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Second-generation immigrants - the children of those who migrated, or they were very young when they migrated - present their own challenges and opportunities. The same can be said for children of mixed marriages. While they grow up in Western culture, they may be subjected to surprisingly traditional expectations from their family. Kathleen Garces-Foley records how mixed marriages were a constant pastoral problem even at Evergreen church, California, a church that is purposefully multiethnic, and whose pastor has a mixed marriage. “Many of the young adults at Evergreen were raised with this double message: Be American in all areas of your life except family.” [Kathleen Garces-Foley, Crossing the Ethnic Divide: The Multiethnic Church on a Mission, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 113-4].
These children feel like they belong to neither the dominant culture nor their home culture. This could lead either to a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, or a genuine flexibility and ability to engage with both cultures. The question is how to encourage the later while avoiding the former.
In reply to a comment on a previous post, I said while we're free to create ethnic-specific churches, we're also free to deliberately create ethnically hetergenous churches. The best books on multi-ethnic churches I've found so far are:
- Korie L. Edwards, The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008);
- Kathleen Garces-Foley, Crossing the Ethnic Divide: The Multiethnic Church on a Mission (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and
- Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downer's Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 2009).
I like Rah the best - he seems to come from the most conservative-Evangelical standpoint of the three.
Anyone else got any good resources to recommend? Also - any ideas on how we encourage second-generation immigrants to be be flexible, not disconnected?
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