SOLA Network had the privilege of speaking to Aaron Chung, founding pastor of Exilic in NYC and SOLA Council member. Aaron Chung spoke about the future of the church in America, especially the Asian American church.
Their conversation included:
- Why are young people becoming disenfranchised by religion?
- How should we think about doubt in the church?
- Is deconstruction bad?
- How can we help Christians take ownership of their faith?
- How should the church think about discipleship in the digital age?
We hope you are blessed and challenged by their conversation.
Watch the interview on YouTube, listen to the audio on Podcasts, or read the transcript below. Please note the transcript has only been lightly edited and may contain spelling or grammatical errors.
SOLA Network: Young people are increasingly becoming disenfranchised by religion. So what does that mean to you? And why do you think it’s happening?
Aaron Chung: Yeah, I think it’s the idea that people are becoming more and more jaded with religion or deconstructing their faith. Why is it happening? Why?
Well, I think the first group I would talk to is pastors and ministry leaders because the way the question is framed is geared towards them. But what I would say is, when people grow disenfranchised or jaded with religion, it’s not something that’s new. You see many people in the Bible becoming jaded or deconstructing their faith as well. So it’s not something that’s new, but it is something that’s more visible than it was ever before. So, books on deconstruction podcasts or courses on how to deconstruct our faith even. And so there are now more communities with deconstructive folks that are gathering and assembling together, so it’s not new, but it is more visible.
SOLA Network: And so how do we speak into the lives of those that are thinking about potentially, you know, abandoning their faith? And what do you think is often the impetus for that deconstructionist journey?
Aaron Chung: Yeah. So usually, when you look at the people thinking about abandoning their faith, it’s usually people that grew up in the church, not people that are like brand new to the faith, obviously. So it’s usually people that grew up in the church. And probably the easiest way to think about it is the head, the heart and the hands.
So in our church, for example, a ton of people left the church, and then for whatever reason, they came back. And so usually when they do come back, or they’re thinking about leaving their head questions, right, so one of the things that we see ad nauseam is that if you have these doubts, it’s not a bad thing, it’s actually a good thing. So we say, doubt is not the opposite of belief. Unbelief is the opposite of belief. doubts are somewhere in the middle. And if you find answers for your doubts, it can actually propel you to have stronger faith. If you don’t find those answers, it will propel you to unbelief. So doubts can actually be a strong thing. But are they finding the answers?
And well if you grew up in the church and you sort of have an inherited faith, it’s not really your own. And so you just were told to go to church, you were told to believe, but you never found answers to what about this? And what about that?
So sometimes our head issues, and they didn’t find the answers to that, and we want to help with that. So we say doubts are good. And we want to affirm the doubts that they have, in a way where we can help them find answers, then there’s heart issues. And so we’ve all heard the expression, the heart wants, what the heart wants.
And so sometimes it’s I just don’t want to live this way anymore. Like, I feel like I’m in a straitjacket the entire time, I’m not free. I want to sleep with who I want to sleep with. I want to date this person, even though they don’t share my faith. I want to spend my money the way that I want to spend my money. And so there are heart issues where you feel like there’s too much of a social cost being a Christian now, there’s no social benefit.
And so there’s a lot of social costs of being a Christian like, Why am I doing this? Again, like when people think I’m bigoted? And I’m, you know, ignorant, I’m on the wrong side of history, like, Why do I want to associate myself with this historically, regressive group.
And so there’s heart issues where like, you want to be accepted, and you want to live your life with autonomy and freedom the way that you want to so Christianity can come across like a straitjacket.
That’s another reason why I think people are growing jaded with religion, and then obviously, the hands and with that, it’s, you know, I’m talking about abuse, and so sexual abuse of the church, spiritual abuse of the church. And so when something like that happens in your life, it literally changes the trajectory of your life. And so, if it happens, especially under the church roof, it’s very hard not to associate that with the faith, especially if it’s coming from church leaders. And so, the head, the heart and the hands and so what I would try to do is to do the best that I can to minister to those areas as best as possible, so that they don’t completely grow disenfranchised or or deconstruct their faith.
SOLA Network: And in that paradigm, right, the head part in the hands. What are the ways in which our churches, specifically Asian American, Korean American churches, what are the ways in which they’ve been structured that maybe has contributed to some of those problems? And then on the flip side, what are the ways in which you see, hey, maybe Korean American church culture can be a benefit to people who have had those experiences.
