Editor's Note: When Grace shared this draft with us, it reminded us why the AAC's work matters beyond our immediate context — and prompted us to spend Asian Pacific American Heritage Month revisiting our foundations: who gets represented, what tools we use, what we value, and what we're ultimately moving toward. If you haven't read our APAHM series, links are at the bottom.
I’m from Brisbane, a small city in Australia. How is that the Asian American Quadrilateral has made its way over here to the land down under?
Finding the Oasis
As a young leader, I noticed the patterns in the Asian Australian church that parallel what the Asian American church calls the Silent Exodus. The church splits weighed on me, and I saw few answers that worked. Eventually, through God’s providence and some Googling, I found my way to Fuller’s Asian American Center and its classes. It was like discovering an oasis in the desert!
The Asian American Quadrilateral in particular opened my eyes to see the multiple facets of the Asian Australian church experience. My understanding of what I primarily labeled as broad culture problems was expanded with the vocabulary and categories of Migration, Australian Culture and Racialization. Learning the stories of Asian American and Black American Christians helped me see how many in history had suffered to build the foundations of the discipline that I was studying.
Building Something New
As I finished my seminary classes, I was deeply compelled to share what I had learned. For a period, I felt incredibly isolated in Australia. Dr. Lee was incredibly gracious to continually check in, mentoring me from a distance. In time, God led me to find my people here in Australia, individual by individual. And step by step, through each blog post, article, and chapter written through intentional research, the Asian Australian Quadrilateral started to form.
Asian Australian leaders have long benefited from American Evangelicalism: Don Carson, Tim Keller, John Piper, Matt Chandler and even Driscoll are “household names” to many Chinese Australian Christians. But the U.S. is different to Australia; Asian America is different to Asian Australia. I’ve learned that these white American evangelical pastors’ situational awareness was not inclusive of the Asian American Christian experience, and by extension, could not be neatly applied to Asian Australian Christian formation and spiritual practices either.
Here are some of the particularities I’ve observed:
Students are less likely to move for college. Therefore, this changes the dynamics of Asian heritage churches when young people stay at their home churches longer.
While Korean Americans dominate the Christian scene in the U.S., Chinese Australians dominate here.
Unlike the U.S., the discipline of “Asian Australian studies” doesn’t exist here; only networks of Asian Australian scholars.
Without any comparable civil rights movement, Australians lack racial vocabulary. Even terms like “model minority” and “colorblind” aren’t used here.
Being so close to Southeast Asia, many Asian Australians come from this region, and so we’ve had to spend more time looking at those migration policies and stories.
We’ve had to consider the Blak movement in Australia—the important racial work of First Nations which migrants to Australia have ignored and overlooked.
There are significant differences in how we engage, critique, and apply the U.S. resources to the Australian context. Now, I think twice about blindly applying teaching that has worked for some famous pastor overseas to my church context. It’s a reminder of how important it is to identify the contextual location of any teaching, whether it’s first-century Jerusalem, modern-day U.S., or a Chinese heritage church in Australia.
We are indebted to Dr. Daniel D. Lee’s investment into the Australian context over the past couple of years. We can’t wait to welcome Daniel to Sydney and Melbourne in July.
Grace Lung is the Director of the Centre for Asian Christianity at the Brisbane School of Theology. She is also Program Coordinator of the Next Generation Bicultural Program at the Melbourne School of Theology. She pastors at Rise Alliance Church with her husband Chris and has been involved together in ministry to Chinese Australians for over 20 years.
Additional Reading
Dr. Daniel D. Lee’s book, Doing Asian American Theology.
The APAHM series
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.
To learn more, support our work, and subscribe to our newsletter, visit aac.fuller.edu.
For information about Fuller Seminary’s degree programs and continuing education resources, visit fuller.edu.