Sanctification and Migration Across Generations: Expanding the Explicit Curriculum of Asian American Discipleship

Introduction

When I was studying as an undergraduate, my world history professor assigned an oral history project to interview someone older and get a living sense of the history they had experienced. In response, I immediately thought of my beloved Popo (grandma). She was a key part of my upbringing, yet I knew little about her life. As is often the case in Chinese families, I could barely remember her given name. She was always just my Popo. I prepared some simple questions and called her on the phone from my dorm room. Her voice was growing hoarser but retained the sweetness I remembered from my childhood. After explaining the reason for this interview, before I had asked a single question, she replied, “It’s all very simple, really. My mother was a Christian and so she raised me as a Christian. I raised your mother as a Christian and, today, you are a Christian. That is what is important, and that’s really all there is to say.” Her preemptive statement left me speechless. It was somehow both inspiring and disconcerting all at once. On one hand, her words marked how important her Christian faith was to her identity. On the other hand, the statement also dismissed nearly everything else about her unique journey.

While I was touched by her sentiment, I knew there was more to learn. “That’s amazing,” I replied, “and I know God has been very faithful to our family, but I want to ask some more questions about how.” Stories of displacement and belonging followed that cut across China amidst war and uncertainty and then across the Pacific to the United States. These stories contained lessons of faith that were no less important than her initial confession. By sharing these stories with me, my grandmother was not only giving witness to God’s faithfulness, but she was also forming my faith in unexpected and powerful ways.

This interview with my grandmother seeded questions about the role multi-generational migration narratives might play in Asian American Christian faith that lingered for many years, two of which are addressed here. First, how do migration experiences and lessons passed down across generations relate to God’s work of sanctification, the theological term given to that process through which Christians are made holy and transformed into the likeness of Christ? Second, how might Asian American churches intentionally design their discipleship programs to include the lives of our ancestors across times and places?

In this article, I argue that Asian American Christians must intentionally foster reflection on their multi-generational migration stories as a pathway for God’s sanctifying work. The value of multi-generational knowledge and memory for Christian formation is found in scripture, and the importance of migration for understanding God and the church is expressed in the growing scholarship on migration theology. As a result, Asian American churches and para-church ministries should work toward explicit discipleship curricula that facilitate sharing migration narratives across generations as a spiritual practice and discipline. In conclusion, I propose a three-fold movement for facilitating multi-generational learning rooted in honoring, integrating, and embodying our ancestors’ migration stories as a means through which God can further transform us into Christ’s likeness.

Sanctification and Discipleship: Beyond Individual Imitation and Toward Multi-generational Transformation

The theological crux of this article argues that engaging one’s multi-generational migration narratives is instrumental to God’s work of sanctification and, therefore, a necessary element of Christian discipleship, especially for persons of multiple ethnic and cultural belongings like Asian Americans. In this article, sanctification and discipleship are terms that are understood as two sides of a single coin, sharing a common end in the formation of holiness via Christlikeness but with differing emphases on the roles that God and the church play in this process. My use of sanctification as a theological concept prioritizes God’s work of transformation in the life of the Christian, beginning with Christ’s redemptive act of justification and imbued throughout one’s life as the Holy Spirit restores the holiness of God’s image. ¹ The emphasis here is on God’s presence with us and God’s work among and through us to foster Christ-like holiness in all aspects of life. ²

This understanding of sanctification builds on Derek Tidball’s definition, drawn from Colossians 3:5–17, which he summarizes as a formation of holiness that exhibits three traits: Christ-like character, Christ-renewed mind, and belonging to a Christ-transformed community. ³ While Tidball’s first and second traits of Christ-like character and mind are standard benchmarks in definitions of sanctification shared across many traditions, his third trait of belonging to a Christ-transformed community serves an especially important role in my argument because it emphasizes a collective dimension to sanctification. While recognizing that only God can accomplish the work of sanctification, the role of belonging to a community of faith that collectively embodies Christ’s transformative presence is also imperative. Therefore, our sense of belonging to Christ and to the church advances an analogical view of divine and human agency at work together in accordance with God’s will. ⁴ This lays the groundwork for engaging multi-generational migration narratives as a kind of historical witness to God’s presence at work within communities across time, space, and the genealogical relationships that tie us together.