Aaron Chung: So I think one of the things that the churches that, you know, we may have grown up in, they didn’t come across, necessarily intellectually credible. So when they went to schools, their professor sounded intellectually credible. But when they went to church, it was the text was preached in such a way where it just didn’t sound rational or logical at all. And so we’ve done a poor job of that.
Additionally, the experiences that people have in church are not existentially satisfying at all. But when they’re out in the real world, it’s super satisfying. And so we need to provide communities where it’s also like, I have friends, I have community, I find fulfillment. There’s a person at my church who recently got invited to Coachella, which is great. But it also happened to fall on Easter Sunday, he was a skeptic. And he was like, for some reason, I had no desire, or feelings to go to Coachella actually wanted to come to church. And so there was something that was happening to him, existentially, that caused him to actually come to church on Sunday despite being a skeptic.
And so the two ways that I’m finding this from Tim Keller to really transform the heart is is it intellectually credible, is existentially satisfying, we’ve done a poor job of that, and we need to do better. I do think that the Asian American church is certainly capable of that we fellowship with the best of them. We’re smart, we know the Bible, like why can’t we do that? And we were able to and so we need to provide churches and, you know, communities and forums where these kinds of spaces can happen more.
SOLA Network: And speaking of that, you know, I think it’s always interesting. People use this term, deconstructionism. But then no one ever talks about construction.
Aaron Chung: Exactly. Reconstruction is yeah…
SOLA Network: What does it mean? What maybe excites you right now about how churches because like you said, a lot of people, they grew up in church. And I think it’s a critique of the way we constructed people’s faith when they were kids to now sure. How is that shifting for you? Where you’re like, hey, I think this is a better way in 2022, to construct people’s faith better and trusting either their children or they’re actually trusting their own lives to the church.
Aaron Chung: Yeah. So what I would say is not all deconstructionism is bad, some of it is good. So we should take a step back. And if we have the truth, we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge our own truths. Right. So question it. So one of the things that our church says was we have a venue called Curious, and so anyone can come? No question is off the table.
So we provide spaces where we’re not afraid to tackle the most difficult questions. And so that’s what I mean, when I say that, not all deconstructionism is bad, some of it is good. And so if we find answers for those doubts, it’s actually a good thing. But I think far too often, we’ve, we’ve sort of seen doubt in questions that sort of like, in a negative light instead of a positive light, which is the way that we should. And when you do that, you can help reconstruct their inherited fate to become their own, when they’re in their 20s and 30s, and so on and so forth.
SOLA Network: And that process, I think, you know, when we make children’s ministries and youth ministries, how does that mentality affect how we build those for you like in your church and your context?
Aaron Chung: Yeah, I mean, the earlier the better, you know, so if we don’t get to our kids, the world will first. And so we need to start talking about even difficult things at an early age. And the Bible has so much to say about different topics. Yes, we have to do it in such a way where our kids can understand it.
But we have to catechize and disciple our kids early, because the world is not they’re not going to wait. And so we need to start very early and and give them the the spiritual muscles to be able to handle the difficult questions that they’re going to be asked and, and they’re going to face I’ll give you an example of this.
So one of our pastors was at the playground. And his three boys were playing. And there were some other kids that where they’re like, 10 or 11, they were watching porn on their phone at 10 or 11. When I was growing up, we didn’t have that kind of access. The only access that we had to porn was at Blockbuster, but it was in that xxx room behind the you couldn’t even get in there because you’re a kid. But kids grow so much earlier because they’re exposed to so much and so the world is not going to wait and so we can’t either.
SOLA Network: And then as you’re constructing those things, how do you measure the difference between we’re constructing this with intentional, like biblical theology versus we’re constructing this with kind of cultural warfare mentality, right? How do you balance and both measured?
Aaron Chung: Yeah. Which so you do have to do a little bit of both. So I like what Jesus said when he said, You have heard that it was said, but I say to you, so he’s saying, You have heard that it was said, based on culture. For us, it would be you have heard that it was said by this cultural Prophet, rapper, athlete poet, but I say to you, so we have to do the same thing we can do with biblical theology, certainly, but we also have to use cultural prophets as authoritative sources as well, that can help critique culture, in a biblical light. And so there’s ways of doing that.
So one of the things that we do at our churches, obviously, we preach the gospel, we preach the Word. But we also use, you know, cultural authorities, Elon Musk, Bezos and other people to reinforce actually what the Bible is trying to teach. So there has to be a combination of both.
