What the Asian Church Can Give Back
Read time: 6 minutes
Mamre is a ministry that models Jesus Christ, who continually shared meals to foster reconciliation. Our table is wide. We welcome and stand as a bridge between the sacred and the secular, the investor and the founder, and Asia and America. In a world obsessed with productivity, speed, and optimization, we hope you will slow down, rest, and rediscover the gift of presence, revelation, and reconciliation with God.
Mamre is a liminal space. A bridge. The place between things.
Three bridges, really. Three places where we keep being called to stand between:
Sacred and the secular.
Investor and founder.
Asia and America.
Many of us have spent our lives in those in-between places. Not fully one thing. Not fully the other. For a long time I thought that was a weakness. A lack of belonging. I have come to believe it is the assignment.
The first Mamre was also a bridge between two-worlds. It is where Abraham pitched his tent and built an altar. Where three visitors came and a promise was spoken and a covenant moved forward a generation. The in-between is not nowhere. It is where the meeting happens.
This article is about the first bridge. Asia and the globe. And more specifically, the church.
A Thank You Note
This article, at it’s core, is a thank you note.
The Asian church has something to give back to the Western church.
A gift. Offered in gratitude, brotherhood, and servanthood.
The Western church sent missionaries to Asia. They came. They suffered. They planted. Many Asian nations are what they are in part because someone crossed an ocean for it.
What I Have Seen Across the Church
I am Korean American. I have spent twenty years between two worlds. Korea and America. East and West. Church and marketplace. And I have worshipped and served across more of the church than most people see in a lifetime.
Southern Baptist church in Middlebury, Vermont.
Presbyterian churches from Los Angeles to Chicago.
Assembly of God church in Korea.
Missional churches scattered across Southeast Asia.
Not just one denomination. Not one geography. Not one culture. I have seen the Protestant church in its full diversity and color.
And I love it. All of it. That is why I can say the next part honestly.
The American church is very good at one thing. Personal faith.
I chose Jesus.
I found my calling.
My purpose.
My destiny.
My gifts.
That is beautiful. I mean that. But it can go thin.
The Asian church carries something America has weakened. A memory.
The memory is this. I am not only myself. I am a son. A daughter. A parent. An ancestor in formation. A steward of what was handed to me.
Faith is not only personal conviction. It is inherited trust. Embodied duty. Honor carried across generations.
Asia has a name for this: filial piety. The duty of a child to honor parents and ancestors. The West has mostly heard it as a foreign idea, or a burden.
But strip away the baggage and look at the root. What I am describing is filial faithfulness. The conviction that I am a son before I am anything else, and that faithfulness flows from being received, not from earning a place.
That is the gift. Not a better theology. A recovered one.
Let Me Get Personal
So let me go back further. To the moment the idea stopped being theology and became mine.
A few years ago I was in an accident in Shanghai. The taxi driver, giving me the ride, died. I was bedridden for six months. When you cannot move, you think.
What I kept thinking about was inheritance. What I had received. What I had not honored. What I would leave.
I realized I had been building like a man with no father. Earning. Proving. Striving. As if everything depended on me.
That is the American instinct, and I had gotten extraordinarily good at it. Faith as self-expression. Faith as performance.
The Korean church gave me a different word. But Korea alone could not heal it.
The Surprising Reversal
Here is the irony I did not expect.
We assume Asia is the performative one. The land of hierarchy and face and bowing to expectation. We assume America is where the self runs free.
When it comes to faith, I found the opposite.
In America, faith had become the performance. The personal brand. The testimony polished for an audience. The platform.
In Asia, faith was freer. Less guarded. More honest before God.
I think there are reasons for this.
The churches in Asia are younger. Less institutional weight to drag around. More teachable.
The faith is often first generation. People who met God in their own lifetime, not people who inherited a pew. There is a hunger in that. A fresh love.
And the faith there often costs something. It is not the cultural default. When belief is not free, the believing tends to be real.
So in my faith journey, the younger church taught me what the older one had forgotten. The little brother was keeping something the firstborn had set down.
That is what the Korean church gave to me. It did not give me something new. It uncovered something I had let my American instincts crowd out.
The Gift that Can Rot
But I am not here to romanticize the Asian church. Because here is the hard part. Filial piety, left to itself, can rot.
It becomes shame. Control. Hierarchy. Fear of dishonor. We know this. Many of us carry the scars from our own fathers.
So the gift is not Confucian obligation with a cross painted on it.
The gift is filial faithfulness redeemed by the Fatherhood of God.
America needs fatherhood without domination.
Asia needs sonship without shame.
The Asian American church carries both wounds. So it may carry both medicines.
Source, Root, Fruit
Here is the frame I keep returning to. Three tiers:
Redeemed Sonship is who I am. I am received before I earn anything. The Father runs to the son before the speech is finished. Given, not achieved.
Filial Faithfulness is how I live. Because I have been received, I can honor without fear. Cut this from sonship and it curdles back into shame.
Generational Stewardship is what I leave. What was entrusted, passed on stronger than I found it. Cut this from faithfulness and it becomes management. A spreadsheet.
Source. Root. Fruit.
Four Verbs
And it moves. Four verbs.
Receive. Admit it was given before it was earned.
Honor. Be grateful to those who came before.
Steward. Improve and protect what is in your hands.
Transmit. Pass it on stronger than you found it.
Then watch. What one generation transmits, the next receives.
The verbs loop. Down the family line. Powered at the top by a Father who gives first.
Not a Correction. A Reconciliation.
I am not asking the West to become Asian.
I am saying the Asian church may help the West recover a biblical virtue it once knew more deeply.
That is not a correction. That is reconciliation.
A brother returning a gift.
The First Bridge
So this is the first bridge. Asia and America.
The Asian church does not come to America empty handed. It comes carrying a memory the West misplaced. That we are sons before we are strivers. That we belong to a people. That what we receive, we are meant to pass on stronger.
Sonship is who I am.
Faithfulness is how I live.
Stewardship is what I leave.
Father. Son. Inheritance.
We offer it back in gratitude. In brotherhood. In servanthood.
That is worth a life.