From INHERITANCE Issue #2 - Summer 2009

ISAAC’s vision is to empower Asian American Christianity. The way we do that is by providing research that’s available and useful for both academic arena and ministry, as well as providing equipping tools for church leaders in Asian American churches

Currently, what is ISAAC working on?
Let’s start from the research side. Right now, we’re developing a lectureship with a number of partner universities and seminaries. The goal is to bring scholars that have been researching Asian American Christianity and Asian American religion to the campuses.

Then at these campuses, these scholars will talk about their research and hopefully provide and encourage more research and support in this area of Asian American Christian studies.

We’re also about to start a seminar to help those who are interested in studying Asian American congregations, try to learn from each other, and try to develop more research. Each of us on ISAAC has our own individual research projects as well. We just finished the Bay Area Chinese Church Project report. We’ll probably move into a different ethnic group.

Can you describe the Bay Area Chinese Church Project?
That started off as Dr. James Chuck’s research project about 12 years ago, when he wanted to get a comprehensive profile of all the Chinese churches in the San Francisco Bay Area. And not one that was just quantitative but one that had qualitative information like the histories of these churches.

So it started back then, and this follow up project included sort of an updating of those churches, getting a sense of how many new churches were planted, how many closed, as well as including some essays from some pastors who have had experience in Chinese ministries. So these new research projects are really surveys plus some essays that reflect Chinese churches in the Bay Area.

How did ISAAC start?
It started two and a half years ago with a number of us who used to be seminary teachers. There were six of us on board, all of us have had experience teaching in seminary context.

We started because we were unhappy with the fact that theological education in general, both evangelical and mainline, was not giving enough attention to Asian American ministries and studies. So we decided to form a non-profit organization that tried to focus on research and leadership development.

Does ISAAC have any long-term goals?
It’s hard to think of long-term goals when you start off as non-profit (laughs). But, I think a long-term goal right now is to really develop a research institute that provides regular resources. That’s from the research angle.

From the church angle, we are bringing in practitioners who are experienced in ministry to share and build resources for equipping churches. So we want to build a research and leadership equipping institute, side by side. Our advantage is that we can have them overlap so that it’s not either or, but we can impact two different communities at the same time.

There’s an organization under ISAAC called the ER. Can you explain what that is?
That’s the equipping and resource center (actually we might change the name, we kind of made it up for fun).

The idea was to develop a means to equip and resource Asian American church leaders, in practical ways, that’s grounded in good research. We also wanted to do it in a manner that includes the actual leaders themselves, so that they’re involved in the process as well. Most equipping programs usually bring in expert speakers to come and talk about their experience.

But we really want ours to be more of a give and take kind of collaborative effort, something like a Wikipedia approach to learning about how to do ministry in an Asian American setting. So we’ve been meeting in the last year to plan strategy of how to connect with Asian American churches, starting in the Bay Area.

Currently in the Bay Area, we started off by partnering with the Leadership Connection, which is an executive coaching organization that works with pastors. We started off with a retreat for the Chinese American pastors in English ministries.

Then we started to build ideas for resources and consulting with pastors who were served by this consulting service. So right now we’re in the middle of designing monthly workshops and some mini classes, and hopefully more. The classes we want to design are somewhere between seminary level and Sunday School.

So we’re trying to find a niche where leaders can get further training. It’s a big gap but also full of opportunities. We ask ourselves what it means to teach Sunday school, small group leadership, or world religions for an Asian American Christian context. That’s always the first question we ask ourselves before we do anything.

There’s a lot of mini-organizations under ISAAC. How many people are on staff?
We have four people who are officially staff. Young Lee is the director in southern California, who also heads up AAWOL group, which is a local women’s leadership network. Andrew Lee is the east coast representative for ISAAC and is right now hitting up a fund for theological grant to help local Chinese churches cultivate a sense of calling.

So he’s going to administer that grant and bring interns and local Chinese church leaders to create a more encouraging environment by calling people to ministry. So that’s one of the projects he’s doing, but he’s also trying to take some ER ideas, just like Young is doing, into his own region. And Johnson is the ER direction here in the Bay Area.

I play the role of the powerless figurehead leader here (laughs).

We also publish resources for spiritual growth, leadership formation and academic types of resources. We’re basically trying to respond to where needs appear; because of that, don’t have a very clear objective; we’re kind of reacting and responding to situations and scenarios as they occur, so we’re trying to feel our way through.

Final thoughts?
Our hope and our dream is that the Asian American Christian community will embrace and support us because I don’t think there’s another organization that tries to do both of these ministries at the same time in research and leadership development; its either one or the other.

And we really want the Asian American community to support us, more than getting big grants because we feel like this puts our work and agenda in the hands and in the control of the Asian American community. So come on out and give as much support as you can so we can continue to be responsive and helpful to you.