Seeking the Christian tutelage: agency and culture in Chinese immigrants' conversion to Christianity

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2002 by Kwai Hang Ng

Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 20:34:05

From: Keng

Subject: update on Luke

Dear friends

X, P, and I went to visit Luke at the hospital this afternoon.

M and M went too but were not allowed to the wards because they are below 16....It seems that he(Luke) needs to undergo a surgery when a time slot is available, sometime early next week. Kang and Zi were not ready to sign the consent form last Thursday night when the doctor suggested an operation on Friday. Kang's father will be applying for a visa to come to America this Monday.

Please pray for the health of Kang and Zi, for a speedy recovery for Luke, for Kang's father...

Please feel free to forward this message to people who would pray for the Li family.

May the peace and love and joy of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you throughout this week.

Sincerely

Keng

"Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer."

(Romans 12:12)

Several days after the operation, the congregants held a birthday party for Luke at the hospital. This was again an occasion for people to show their love and care for the Li family. The episode of the hospital party was one of the most unforgettable moments in my field study. About fifteen congregants and friends of Kang Li and Zi Fen were crowded together in Luke's room, which was about a hundred square feet. What astonished me was how generous these people were to Luke and his parents. Through practices like prayer, gift giving, and visits, church congregants made a "loud" statement of their love for the Lis.

(2) Loyalty and Duty

Faithfulness, duty, and responsibility form a cluster of conservative themes that are often emphasized inside the church. In his sermons, Tang likes to remind congregants that Christians should be loyal and dutiful in their roles as parents, sons or daughters, and students or employees, and he makes no pretense of his dislike of blithe, carefree lifestyles that celebrate individual preference and freedom. For him, a loyal Christian is someone who is committed to his existing social roles, all of which are understood as assigned by God. In one of his sermons, he said Christians should excel in their roles as employees and workers and serve their earthly masters as they serve the Lord. He said the culture in America focuses too much on personal merit and achievement. But he added, Christians inherit everything from God, even things they encounter in their work. Christians should strive for excellence, to the extent that colleagues will say: "You are a blessing." Tung Chen, an elder of the church, once said in t he adult Bible school that he volunteered to do something extra for the company even though he personally disliked his boss; he said he did so because, as a Christian, "I need to be loyal in my position."

The moral ideal of Protestantism not only consolidates the bonds among the Chinese congregants, it also marks off the community from the outside society. For the congregants, professing themselves to be Protestant does not compromise their Chinese identity; quite the contrary, it is precisely through a commitment to the conservative Protestant ethic prizing communal care and love, loyalty and duty, that the congregants come to see themselves as a visible Chinese community. Thus, while there are quite a number of non-Christians in the VPCC and they are relatively well mixed within the church, there is still a fine but distinct line separating Christians from non-Christians. Despite the fact that non-Christians are welcomed to join different meetings of the church, this does not mean that as long as you are a Chinese, you are "in." Alongside their openness, many congregants hold an expectation that, sooner or later, a curious seeker will convert to the Protestant faith and become a member of the church. This be came most evident when after I had stayed in the Bible study group for a long enough period (more than six months), members began to ask me to pray and to share my religious experiences, even though they knew that I came here to conduct a study and that I was not a believer.