Editor’s Note: This article is an adapted excerpt from the article “From Silent Exodus to Silent Divergence: Changing Immigrant Society Unchanging Immigrant Church” in the Journal of Language, Culture, and Religion. It was published with the permission of the author and JLCR.
In 1976, when I was just ten years old, my parents immigrated to the United States. On our first Sunday, my family walked to the nearest Korean church in town. My father did not know a single word of English, but the very next day the senior pastor of that church, who worked in maintenance at a general hospital during the weekdays, helped my father find a job at that hospital as a custodian.
The senior pastor not only helped him find a job but also helped him acquire his driver’s license, buy a used car, and get his children enrolled in school. He went out of his way to help our family with many things required to settle into our new life in America.
Forty-some years later in 2018, I met a newcomer and his family at my church. They had arrived from Korea just two weeks prior. The family came on an exchange visa to a university in the Dallas area and were planning to stay for about one and a half to two years. The two sons were starting fifth and third grade.
When I heard this, I told them that while the younger son would be able to attend one elementary school for the two years that they were here, the older son would have to move up to a middle school after just one year in fifth grade. The mother then chimed in to say that while they were still in Korea, she had searched the internet to see if there was a school district nearby that had elementary school up to sixth grade. She was able to find that one school district with that condition near the university. So they used the internet to find an apartment inside that school district boundary and made an online deposit.
Then when I asked how they found out about our church, they answered that after researching several churches on the internet, they had decided to come to this church. Shocking. It is a completely different world from when my parents came to the United States back in 1976. The immigrant society has changed and is constantly changing.
The Changing Role of the Korean Immigrant Church
As the Korean population increased in the 1970s, the Korean church experienced parallel growth, playing a central role as part of the immigrant community. When Koreans came to the United States, they often went to church. Research shows that throughout the 1980s and 1990s, about 70-80 percent of Koreans in the United States attended a Korean church. Accordingly, by the 2000s, approximately 900,000 Koreans in the States were attending Korean immigrant churches. Yet, by the end of the 2010s, church attendance decreased to approximately 470,000, a near 50 percent decline in just 20 years.
In 2018, multiple Korean denominations in the US reported decreasing trends in the size of their membership. They all stated that it was due to decreasing immigration trends. The Korean media was also reporting that the Korean population was decreasing. However, according to census data from the U.S. and Korean governments, the Korean population in the US actually increased from 2.09 to 2.55 million, an increase of 22 percent, in just six years from 2013 to 2019.
The reality is that the Korean church is no longer the central place for the Korean immigrant community. Unlike the immigrants of the 1970s and 1980s who sought comfort and identity through the Korean churches, the new immigrants of the 2010s no longer feel any tangible need to attend a Korean church. In spite of this reality, the church continues to believe that when Koreans immigrate to the United States, they would naturally come to a church just as they did back in the 1970s and 1980s, disregarding the growing disparity between the Korean population and church attendance.
Sometime towards the end of the 2000s, the path of the Korean immigrant society and the Korean immigrant church started to diverge. Along with decreasing church attendance, the number of Korean churches has decreased from 4,500 in 2017 to only 2,800 in 2021 for a precipitous decline. For over a decade now, the Korean immigrant society and the immigrant church have traveled along divergent paths. But because it was so under the radar, many have failed to observe the development of this “Silent Divergence” over the past decade. One of the main culprits of this divergence in Korean immigrant society is the transition from an offline community to an online community.
The Impact of the Internet on Korean Immigrant Churches
The Korean immigrant society has changed from an offline to an online community. In the 1970s and 1980s, the primary offline community was the Korean immigrant church that functioned as a de facto community center. However, in the 21st century, the tech-savvy generation no longer depends on the offline community for assistance in settling down in America.
As described above with the family I met at my church, many Koreans search the internet to educate themselves on what is required to live in the United States, such as a good school district, options for dining, shopping, leisure, etc. even before immigrating. With plenty of secular community websites providing services, the church is no longer the center. However, church leaders don’t seem to notice this “Silent Divergence”.