When focusing on the dynamics of community and belonging in sanctification, the explicit role of the church and its orientation toward discipleship comes into play. In contrast to sanctification’s emphasis on God’s agency, I use the term discipleship to emphasize the church’s work in establishing the settings, habits, and processes through which God’s work of sanctification might be fostered. ⁵ Here, discipleship is understood as an exemplary collaboration between the church and God, made possible by God’s creativity, providence, and sovereignty. While maintaining that God’s sanctifying work is in no way dependent on human action, God invites and integrates the church’s work into a greater plan to reconcile all of creation unto God’s self. This is, therefore, a discipleship that is grounded in a missional ecclesiology that centers the Missio Dei as an intimate part of the sanctification process. ⁶ Moreover, the vital link between God’s work of sanctification centered on Christ and our work of discipleship within the church is the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is recognized as a presence that abides in the church, an extension of God through Christ that ushers the church’s actions into harmony with God’s divine will, including the work of transforming God’s people into Christ’s likeness. ⁷

How a church defines discipleship and administers its curriculum to form congregants has real implications for God’s work of sanctification. When defining discipleship in the context of Asian American experience, I am critical of definitions that overemphasize the imitation of Christ and the denial of the self. Consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s powerful claim regarding discipleship as an all-encompassing commitment: “To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self-denial can say is: ‘He leads the way, keep close to him.’” ⁸ Lee Camp provides a complementary definition to Bonhoeffer’s when he states that to truly follow Christ, one ought to put obedience to Jesus as Lord ahead of allegiances to all earthly authorities—nationalistic, political, economic, or cultural. ⁹

While this emphasis has its place, especially when accounting for Christian resistance to sociopolitical idolatry and ethnocentricity, it can also have the unintended effect of erasing the gifts of one’s particular cultural identities and individual experiences. In other words, it is a posture of belonging to Christ that can unintentionally exile all other belongings in such a way that denies opportunity for Christ’s transformative power to work through the whole person. Consider my grandmother’s initial response to my desire to know more about her life. Her answer reflected a belief that the only thing that mattered in her life was her Christian identity and that nothing else needed to be said. While such humility is admirable from a certain standpoint, I argue that a fuller understanding of God’s faithfulness to the whole of my grandmother’s life provides greater witness to God’s transformative power than ignoring this larger transgenerational story for the sake of lifting up Christ alone.

More importantly, knowing my grandmother’s whole story provides God with a means for sanctifying me a generation later, because knowing of God’s work in her also has a direct impact on God’s work in me. Alister McGrath identifies the “intergenerational transmission of wisdom” and “reflective inhabitation of our faith” as traits of strong discipleship that should apply as closely to our ethnic and cultural ancestries as it does to our biblical and theological heritages. ¹⁰ Emphasizing my grandmother’s story for the sake of my own spiritual growth deepens and extends the second facet of what reformed theology refers to as a twofold knowledge of God and self. ¹¹ To know my grandmother’s story is to know myself in ways that resonate beyond my immediate context, connecting the past to my present across time and space.

Daniel D. Lee argues that Asian American Christians ought to seek “intrapersonal reconciliation,” which “involves all of ourselves, even parts that we do not value or are aware of.” ¹² For Lee, Asian Americans face four distinct yet overlapping realities that must be theologically negotiated amidst our hybrid and intersectional belongings: Asian heritage, migration experience, American culture, and racialization. ¹³ My proposal for discipleship informed by Asian America’s multi-generational migration stories builds on a combination of the first and second aspects of Lee’s “Asian American Quadrilateral.” Fostering knowledge of our heritage vis-à-vis our migration stories is an important means toward such intrapersonal reconciliation. Such knowledge provides pathways for making sense of the many gaps, challenges, and traumas that many Asian Americans have inherited as a migrating people.

