainline Protestant seminaries who began questioning assimilation and erasure within their denominations

• The newly republished PACTS Reader, edited by Roy Sano and now available through Claremont Press—the story behind bringing this out-of-print, historically significant text back into circulation

• AACHI’s mission and the “pearl divers” metaphor for surfacing hard-to-find Asian American Christian stories

• The Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State (1968) and the birth of ethnic studies as a backdrop to the Asian American Christian movement

• How the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power shaped Asian American Christian consciousness, and PACTS’ relationship to (and distinction from) liberation theology

• The story of Mabel Lee, a pioneering unordained church leader and suffrage advocate in New York’s Chinatown at the turn of the century

• The danger of “Columbusing”—claiming to discover ideas and movements that our elders were already engaging with over fifty years ago

• Tim’s reflection on being forced out of theological academia in 2005, and what nearly 20 years in local church ministry taught him about listening to God’s people at the grassroots

We hope you enjoy this series!

Additional Resources

Tim Tseng: [linked]

The PACTS Reader (Claremont Press): [linked]

PACTS Archive: [linked]

Asian American Christian History Institute: [linked]

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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“Chinese people in Mississippi? What happened there?”

That question kicks off our documentary, Far East Deep South, and it’s a question audiences ask after watching the Oscar-winning film, Sinners. At first, the thought of a vampire-inspired film set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi might seem an unlikely source of spiritual inspiration.

Yet, both films reveal how the segregated South became an unexpected place for discovery, healing, and cross-cultural unity, where God’s presence showed up in unconventional ways.

Excluded, Together

In the 1930s Mississippi Delta, Jim Crow and Chinese Exclusion laws forced marginalized groups together. Chinese immigrants were brought to the Delta as sharecroppers in the late 1800s to replace Black labor. But just like the broken promises of the gold rush and railroads, they realized they were being exploited by plantation owners.

With restrictive immigration laws simultaneously barring most of them from labor jobs, they pivoted to opening grocery stores. These businesses offered fairer prices than the overinflated plantation commissaries while extending interest-free credit. Classified as “colored,” they couldn’t live in white neighborhoods, so they lived and worked next to their Black neighbors.

In a Far East Deep South panel discussion, Pastor Darryl Johnson, the former mayor of Mound Bayou, noted that the region’s history isn’t complete without acknowledging how these communities relied on each other.

Early in the film Sinners, Michael B. Jordan’s character walks into a Chinese-run grocery store. They hug, talk business, and laugh as friends. There was trust. Skeptical viewers questioned if this was Hollywood revisionism. It’s not. That alliance of survival and even friendship was real. I know because a Black farmer named Hosey Collins was a close friend of my grandfather, KC Lou, in Pace, Mississippi, where they worked with and for each other.

Sacred + Secular

Furthermore, faith and culture were deeply connected in these spaces. In a time when Chinese kids couldn’t go to white schools, the local white church helped start Chinese mission schools. After church, the Chinese would gather to dance to the music of the times. Sinners wrestles with the era’s stigma of the blues as the “devil’s music.” My wife, Larissa Lam, and I (as hip-hop artist Only Won) faced a similar hurdle in our own Chinese churches. We were told that rap, rock, dance, and R&B were music for other racial groups and couldn’t be used by God. Yet today, modern gospel music owes its structure to the blues, rock was influenced by gospel, and Christian hip-hop plays in stadiums and even at the Olympics. Our history shows that God was in our communities long ago, creating in us the ability to enjoy and use our unique gifts.

In Sinners, the vampires had to be allowed in. Spiritual darkness operates the same way. It thrives when we allow prejudice, division, or the rigid policing of cultural expressions into our congregations, burying shared history that ultimately keeps us in the dark.

For Your Week

As pastors and lay leaders, our history asks us to evaluate how we view God’s purpose for His people. As you head into your week, ask yourself: Who is currently standing in the margins of our community? Whose story do I prejudge or not understand?

Are we unknowingly inviting division, or are we building a safe space of cross-cultural unity like we saw in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow and Chinese Exclusion era?