The title of my essay includes the phrase, “Silent Exodus.” This phrase described what happened between the Korean-speaking first-generation and the English-speaking 1.5 and second-generation Korean Americans starting from the mid-to-late 1980s. As the English-speaking generations were emerging within the Korean immigrant church, they were searching for their own identities, and the biblical paradigm with which they most identified was either the exodus or exile paradigm.1
I remember participating in various conferences in the early 1990s where emerging identity issues were addressed. The “exodus” paradigm was quickly embraced over “exile,” and “Silent Exodus” was eventually coined. The term grew in its audience to include not only the Korean American churches but also the broader Asian American churches and even the Latino American churches.
If “Silent Exodus” describes what was happening internally within the Korean immigrant church, then “Silent Divergence” describes what is happening externally between the Korean immigrant society and the Korean-speaking first-generation immigrant church in the new millennium.
The subtitle, “Unchanging Immigrant Church,” has a double meaning to it. The Church that Jesus built upon the rock (Matthew 16:18), bought with his blood on the cross, and began on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2)—the essence of that Church is unchanging. However, the outward demonstration of that unchanging Church in the world does not remain unchanged. For every generation, the Church is unique and indigenous to every locality and in every culture. Yet, the current Korean immigrant church is unchanging in the face of changing immigrant society.
Present Future: From Immigrant Church to Diaspora Church
I believe that in the 21st century the Korean church in the United States is encountering a new crisis. The present crisis of the 2020s is the fact that the growth rate of the Korean church no longer correlates with immigration trends. Since the early 1990s, the Korean immigrant church has endeavored to maintain an outward appearance of generational unity through managing tension between the generations through pragmatic solutions. They adopted Korean-speaking and English-speaking congregational structures as a solution to generational tension.
However, it only addressed the language barrier that obviously surfaced. The Korean-speaking and English-speaking structure did not address the more foundational problem of relational breakdown between the generations. It is imperative that the Korean church reconciles this relational breakdown between the generations and restore what it means for the people of God to truly live out the reign of the triune God as a community composed of a “triune generation”.
Therefore, I believe that a transformation must occur within the Korean churches in the United States. In the 21st century, I believe there is a call for a transformation from immigrant church to diaspora church. If an immigrant church is reactive to immigration trends, then the diaspora church is proactive in engaging the changing community. If an immigrant church is about providing pragmatic solutions, then the diaspora church is about rediscovering the core values and what it truly means to be the community of the people of God indwelling one another through genuine koinonia.
If an immigrant church is about extracting members out of the world, then the diaspora church is about being sent, that is, scattered into the world. It is imperative for the Korean diaspora church to rediscover what it truly means to be sent, in other words, scattered into the world and to engage the world in living out the reign of the Kingdom of God and the providence of God in their daily lives. The Korean immigrant church must change to demonstrate this unchanging Church to the changing immigrant society.
Lastly, I noted above that “Silent Exodus” grew in its application to the broader Asian American churches and to the Latino churches in America. My question going forward is whether “Silent Divergence” will grow in its application from Korean American churches to not only other Asian American churches but also to many other immigrant churches. If so, then what will be the challenge going forward for ministering to the immigrant churches? Furthermore, will “Silent Divergence” apply not only between the immigrant society and Christian churches but also between the immigrant society and other religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism? Is it just a Korean American phenomenon? Or is American secularism so powerful that it will split apart millennia-old religious identity from their cultural identity?
The Unchanging Church
Just as there was a need for Korean-speaking immigrant churches 40 years ago, there is a need for one today and there will be 40 years into the future. But unlike the 1970s and 1980s, the Korean immigrant church has been pushed out to the margins of the community. Yet, it is in the margins of the community, ironically, that God, in his sovereignty, has called the Korean church to rediscover her identity of “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet 2:9-12). In his groundbreaking book, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology, Lee Jung Young developed his theology of marginality and challenged, “One fundamental problem that the church faces today is its tendency to seek a central place in our society. The church becomes authentic when it is situated at the margins of the world.” The Korean church must seek out and reengage the community so that she is not completely isolated from the members of the community. In the midst of a constantly changing immigrant society, the Korean church must live out the unchanging gospel of Jesus Christ.