Lee also states, “We cannot meaningfully ask the theological question of what the gospel means in a particular context if we cannot even grasp the scope and boundaries of that context.” ¹⁴ For many Asian Americans who have been born and raised in the United States, it can be tempting to believe that it is only the context of the United States that matters to our formation. In fact, we bear the marks of multiple contexts and belongings inherited from previous generations. The scope and boundaries of the Asian American context are much bigger than first imagined and God’s work of sanctification is a process through which the gospel must work across all of it.

Based on the above, I argue that Asian American Christians must promote a practice of discipleship that makes explicit the need for deeper knowledge of our ancestral heritage, which is specific to our multi-generational migration narratives. This multi-generational understanding of discipleship aligns with Tidball’s emphasis on the importance of belonging to Christ-transformed communities as a vital dimension of sanctification, extending the definition of community across time. All peoples of diasporic heritage need spiritual narratives that display how Christ can, has, and will continue to actively transform all aspects of the multiple belongings we accumulate across generations.

Patterns of Migration and Multi-generational Transformation in Scripture and Theology

Invoking one’s multi-generational migration narratives as a means to spiritual growth is a pattern that one can easily discern in the testimony of the Bible as well as in recent literature focused on the role migration plays in theological understandings of the church, mission, and worship. Asian American Christians and churches who question the relevance of integrating discipleship structures for reflection on heritage and migration history must take seriously this emerging consensus.

First, when one examines the larger narrative arcs of Christian scripture, a pattern of migration emerges. Amidst movement, experiences of remembrance and displacement foster new senses of belonging. In some cases, God calls people to look backward to remember the particularities of their identity and belonging to look ahead to the broader missional task God has set before them. Exodus 3:1–6 is one vivid example of this pattern at work. This passage recounts Moses’ encounter with God in the form of a burning bush, an unexpected moment that expresses God as wholly other compared to anything Moses experienced in the past. Amidst this other-worldly experience, God identifies God’s self to Moses via reference to his heritage by calling out, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this point in Moses’s life, he has already had to negotiate multiple belongings across many cultures in his own story of migration. Moses will come to know the universal God through the particularities of his forefathers, and his calling to lead God’s people out of Egypt and to the promised land is dependent upon an intimate knowledge of God’s promises to previous generations. This pattern is also employed in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where, to encourage the newly emerging followers of Christ, the author explicitly draws from the migration experiences of many ancestral role models.

In contrast, Numbers 14:1–4 provides a different example of when previous senses of belonging prove detrimental to formation. In these cases, the displacement that comes with migration can be seen as an equally important aspect of discipleship. Faced with persistent challenges and obstacles in the desert after being liberated from Egyptian slavery, the people of Israel cry out, “Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt? We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” For these wandering Israelites, their belonging to Egypt binds them to the past and blinds them to a new future. Though they have physically migrated away from Egypt, their hearts and minds have not moved on, requiring Moses and Joshua to emphasize a new belonging beyond their current experience. In such cases, experiences of migration are rendered by God to loosen and renew the hearts and minds of God’s people. The author of Hebrews echoes this imagery of migration beyond the belongings we know when he writes, “These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” ¹⁵