About Far East Deep South

The multi-award winning PBS film Far East Deep South follows the stories of producer Baldwin Chiu’s family history and testimony to uncover and explore the lost history of Chinese families in the segregated South during the Chinese Exclusion era. Far East Deep South has been seen by nearly 2 million people, and he is currently on a national film & speakers tour, which included a screening at the Museum of the Bible in D.C.

Additional Resources

• Film: Far East Deep South

• Book: The Spirituals and the Blues by James H. Cone

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees—grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

The conversation explores:

• How the book’s title emerged from a single cacophonous poem weaving together her grandfather’s experience in postwar Vietnamese reeducation camps, asylum testimony, and questions of public memory—and its resonance with Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones

• Why revision, for Michelle, is a spiritual practice—including the story of a poem addressed to “the enemy” that only became true once she recognized her own desire to win, rather than to love

• Her unconventional path into poetry: from a college Asian American writing collective, to narrative breaking down into fragments, to a formative writing class with poet Solmaz Sharif

• Why she believes she’s writing to preserve a kind of remembering—drawing on a story about Vietnamese language surviving Chinese colonization through “a critical mass of rememberers”

• The necessity of leaving gaps in language—and why trying to fully explain grief or wonder can betray the experience itself

• Her unexpected, dramatic conversion story at a college church service in New Haven, after a season of spiritual searching that included a Buddhist meditation practice

• Navigating faith within a predominantly white Vineyard community—finding theological resonance in the integration of word and spirit, while wrestling with not fully belonging

• The poem “After Salvation” and the disorientation of being “rescued”—both as a refugee and as a Christian—without a clear roadmap for what comes next

• Writing prompts to borrow for your own journaling: Alexander Chee’s “What don’t you want to know?” and Bhanu Kapil’s “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?”

A reflective, generous conversation about poetry as a spiritual practice—and an invitation to anyone (poet or not) to bring more curiosity and surrender to their own writing and prayer life.

Pre-order her book: [linked here]

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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We often assume that sexual addiction is, at its core, a problem of lust. A sex-crazed brain with an insatiable appetite for pleasure. Consequently, the church has largely responded with more confession, more purity pledges, and more spiritual disciplines. Try harder. Want it less.

In truth, while sex-crazed people do exist, they are vastly outnumbered by another population.

Tortured Restlessness

After working with people trapped in cycles of sexual compulsivity, one pattern surfaces repeatedly: the behavior rarely begins with sexual desire. It begins with pain. With loneliness. With a crushing sense of inadequacy, or an anxiety so relentless that a person will do anything just to make it stop.

This is both a clinical observation and a spiritual one. These are souls searching for a relief that only God was ever meant to provide, finding a counterfeit instead. Augustine understood this long before modern psychology: “Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

Compulsive behavior is tortured restlessness looking for rest in the wrong places.

Trapped in the Cycle

In the wake of my own betrayal trauma and subsequent divorce, I entered one of the most extensive periods of pornography consumption of my life. A fly on the wall would conclude I was horny and perverted. Yet my behavior did not start with desire. It started with the pain of my reality: I was unwanted by my wife. I wanted to flee from the pain of seeing all my dreams for the future dashed. And in my fantasy, I could experience the illusion of being wanted.

Those of us who keep falling aren’t simply weak-willed or licentious. More often, we are people who learned, perhaps in childhood, that emotions were dangerous or unbearable, and therefore had to be numbed.

The problem is that we stumbled upon one of the most potent numbing agents available. It worked so well that it became habitual, and with the habit came a chronic feeling of being the worst of sinners. These are the poor in spirit, to whom belong the Kingdom of Heaven.

Yet what happens when the poor in spirit cannot find their rest in God’s grace? They find it in the very thing that makes them feel like the worst of sinners, and thus the tormented cycle continues.

Unconditional Welcome

Breaking this cycle doesn’t depend on a tighter lockdown on our behavior. It begins with genuinely acquainting ourselves with our pain. Practically speaking, the next time you feel pulled toward a compulsive sexual behavior, ask yourself: “What reality am I trying to escape right now?” The answer may reveal exactly where God wants to meet you.

The grace of God invites us to treat ourselves less as messes to clean up, and more as souls to be known. How God meets us in that quiet, safe space remains a sacred mystery. Perhaps for the first time in a long time, we will find He is the very relief, the unconditional welcome, we have been exhausting ourselves to find elsewhere.

