International Bulletin of Mission Research

This review of the first posthumous volume by the late Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age, focuses on his account of the background, motives, progress, and theology of the missionary movement from the West and the unanticipated consequence of Christianity’s decline in the West and growth elsewhere. The golden thread Walls seeks to untangle is how and why Christianity, as in its inception, had once again become a non-Western religion by the end of the twentieth century. He portrays the missionary movement as a “despised, semidetached appendix” within the larger framework of European Christendom and its Great Migration and shows how missionaries played a significant role in the unforeseen shift of Christianity’s center from the Global North to the Global South.

This short article serves as an introduction to a special issue of the International Bulletin of Mission Research on the topic of multiple belongings in transpacific Christianities, focused on Asian migration to the United States. It summarizes the collection of articles included and their context within the work of the Center for Asian American Christianity and the Overseas Ministries Study Center, both based at Princeton Seminary.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (or the Hart-Celler Act) remade the racial and ethnic composition of the nation, opening the United States to large numbers of Asian migrants for the first time. The new immigration system, based on job skills and family reunification, flipped the racial demographics of US-bound migrants from majority European to majority Asian and Latin American. It is estimated that as many as 75 percent of Asians who migrated to the United States between 1965 and 2000 had some kind of Christian background. This article provides a brief overview of how post-1965 Asian migrants have changed a range of US Protestant institutions and organizations.

After centuries of colonial violence, Filipino American identity and Christianity are characterized by experiences of unbelonging. To show this, I trace these developments historically and sociologically, highlighting pastorally and ecclesially significant ways this unbelonging manifests, as US Filipinos negotiate Christian faith with increasing distance from the Philippines itself. This unbelonging sets Filipino American Christianity and community apart from other Asian Americans, and this uniqueness must be understood in order for Filipino American theology to be grounded contextually. Finally, I demonstrate that Filipino American theology and ministry are works of “home construction,” as the idea of home is continuously contested and reconceived. ¹

The merger of Christianity and migrant nationalism during the first wave of Korean migration created a synergy that provided a sense of liberation and belonging to Korean migrant religious communities. In this article, I argue that Christianity played a pivotal role in fostering nationalist sensibilities away from home. Conversely, migrant nationalism propelled the spread of a contextualized Christianity based on Korean migrant ethnic identity that was distinct from the dominant White American Christianity during the early 1900s. Korean migrant churches functioned as repositories of national pride as Koreans negotiated their sense of belonging, identity, and agency in a foreign land.

Migration is changing and revitalizing the religious and cultural landscape of the United States. This article explores the theme of migration and belonging within the Asian Indian Christian community. Building upon this theme, the article draws attention to the myth of Asian Indians being a “model community” and experiences of foreignness of belonging. This article also argues that despite the perception of economic mobility, Asian Indians face discrimination and a sense of foreignness of belonging. It is suggested that autobiographical theology becomes a powerful tool to understand family, church, and community.

This article examines Taiwanese ethnic identity formation in the United States and its endurance in the Taiwanese Christian community. It is argued that the drivers of peak migration (1960s–1980s) have a time-capsule effect on immigrants, an effect that continues to influence present-day immigrant social relations. From the 1960s into the 1980s, Taiwanese immigrants infused their foundational ethnicity-based organizations, such as churches, with the spirit of Cold War-era democracy, self-determination, and anti-communism. For Taiwanese churches, this meant religious freedom is entwined with political freedom of expression. Today, we see the persistence of the time-capsule effect in existing Taiwanese churches. Ethnic boundaries that defined the Taiwanese community during the martial law period continue to shape contemporary social relations in church.

As compared to other Asian Christians in the US, Burmese immigrant Christians are relatively recent arrivals to the US. Their stories are largely hidden and not widely discussed in the emerging field of Asian American contextual theological formations. The aim of this article is, therefore, to unlock the hidden stories of Burmese American Christians and to put their lived stories and unheard voices into the discourses of Asian American theologies. In the first section, the article explores when and how Burmese American Christians migrated to the US and how they imagine their ethnic and ecclesial identities in the US. In the second section, it reimagines how a migration theology of Burmese Christians should embody God’s trinitarian mission of identity, otherness, and reconciliation within the multicultural and multiracial context of the United States.

This article examines the dynamic relationship between Christian doctrine, migration, and social circumstances, tracing how the uses of Christian doctrines have evolved and interacted with different socio-political conditions from the Protestant Reformation to present-day Christianity in Asia. It delves into pivotal historical moments, such as the Protestant Reformation, symbolized as the “1517 Project,” and the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy in the United States, to show that Christian doctrines have shaped and been shaped by cultural and socio-political landscapes. This work particularly contrasts the uses of doctrine in Anglo-European Christendom contexts with post-Christendom situations relating to Asia. The study emphasizes the significant role of migration in spreading Christianity globally and in the development of doctrine, focusing on the Christian faith of Dalits in India and Taiwanese Americans. It calls for a holistic understanding of how Christian doctrine’s universal character interacts with diverse racial and ethnic formations. The article argues for and imagines a more expansive view of the catholicity and contextual embodiment of the Christian discursive tradition for the twenty-first century.

How do migration experiences passed down across generations relate to God’s work of sanctification, and how might Asian American churches engage the stories of their ancestors as a form of Christian formation? Drawing from scripture, migration theologies, educational theory, literature in Asian American ministry, and personal experience, this article argues that Asian American churches must begin designing discipleship curriculum that explicitly honors, integrates, and embodies the stories of their families’ multiple migrations into their spiritual lives because it is through such remembrance and learning that God can render Christ-like transformation.