This balancing act of working out the dynamic tensions of our sense of belonging to the traditions of our past and leaning into God’s promises for the future is not only exemplified in many biblical narratives, it is fundamental to the person of Jesus Christ himself as fully human and fully God. To be fully human is to be a part of a culture and heritage that can be traced through a society and its history. Daniel Lee builds his case for Asian American theologizing on this very foundation, arguing that Jesus’s particularity as a Jewish man is fundamental to understanding the work of God through the sociocultural realities of Jesus’s time. ¹⁶ When Christians spiritualize Jesus Christ out of his particularity, they risk falling into a Docetic posture that denies the importance of Christ’s cultural and bodily particularity. The universal work of Christ is thus embedded in a particular multi-generational narrative of transformation embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, his ancestry, and the story of Israel. In the same way, followers of Christ who seek to imitate Jesus do so not by adopting Jewish heritage as their own but by working toward holiness through the realities of their own heritage and migration stories. God’s multi-generational work through Jesus’s particular heritage is, therefore, a model for understanding God’s sanctifying work as a multi-generational migration for all Christ followers. Christian discipleship should follow these patterns, manifest in scripture and in Jesus Christ, to make holistic sense of God’s transformative work across every culture and people.

Second, the emergence of migration theologies is reframing the church’s understanding of the Christian faith as a product of migration itself, giving further impetus to the importance of engaging migration narratives as a vital part of discipleship. The following examples assess migration as the locus theologicus of Christianity from three disciplinary perspectives: ecclesial, missional, and liturgical.

From an ecclesial standpoint, Peter Phan has made a compelling series of arguments across many works regarding migration as a source of the church’s very existence, an institution that has emerged out of migration. Tracing the history of the church’s growth across eight migration movements from the early church to contemporary times, Phan argues that, “Migrantness is a constitutive mark of the true church” and that extra migrationem nulla ecclesia (without migration there is no church). ¹⁷ Grounded in this historical analysis of the church, Phan extends his theological construction to the heart of God’s nature as Deus Migrator (God the Migrant), recognizing elements of movement across borders and boundaries in the Godhead’s works of creation, Christ’s incarnation, and the Holy Spirit’s pushing and pulling upon the church and the world. ¹⁸

Sam George and Godfrey Harold extend dynamics of migration to the Missio Dei, ascribing to God the title of Motus Dei, a God that is “on-the-move” and “continually moving toward the world and his creation to recreate it and establish his reign.” ¹⁹ This theological framing casts migration and movement as one of the primary means through which God accomplishes God’s will for reconciling humanity and creation. Here, God’s migrant-ness is intricately tied to God’s mission. This framing conceives the church and individual Christians who seek to imitate Christ in their lives as migrants participating in this greater work. When Christians migrate and bear witness to the gospel, they reflect God’s own heart and movement.

Lastly, Daniel Groody depicts his migration theology in terms of a holistic expression of worship with reference to the liturgical pattern of the Roman Catholic mass, bringing together the experiences of refugees and migrants into intimate relationship with scripture, prayer, and the Eucharist itself. ²⁰ Narrative readings from the Old and New Testament are understood as testimonies of God’s work through migration among the people of Israel and the early church. The responsorial Psalms are framed as windows into the inner landscape of migrants and refugees expressing their joys and struggles before God as they traverse life. The gospel reading is understood as a witness to God’s divine migration in Jesus Christ, bridging heaven and earth. This liturgy climaxes with a eucharistic theology of migration that relates the body of Christ with the bodies of refugees emphasizing a shared sense of sacrificial love. ²¹ Groody’s theology creatively blends thoughtful engagement with the migrations of God and humanity as an act of worship with a sacramental quality that calls forth a missional response.

This brief review of patterns in scripture and theologies of migration point to a growing need for reconfiguring our orientation toward discipleship in ways that are attentive to the multi-generational narratives of migration in our own histories. Throughout the Bible, the rhythm of spiritual growth exhibited in both individuals and communities often involve migration and learning across generations. The very nature of Jesus Christ revealed in the Gospels recognizes the importance of human particularity and connection across generations in relation to divine presence as an aspect of God’s will. Theologies of migration that frame the church as a migrant institution, the image of God as migrant, God’s mission as rooted in movement, and the order of our worship as an expression of our migrant condition with and before God ought to enrich and expand our theological imagination regarding sanctification and discipleship.