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees—grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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Topics covered:

• Steve’s surprising road to faith: a devout atheist in college, a frightening drug experience, a season of vulnerability with a therapist, a breakthrough moment of compassion with his sister, and finally—fittingly—becoming a Christian through reading a comparative world religions book

• The origin of Little Lights: meeting an eighth grader who couldn’t read a Dr. Seuss book, and the heartbreak that became the spark for a ministry

• Why Little Lights teaches anti-racism and “race literacy” classes rooted in scripture—and how interest in that teaching has shifted with the political climate, from post-Trayvon Martin to the George Floyd surge to today’s pushback

• Unpacking the model minority myth: how U.S. immigration policy handpicked certain Asian immigrants for “honorary white” status, bypassing the redlining, segregation, and policing that shaped Black communities—and how that history gets erased into a story about “family values” alone

• The challenge and necessity of being a Korean American leader serving primarily in a Black community for decades—gaining trust, navigating being seen as an outsider, and inviting more Korean American Christians into the work

• A theology of anger: why Steve believes you can’t fully love without it, and how to direct anger toward justice rather than letting it curdle into bitterness or depression

• Hard-earned lessons on healthy ministry growth—including advice from Bruce Main of Urban Promise about not getting desperate for help—and Steve’s conviction that community health, not budget size or social media followers, should be ministry’s true metric

• A glimpse into partnering in ministry with his wife, Mary, and raising a family while doing intense, emotionally demanding work

A grounded, hard-won conversation from someone who has done the long, unglamorous work of cross-racial ministry for decades—and has the wisdom (and humility) to show for it.

Little Lights: [linked here]

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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Ministry (and sometimes simply existing) can be lonely. Even in the best of circumstances where everyone is nice and welcoming, it’s possible to never be truly known or understood. Then there are the spaces where belonging demands conformity. The price of belonging, then, is to lose parts of our identity.

Isolation, Longing, and Shame

As a Filipino American who spent much of my life in predominantly White spaces and even some diverse spaces where I was the only Filipino American in the room, this loneliness had become commonplace. So for most of my life, whether I realized it or not at the time, being Filipino American came with a sense of shame.

What does it do to our souls when we’re always perceived as a novelty and oddity? What damage is done when vulnerably sharing our painful experiences is met with dismissal, demands for “evidence,” or insults to our intelligence or humanity? What remains unhealed when our pain is received with love and sympathy, but without full understanding?

Even when I’ve been in spaces with unity and a dedication to gospel-centered racial justice, there have continued to be pieces of my story that couldn’t be understood, wounds that couldn’t fully heal, and deep longings—longings I didn’t even know to name—that remained unfulfilled.

Could there be something better than this? Is it possible to be in a space where everyone is truly known and understood on this side of eternity? For many years, I thought the answer to this question was, “no,” but being part of the FAMI (Filipino American Ministry Initiative) Pastoral Formation Cohort gave me a new perspective.

My Soul is Healing

During our first Zoom meeting, when I saw faces that looked like mine—characteristic brown skin, flat noses, when I heard perfect English spoken with various degrees of a Filipino accent sprinkled on some words, I felt a familiarity that made my body relax. Then as I listened to them share their insights, I was blown away by the brilliance and anointing I saw in each person. After that meeting, I wrote in my journal, “My heart is full. I already feel my soul healing.”

There was an honesty and vulnerability in our meetings. We each brought our full selves—messiness and all—with no fear of being judged or gaslit. We received each other’s stories. And in doing so, each of us heard echoes of our own. We didn’t have to explain every detail—we all understood.

It’s one thing to share your story with an empathetic witness. It’s a whole other thing to share your story with a witness who can’t help but empathize because, though some of the details may be different, they lived that same story, too. Through this sacred act of story sharing and receiving, I encountered the God Who Sees, the Word Made Flesh, in a profoundly healing way.

Coming Home to Each Other

After nine months of Zoom meetings, we finally met in person for our concluding retreat. At that point, we already knew and trusted each other deeply. And from the very beginning of day one, laughter and tears were abundant. I’ve never felt so safe, seen, understood, and loved by an entire group before in my life. Being among them felt like experiencing the very best of the family of God and communion with God himself.

All of us in this cohort are home now, scattered throughout the country. For the first time in my life, I feel a genuine pride in being Filipino without shame. And I am not alone anymore. An important part of my identity has been redeemed and deep wounds have begun to heal. I don’t want what I experienced through this cohort to just be a memory. I want it to continue to expand my imagination for what could be.

As we live in the now and not yet, what if there are things we thought were only reserved for heaven that God actually wants us to start experiencing on this side of eternity? Do we have the imagination to dream and ask for these things—for ourselves and for our communities? And do we have the courage to say “yes” when we’re given the opportunity to work towards them and receive whatever God has for us?

About FAMI

The Filipino American Ministry Initiative (FAMI) of Fuller Seminary exists to empower Filipino American Christians to lead and flourish in ministry. Central to this are FAMI’s formation groups, which integrate spirituality, identity, relationships, academics, ministry, and leadership. As a community, each formation group prioritizes learning and connecting deeply with ourselves, with God, and with others. For more information about FAMI and our formation groups, email fami@fuller.edu.

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

Drew traces his journey back to a summer internship in Queens that changed everything: arriving expecting to learn urban ministry, and instead being introduced to Pete Scazzero’s emerging framework of emotionally healthy discipleship. From there, the conversation moves into deeply personal territory:

• Drew’s early skepticism and “Pharisee” posture toward inner work, and the slow unraveling of his neat theological categories through grief, 9/11, and family loss

• His complicated, healing relationship with his father—including the moment his father, after reading Drew’s manuscript, wrote back: “I wish I could’ve been a better daddy”

• A painful, years-long falling out with mentor Pete Scazzero, and what it took to reconcile

• Why grief is often the hardest spiritual practice to access—illustrated by a story of Drew “losing it” while caring for his kids during his wife’s medical emergency, and what that taught him about over-functioning as a trauma response

• How leaning into his own Korean American story—rather than erasing it—has shaped his leadership of a multiethnic church, and why “the most particular is the most universal”

• Practicing slow, embodied spirituality (Sabbath, silence, monastic rhythms) in the relentless pace of New York City

• What grounds his hope for the local church despite real reasons for disillusionment

A vulnerable, unhurried conversation that’s part theology, part memoir, and a good reminder that there’s no shortcut to becoming whole.

Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: [linked here]

Hope Church NYC: [linked here]

Drew’s book, Beautiful, Disappointing Hopeful: How Gratitude, Grief, and Grace Reflect the Christian Story

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About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

On April 10, 2026, Dr. Jessica ChenFeng, chair of the Doctor of Marriage Family Therapy program at Fuller Seminary and director of the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory delivered a plenary address at a conference presented by the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and the Rosemead School of Psychology at Biola University, titled Our Flourishing, Our Faith: Navigating Rupture and Repair in Asian American Christian Communities.

In her lecture, Dr. ChenFeng preached, taught, and told the truth all at once: the work of repair in our families is lifelong, relational, and sacred. Drawing on 20 years of clinical practice and her own family history, she walked through a relational framework for understanding rupture, then illustrated it through a composite case study of a young Asian American couple navigating grief, family expectations, and shame.

To learn more and watch more presentations from this conference, visit https://ourflourishing.org/.

Watch the full replay of Dr. ChenFeng’s presentation below:

Key Takeaways

• Sanctification is “a long faithfulness across generations.” The healing our parents and grandparents didn’t get to finish isn’t a failure—it’s a relay. We inherit unfinished repair work, and we pass forward what we’re able to mend.

• We cannot heal ourselves. Contrary to what self-help culture tells us, rupture happens relationally—in families, churches, and communities—so repair also has to happen relationally, modeled on the mutual, self-giving love of the Trinity.

• Rupture isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s yelling and conflict; sometimes it’s a family quietly eating dinner in separate rooms. Both are a loss of felt connection, and both shape us just as deeply.

• Shame keeps us from seeing ourselves clearly—and it’s the biggest barrier to repair. Many Asian American clients, especially women, struggle to name their own needs or strengths because they were never given permission to ask.