Discipleship Curriculum in the Asian American Church: Making Explicit the Role of our Ancestors in God’s Sanctifying Work

Now that some of the biblical and theological foundations for engaging multi-generational migration narratives have been explored, we will address the practical question of how these insights can be applied to Asian American Christian discipleship programs. Eliot Eisner’s delineation of explicit, implicit, and null curricula provides helpful heuristics for considering how these narratives might be taught and what lessons might be drawn from them. ²²

First, when one inquires of the materials used in discipleship curricula, the answers are typically components of the explicit curriculum, the content that has been intentionally delivered as part of the formal education process. For many churches, including many Asian American congregations, the explicit curriculum for discipleship often involves the study of scripture and theology in dialogue with questions of contemporary society and culture that explore what the latter teaches about identity and behavior in regard to the former. The explicit curriculum is used during formal settings dedicated to teaching and learning such as sermons, Sunday school classes, Bible studies, or small groups. Often, the explicit curriculum will also recommend co-curricular activities designed to put what is learned into practice, such as patterns for daily devotions, group prayer meetings, and service trips. All of this is intentional and by design.

Second, if one examines the contexts outside the explicit curriculum, perhaps observing the ways in which congregants speak about family life or community matters in between Sunday school and the worship service, one will discover elements of the implicit curriculum. The implicit curriculum is also known as the hidden curriculum because it refers to lessons that are learned from informal sources embedded in one’s social and cultural contexts. For example, while the importance of God’s love for all people might be taught in the explicit curriculum, the congregation’s unwillingness to welcome undocumented migrants into their community may implicitly teach something to the contrary. This tension between the explicit and implicit curriculum may cause cognitive dissonance, forcing learners to reevaluate the principles and practices they are taught. Where explicit and implicit curriculum overlap, however, one can find greater cohesion and praxis. Because it is embedded in larger swaths of a community’s way of being in the world, the implicit curriculum can often be unintentional and yet more influential than what is taught in the explicit curriculum.

Lastly, the concept of the null curriculum encompasses subjects that are not discussed at all within the learning context either explicitly or implicitly. This concept recognizes that absence can have as much formative power as presence. ²³ At the most basic level, the absence of a particular subject’s inclusion in a course of study communicates that the topic is not important. At best, the teacher may be naively ignorant or genuinely believe the topic is irrelevant to one’s learning goals and objectives. At worst, the material is intentionally excluded because it is perceived to be too difficult or even detrimental, thereby denying the learner an opportunity to critically engage. Identifying the null curriculum at play in different churches is an exercise that asks what is not being addressed, why, and being honest with the effects that exclusion brings to the formation of Christlike character.

Over the past several decades, the explicit curriculum for Asian American ministry has grown. Pioneering volumes like Following Jesus without Dishonoring your Parents, Invitation to Lead, and Pursuing the Pearl addressed facets of Asian American Christian life that were ignored in mainstream US American discipleship materials that generally assumed white Euro-American normativity. ²⁴ While this first wave of Asian American Christian literature has spotlighted the importance of Asian American history, reconciling the generation gap between the first and second generations, and negotiating the hybridized cultural values that Asian Americans have inherited, their orientation is directed toward the present and the future with limited engagement with migration and multi-generational narratives as topics of discipleship.

More recently, works like Beyond Colorblind, by Sarah Shin, and Learning our Names, edited by a group of Asian American ministry leaders, have updated these themes with greater sophistication, particularly on the topics of culture, racialization, and Asian American Christian vocation. ²⁵ In Shin’s text, an explicit theological case is made for discipleship that calls all peoples to redeem their ethnic heritage as a means toward healing and prophetic ministry, but the journey through which such work is done lacks an exploration of multi-generational migration histories. While recognizing migration as a starting point for Asian American identities, the authors of Learning our Names begin their narrative with experiences of marginality in the first generation to migrate to the United States rather than in stories of earlier generations in Asia. The fourth chapter of the text, by La Thao, is dedicated to understanding parents and the generation gap between cultures rendered by migration, but grandparents who may or may not have migrated with parents remain absent.