• Repair looks different in every relationship. Reconciling with a parent (often reflective, sometimes even after they’ve passed) is not the same work as repairing with a spouse (active, ongoing) or a child (daily, in the small moments of taking responsibility out loud).

Next Steps

• Notice before you fix. The first move toward repair isn’t a strategy—it’s simply noticing what rupture has occurred and how your body and nervous system are responding to it.

• Get curious about your family’s story. Ask what shaped the people who raised you: migration, trauma, silence, survival. Every response has a reason behind it, even the ones that hurt you.

• Take stock of what you’ve been taught to bury. If you were raised to keep the peace, not name anger, or serve everyone else’s feelings first, that’s worth naming honestly—not judging, just understanding.

• Consider whether a therapist could help. Dr. ChenFeng’s own conviction: if you’re even asking “should we see a therapist?”—the answer is yes. Repair is hard to do alone, and it’s not meant to be done alone.

• Practice the small, daily faithfulness. Repair with children and spouses often isn’t one big conversation—it’s the repeated, ordinary choice to regulate yourself, take responsibility, and come back to the relationship again.

“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Let us engage in the slow, faithful practice of returning—to ourselves, to one another, and to God.

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About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees—grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

The conversation covers:

• Why Jean wrote the book: growing up in Korean American evangelical spaces (and broader U.S. Christian culture) where she rarely heard stories of unresolved, long-term suffering—and the toxic message that real faith should look like constant joy, certainty, and answered prayer

• A warm, nurturing church upbringing as a pastor’s kid, paired with a self-critical, melancholic temperament that absorbed and amplified harmful theological messages

• Her parents’ striking, unshaming response to her mental health struggles—including their reflection on a formative early trauma they felt responsible for

• A vivid, moving story: being sent to live with relatives in Korea as a baby, then flown alone to the U.S. at 22 months old after her aunt grew attached to her—and the lasting effects of that early separation (a story Yulee shares a striking parallel to from her own childhood)

• The long, hard-won process of trusting that Jesus is present in depression and doubt rather than disappointed by it—with help from her Aunt Miyong, a retired pastor, and contemplative writers like Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, and Henri Nouwen

• Why she now describes herself as more of a doubter than a believer, and what faith looks like when intellectual certainty isn’t available

• A connection to Luther’s Anfechtung and the idea that wrestling with God—not quiet submission—is at the heart of the biblical story (Israel as the one who wrestles with God)

• The unexpected comfort of contemplative spirituality: “silence is God’s first language,” and the idea that something is happening in prayer even when it isn’t felt

• Sustaining daily practices: a prayer app, NYT word puzzles, checking in with friends by text, and unwinding with Korean dramas

• A fun detour into Jean’s love of languages—French, Korean, and Arabic (including reading Harry Potter in Arabic to build vocabulary)

A rich, honest conversation well-suited for church book groups—not just for those who’ve experienced mental illness, but for anyone wrestling with unresolved pain and wondering what kind of God they’re dealing with.

Jean’s book, Christ in the Abyss

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About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

I am not a pastor. I am someone who has spent her entire life inside the church. My family attended every Sunday, and for better or worse, the church became the framework of my entire world. My closest relationships were formed there, as were the foundations of my faith.

But even within this bubble of safety, I absorbed a type of performative, checklist-centered Christianity, where it felt like God constantly needed to be chased down. It was as if God chose proximity to me dependent on my actions. The friendships I held outside of the church came with a nagging guilt that I wasn’t doing enough to bring those people in. My nearness to God was measured by the eloquence of my prayers, my knowledge of Scripture, and the earnestness with which I sang songs of praise.

A lifetime attending church, seven years into vocational ministry, and I still find myself stumbling over my words when I pray, unable to recite all the books of the Bible by heart, and sometimes I simply don’t feel like singing. But God does not feel far at all. And beyond spiritually knowing that God is near, I viscerally feel that He is near.

I feel His nearness in the rustling of the leaves as I walk my dog. I feel it in the hug I share with a friend after a good conversation and before I walk back to my car. I feel Him in the warmth of a blanket I wrap myself in as I sit on the couch and press play. In fact, as church became not only a place of worship but also my place of work, I’ve been finding it especially sweet to become more aware of God’s presence in places outside of ministry.