Informed by Daniel Lee’s research cited above, Epic Movement/Cru’s Asian American Discipleship curriculum offers an explicit curriculum with important openings for deeper engagement with migration and heritage. ²⁶ The first three units cover subjects titled “Asian American History,” “Unpacking our Stories,” and “Your Asian American Story.” The unit on “Unpacking our Stories” is noteworthy for bringing attention to Moses’s biblical narrative as a pattern for engaging issues of migration, identity, and racialization as a pattern for Asian Americans to consider their own stories. By building discussion questions that engage migration and heritage into the third unit on “Your Asian American Story,” the door to engaging multi-generational narratives as a form of spiritual growth is implicitly introduced as a promising possibility but without explicit guidance.

The developments noted above are encouraging because they show the explicit curriculum for Asian American discipleship expanding, integrating new insights from Asian American history and studies. This growth, however, has yet to fully address the spiritual importance of our trans-Pacific connections and multiple generational narratives. Without an explicit curriculum to guide the Asian American church’s conception of God’s sanctifying work across generations, the meaning behind the stories of our ancestors’ lives before the United States is left to the implicit and/or null curriculum. For many first-generation Asian American churches, congregational life can implicitly reinforce an unintentional ethnocentricity given their natural tendency to support new migrants by providing a cultural home in diaspora. This implicit curriculum often turns the second generation off as they struggle with the realities of the US American context. As a result, the value of their families’ heritage and migration stories becomes a null curriculum where the lack of explicit address essentially teaches that these stories are not important to our faith.

Emphasis on Asian American life and challenges in the United States alone implicitly communicates that the experiences of our ancestors in Asia, as important as they might be to our social, political, and cultural lives, have little value for our spiritual growth. But given the biblical and theological evidence presented above, I argue that Asian American discipleship must begin making explicit a curriculum that integrates multi-generational migration narratives as a part of God’s intentions to form us in the image of Christ. The stories of our ancestors’ journeys and their relationship to our spiritual growth cannot be left to the contingencies of a congregation’s implicit curriculum nor ignored as part of a null curriculum.

Asian American Discipleship that Honors, Integrates, and Embodies our Multi-generational Migration Stories

What might it look like to bring our families’ multi-generational migration narratives into explicit conversation with God’s work of spiritual transformation? I conclude this article by proposing a three-fold movement that could be adopted to design an explicit curriculum for reconciling our multiple belongings in Christ by engaging our ancestors’ multi-generational migration narratives: honoring, integrating, and embodying. The phases for this movement are modeled upon the patterns in scripture and migration theology presented above with the goal of fostering new pathways for God’s sanctifying work in the Asian American church.

My hope and prayer is that these movements can provide some of the scaffolding needed to design new explicit curricula that includes family histories, building a new pathway for Asian American discipleship.

One implicit example of this three-fold movement is Russell Jeung’s autobiographical theological reflection, At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors, which traces six generations of his Hakka heritage from China and Hong Kong to the United States. ²⁷ Like many Asian American Christians, Jeung wrestles with heritage and history in relationship to faith and belonging alongside a passion for sociopolitical advocacy that centers God’s love for exiles and desire for justice. As a fifth-generation Chinese American, Jeung’s relational connections to China are thin but his intentional engagement with Hakka heritage as a “guest people” and his sociological studies of Asian American Christian life provide deep roots for his theological imagination. ²⁸ While his book does not adopt the exact concepts I use above, it evidences a rich engagement with his ancestors’ experiences, values, and concerns that have reconfigured his sense of Christian faith and vocation, particularly his work with international refugee communities in the United States. In doing so, Jeung’s memoir exhibits all three movements of honoring, integrating, and embodying his multi-generational ancestral story in ways that deepen God’s transforming work in his life.