He is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. –Acts 17:27-28

My childhood memories of church are fond ones. The walls of the church provided a fortress from an outside world that mocked my parents’ accent and blanched at our food. But the good and gracious God I first met at church was never confined to it. He is in the world too, and He invites us into it—even when parts of it haven’t welcomed us.

In some ways, I feel like a child again. Eager to be in the world with my Heavenly Father. Not just at church. Not just in the spiritual practices. But in everything.

Additional Resources

Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast, Everyday Rhythms and Sacred Encounters with guest Rev. Dr. Kevin Doi
A reflective, practical conversation for anyone wrestling with how to experience God beyond Sunday mornings and quiet times—in the actual texture of an ordinary day.
Apple Podcasts | SoundCloud | Spotify

Faith Reimagined: Enjoying God in the Places we Eat, Work, and Play
A sermon series from Citizens LA
Also on Apple Podcasts | Spotify

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

Kevin pushes back on the sacred-secular divide many of us were discipled into, drawing on Ignatian spirituality and his mentors David Fitch and Wendy Farley to make the case that God isn’t contained in church spaces—the church exists in the world, and the world is where God is already present and active.

The conversation covers:

• Why the church is the container for worship, not the container for God’s presence

• How ordinary moments—feeding a baby, making pour-over coffee, dancing, rock climbing, having coffee with a coworker—can become contemplative practices when we simply notice God in them

• The danger of spiritual practices becoming the goal instead of the portal—when “did I read my Bible today” replaces the deeper question of whether we’re actually being transformed

• Reframing Luke 10: the “harvest” Jesus sends his followers into isn’t a metaphor for evangelism quotas, but literal life among literal people—meaning those of us “out in the world” in our jobs and neighborhoods are the lucky ones, not those cloistered in church offices

• The Prayer of Examen as a practice of gratitude and attentiveness, not a moral scorecard

• A vulnerable, hard-earned story: a moment Kevin didn’t stop for a woman on the sidewalk who needed help, and what that taught him about how “inconvenience” gets in the way of paying attention to God

A reflective, practical conversation for anyone wrestling with how to experience God beyond Sunday mornings and quiet times—in the actual texture of an ordinary day.

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About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

When I was an MFT (Marriage and Family Therapy) trainee 20 years ago—that first year of clinical work, still in grad school, still under supervision—I co-facilitated a weekly court-ordered group therapy for parents. These were parents in a 52-week parenting class because of some circumstance where child abuse or neglect had been suspected.

Every Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to noon, I showed up to co-facilitate those groups. Which meant every Friday night, I was filled with dread—racing thoughts, knots in my stomach and chest, trouble sleeping—over-preparing for something I couldn’t quite name. There were understandable reasons: the impostor syndrome that arrives early in any career, the awareness that I was young and not yet a parent myself, and the anxiety I had learned through my own family system dynamics.

But there was another layer to that anxiety—one I didn’t have language for until my doctoral program.

The Water I Was Swimming In

Even though I had grown up steeped in Asian American Christian spaces—my home church, high school, UCLA’s Asian American Navigators campus ministry—I had deeply internalized the way that the intersection of my gender, race, and Christian identity kept me dysconscious: disconnected from myself and overly attuned to others. Specifically, to the people I had been socialized to serve and notice—East Asian men in the church, and my white supervisors and faculty.

That was the water I was swimming in, and I didn’t know it was water. While pursuing my master’s degree, I didn’t have the kind of critical education and whole-person Christian integration our students have access to now.

I thank God that my doctoral education did, and I often think of those years as saving me. It saved me from a life of functioning out of duty and obligation disconnected from the fullness of who God made me to be—and from missing my own encounter with why Jesus came. That we might have life—an integrated, embodied life—and have it to the full.

Realigned Frameworks

If you’ve taken courses with faculty from the Asian American Center, you know the value of critical knowledge—not just our own personal experiences as Asian Americans, but the structural and systemic lens that comes from understanding how race functions in society, and how it shapes who we are and how we show up with one another.

But I want to say something important: critical knowledge and education alone do not change our relationship to ourselves, to others, or to God. The knowledge on its own does not make us more like Jesus. This is my personal gripe with the shallow information overload on social media—awareness dressed up as transformation.

When I say my education saved me, what I mean is this: it gave me a framework to begin the hard, courageous work of intrapersonal and relational alignment—of bringing my life into accord with what I believe to be good and true. Years of individual therapy with three psychoanalysts, four couples therapists, spiritual direction, executive coaching, and perhaps most importantly, loving friends and community that carried me/us through.

Finding Truth and Goodness

What has God shown me to be good and true? That my Asian American, Taiwanese American identity is a beautiful inheritance from God and from my ancestors—one I can fully own. Working through my own internalized racism, my socialization around anti-Blackness and East Asian dominance, is not optional if mutuality and genuine community are what I value.

Understanding my socialization as a woman in the Asian American immigrant church—and the way that the broader society racially genders me toward invisibility, compliance, smallness, and relentless achievement—helps me know how to do the ongoing work of finding my voice, practicing boldness, advocating for myself and others, and pushing back against the assumption that my quietness is simply deference or timidity.

And this work is not simply about self-improvement. Yes, we hope for relief from symptoms. It is a gift that I live with hardly any anxiety now, except for the kind that creeps through because of perimenopause. But through our own healing, we become more fully congruent—more grounded—for the very purpose of loving God and others, and of receiving that love in community.

This is why and how the time and investment spent in seminary graduate education developing critical knowledge can transform us for the sake of transforming our relationships and our communities. Connecting to the fullness of who God made us to be—celebrating our identities, working through our pain—moves us toward seeing how God sees and loves us so we can love and accept ourselves.

Our Asian American Inheritance

I want to close by naming what this season of graduation means.

We inherit a lot as Asian American Christians. Some of it is heavy: the trauma, the silence, the grief that runs through our families, our churches, and the white cis/hetero patriarchal capitalistic empire we navigate. You have probably spent part of your graduate education naming that inheritance. That naming, itself, is a form of courage.

But I want to remind us: we also inherit something fierce.

We are people deeply interconnected across land, water, generations, and food. We come from those whose resilience cost them everything—and who loved us in the best ways they knew how. We are the descendants of people who learned to read rooms, to navigate systems with astuteness, to find God in the margins. We carry a profound attunement to relationship and community, a capacity to navigate complexity that—once we understand our own relationship to it—becomes a real and irreplaceable strength.

That is not a small thing. That is a gift. And now, with the awareness your education has cultivated in you, you can begin to receive it as one.

The work of being Jesus’ hands and feet—of embodying justice, mutuality, goodness, faithfulness, courage—deepens now. It may feel disorienting at first. Leaving Fuller means leaving behind the people and language and community that gave you guardrails. You will step into spaces where the shared vocabulary isn’t there, where you have to find your footing without the scaffolding.

Trust that God’s faithfulness goes before you to make your steps firm. And know that you belong to a hospitable, brilliant, and caring AAC alumni community that will always remain yours.

Tending our Interior Landscape

The last thing I want to say may be the most important.

We live in a world where human connection is stunted and interrupted by screens, where our critical thinking is being compromised by digital shortcuts, where any grounded presence we try to cultivate is persistently disrupted by a scroll of images luring us toward maximized, optimized, curated versions of ourselves. This could be a recipe for disaster for our capacity to be in sustained, meaningful, formational relationships with ourselves, our loved ones and God.

In that world, we must keep returning to our interior landscape—the place where the Spirit of God dwells.

The fruit of any outward-facing ministry or vocation will never be greater than the fruit of our inner life and our relationships. Our theology, our credentials, our vocational fruitfulness—all of it flows from that interior place. In this life, we have one body to steward. We have our families—the ones we were born into and the ones we choose. Investing in loving ourselves, our people, and our communities well is not a detour from the work. It is the work. It is the most faithful thing we can do even as you are now part of the 1 to 3% of the world’s population that has a graduate degree.

There is so much to celebrate today. Receive it fully. You are God’s beloved. You are more than enough.

Congratulations, graduates of Fuller Theological Seminary, class of 2026.

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

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The episode opens around the dim sum table itself: must-order dishes, the comfort of walking into a restaurant full of people who look like you, and why “dim sum” isn’t a cute device for the book but the actual organizing metaphor—many small dishes, no single linear way to grow.