In my own discipleship journey, I have also sought to follow this three-fold movement. Learning about my grandmother’s life in greater detail became a gateway to knowing more about God’s faithful work across many generations, from my great-grandmother to me. The beginning of honoring my Popo as an individual and not only as my grandmother was learning her name and story. Ruoh Ying Xia was born in 1924 in the city of Wuhan to devout Christian parents who served the local church alongside Methodist missionaries from Great Britain. Both her father and mother were ordained evangelists (chuandao ren) who had dedicated their lives to serving Christ and the church. As a result, my grandmother was raised in a missionary school where she received an above-average education for a girl.

When the Japanese invaded China and moved inland, she packed up her bags and moved west with her schoolmates and teachers. This became the beginning of a long sojourn across many cities as war raged. After the dust settled, she married and began to raise a family in the city of Qingdao on the east coast. As the Communists began to consolidate their power, my grandfather happened to be working for a Nationalist government-owned enterprise. This afforded him and his family the opportunity to relocate to Taiwan for work, which my grandparents thought would be a temporary arrangement. It was not. With the Communist victory and the Nationalist retreat cutting Taiwan off from the rest of the mainland, my grandparents would spend the rest of their lives separated from their extended family in mainland China. My mother was then born and raised in Taiwan and migrated to the United States in the 1970s for graduate studies. Over time, her siblings also made the move to the States, and finally, so did my grandparents. As my grandmother tells it, the only constant in this life of migration was Christ’s presence. After a long journey, my Popo made her final migration to join the Lord on the other shore in 2011.

My grandmother was only willing to share certain parts of her story, and any Asian Americans who have inquired of their parents’ or grandparents’ lives know it is not uncommon nor unreasonable for details to be omitted, especially painful ones. It is not always our place to pry. Nevertheless, for the sake of our discipleship, I believe it behooves us to take the time to dig further however we can. In this age of instant information access via the internet, a little extra research can go a long way. Knowing the dates of my grandmother’s life provided the context to search for materials that intersect with her story. Moreover, these materials provided me with a starting point for imagining and wondering as a way of integrating her story with the greater story of the Chinese and Chinese American church. For example, I discovered a research article examining the context of the Wuhan missionary establishment from 1913–28, around the time my grandmother was born. ²⁹ This provided me with some sense of the social and cultural challenges missionaries and locals faced while working together, a story that may have included my great grandparents. I also discovered a photograph entitled “Children Standing Outside Methodist Central Hall Wuhan, 1937” in the University of California online archives. ³⁰ Given my grandmother’s upbringing in a Wuhan Methodist missionary school, it was not hard to imagine that she may have stood there too. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that my great grandmother was issued her evangelist license by the Methodist church in 1938, a year that contains a great deal of significance in the history of Wuhan. It was that year that the Japanese army invaded the city, the setting for one of the largest and most significant battles of the Sino-Japanese War. ³¹ In that difficult context, her answer to God’s call took on new meaning.

The additional context the above research provided should not be seen as an academic or personal exercise alone but also as an act of prayerful learning to understand God’s presence at work across multiple generations of my family’s migrations. Remembering ought to lead us to worship and service that honors, integrates, and embodies Christ’s faithfulness to generations past. For me, the additional research transformed a memory of my first visit to China. In 2004, I had the opportunity to attend Sunday worship at Rongguan Christian Church in Wuhan with my father. I didn’t know it at that time, but the church was funded and built by Chinese Christians in 1931. Given my new awareness of my grandmother and great-grandparents, I realized that they, too, likely worshipped at some point in the same building. Today, my sense of calling to research and learning in Chinese and Sinophone Christianity is continually enriched, inspired, and informed by the presence of my grandmother and great-grandparents before me.

As Asian American Christians continue to grow in faith and Christlikeness, this article argues that Asian American discipleship programs, following the testament of scripture and the theological importance of migration, must make explicit new pathways for engaging the multi-generational migration stories of our ancestors. An explicit curriculum that guides Asian American Christians to honor, integrate, and embody the lessons rendered from their families’ migrations is more than a means to self-knowledge; it is also a means through which God can sanctify us into Christ’s likeness.