From there, the conversation moves into the heart of the book. Jen talks about why the writing process pushed her toward deeper honesty, why spiritual formation isn’t meant to be done alone, and how Psalm 139 became a recurring anchor—not as a tidy verse, but as an ongoing invitation to ask, “God, do you know me? Am I okay with who you made me to be?”

Jen also opens up about:

• Living in China for 17 years as a Chinese American missionary, and the disorienting experience of “returning” to a homeland that didn’t feel like home

• Channeling her “inner white woman” and what authenticity actually means—not a personality trait, but a fruit of formation

• The instinct to curate our own stories (including the story of her own family’s immigration) and why we have to let go of the curated version to find the true one

• Encouraging young adults to know and tell their stories, and why age shouldn’t determine who gets to be in the room

• An expensive, hard-won lesson about leadership, isolation, and the cost of not having mentors who could mirror her story back to her

• Jen closes with a charge to the Asian American Christian community: we are not meant to do this alone, and we need to be better at showing up for each other.

Resources Mentioned

Khora Collective: where Asian American Christians can become leaders who use their power for good.

Dim Sum and Faith by Jenn Suen Chen

About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack and Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast are publications of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will attend to all those who are circumcised only in the foreskin: Egypt, Judah, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab, and all those with shaved temples who live in the desert. For all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart.”
Jeremiah 9:25-26

So, do you actually like Jesus?

That’s the question I threw out to my youth group students recently. We were right in the middle of a sermon series on “Practicing the Way of Jesus,” and I was handing out a list of spiritual practices—things like prayer, fasting, and reading Scripture—when it hit me: what’s the point of these practices if they don’t even like who they are imitating?

What is prayer without delight?

What is service without joy?

What is obedience without Christ?

Serving my local Korean American Presbyterian Church in Palisades Park, New Jersey for over ten years has revealed a recent shift in the narrative of our youth students: it is really easy to fake faith. It isn’t about rebellion anymore. It is about faking it ‘til you hate it.

Serving a Generation of the Elder Son

Previously, in the Korean American church, the majority of the youth chose the path of rebellion to act against the cultural archetype of Confuncian filial piety, resisting the hierarchical structures and fighting the oppressive nature of the “model minority” myth blatantly present both inside and outside the walls of the Asian American church. The prayers lifted by elders were for the prodigal sons and daughters to return home.

Today, the landscape has shifted. We’re serving Gen Z, a generation defined by unprecedented levels of anxiety and isolation. Instead of running away, that very fear has kept them anchored at home. We aren’t looking at the Prodigal Son narrative anymore; we are leading a “generation of the Elder Son.” These Korean American Gen Zers cling on to the Confucian archetypal value for education and even leverage the model minority stereotype to gain access to opportunities to ease their anxiety and instability.

They are constantly performing, and sadly, the performance doesn’t stop at church. The next generation of Korean American Christians have replaced worldly idols with deadly godly idols where they are deceivingly and blindly performing for a god they do not know. And the challenge that youth pastors are facing is that this distrustful obedience, the uncircumcised heart, is hard to identify and discern.

Remedy for Distrusting Obedience

There is a remedy, though. Correcting the posture of distrusting obedience requires the liberating grace of presence. While we cannot manufacture students’ trust in God, we, as youth leaders, can create a safe space where they can pause to encounter Jesus and His saving grace. Before spiritual practices, youth groups in the Asian American church can celebrate non transactional presence. Pastors need to utilize Sunday mornings to remind them that they are not required to do in order to be. And the performance will stop once they experience the power of grace.

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About Centering

Centering: The Asian American Christian Substack is a publication of the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary (AAC). At the AAC, we train and support Asian American Christian leaders of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, including multiracial individuals and adoptees – grounding their life and work in over 170 years of Asian American history, and addressing their spiritual and psychological concerns.

We do this work through our cohorts, seminary courses, and the programs of our initiatives. The AAC is home to the Asian American Pastoral Formation Initiative, the Asian American Well-Being Collaboratory, the Asian American Christian History Institute, the Filipino American Ministry Initiative, and the Korean American Ministry Initiative.

For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.