SOLA Network: And then how do you teach, you know, as people are getting answers, and they’re learning these, you know, their challenges, their doubts? You know, at some point, faith is required to take that leap. How do you balance that? How do you encourage your congregants to, hey, ask questions and have these? But, you know, like the knowledge gap, right, every answer is actually two more questions. Yeah. Right. Like, how do you kind of help your congregants navigate that?
Aaron Chung: That’s a great question. So I think this is where like, preaching the gospel is not enough. There also has to be an invitation to actually believe in the gospel and to accept it, you can’t just proclaim it, I now have to challenge you to accept it. And so one of the things that we actually do is we say, Hey, where are you at?
And I was asking this to one of the skeptics at our church. And he said, “If baptisms, a 10, I think I’m like an eight and a half.” So he was measuring it that way. Because I continually and recently, he actually said, I was thinking about doing ministry this week. And I was like, How can you do ministry if you’re not a Christian yet? And he was like, he was like, I don’t know, I feel like I’m kind of there.
And so it’s one of those things that slowly crept up on him without him realizing it’s just, it’s just kind of like when you’re, you’re, you’re friends with someone, and then all of a sudden, you develop feelings for them without even knowing it. And that platonic line was crossed that one moment, like it wasn’t planned, but it just kind of crept up. And that’s what happened to him.
But we have this culture where we just say, “Hey, where are you at spiritually?” Because we’re all on a spiritual journey, whether you’re skeptic or not, or religious, like, where are you at? And so we constantly ask questions like that to two so that they can reflect on where they think they’re at to.
SOLA Network: And one thing that I have been noticing is that the head issues, right, the apologetic kind of questions. They’ve sort of shifted in the last 10 years, right? They used to be a little bit more like what is truth, but red pill blue pill matrix, right? Now, there’s a lot more where fake news and like people being like, it doesn’t matter what it’s true. So how have you and maybe your church, right, like, navigated? What are the apologetic questions that are being asked now, versus the ones that, you know, maybe we grew up with when we were being saved?
Aaron Chung: Yeah, that’s a great question. So. So Neil Postman, he once said that. So he made a contrast between George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. And Postman said in 1984, if you want to, you know, control people or whatever, you limit the truth. And if you limit the truth, do some propaganda, they’re not going to know what the truth is. And as a result, you can kind of like control them, like North Korea. Huxley said, there’s another way of doing it. Don’t limit the truth, but give people so much information that finding the truth is like a needle in a haystack now. And with that, you can control people as well. And so that’s the world that we live in. Now. There’s so much information overload now. It’s like, how do I know what’s fake news versus real news? And there’s, we have difficulty, you know, figuring out, you know, how to discover the truth now. And so. So that’s, that’s one of the things that’s taking place there. So how do we communicate? How do we help them find that needle in the haystack? And I think you’re right, the questions have changed. So in the past, it was like, what is truth? You’re right, and now we live in a post truth world, or the questions back then we’re like, how do I know that the Bible is like accurate and those kinds of questions people are not asking that now. And so the way to speak into people’s hearts is by asking questions like, Who do you think you are identity questions. That’s a major question right now because We’re not exactly sure who we are, we’re still discovering who we are. But is identity something that you discover continually in a process? Or is that something like declared up here? Like, what is the meaning of life? morality questions, Destiny questions, what have to what happens after we die of freedom? Questions? What is freedom? Have questions about hope, like, those are the things that people are asking now, not, you know, Christianity versus other religions, comparing it like people are not interested in that anymore. So these are the kinds of things that we need to talk about.
SOLA Network: And you mentioned it about like, you know, the kind of like, being able to ask any questions, let’s open forums, as we’re transitioning, you know, more and more into a digital space world, that old form where the pastor is on the pulpit and preaching and like you listen, versus now where you know, more people are sitting in circles and being able to talk yeah. How do you approach trying to help people construct their faith when you as a pastor, even the elders don’t have that level of control as you used to?
Aaron Chung: Yeah, so I think this is where we need to do some digital discipleship, where we teach our congregations, what they consume, and even how they consume it. Right. So is it the best thing in the morning for your mental health? Do you? Do you look at social? Probably not? So there needs to be more digital discipleship that’s done. So how do we consume it? What do we consume? There’s so many resources out there, they’re all saying different things. Everyone is on this giant spectrum. Even when we’re in the same tribe, there’s different parties. And so how do we figure out and so there needs to be more teaching done on that, because to your point, they are being discipled. And they are forming digital communities throughout the week, a lot more than one hour a week on Sundays. And so we had to do a lot more digital discipleship for that.
SOLA Network: And when you talk about right, like the pain of the hands, right, you know, with digital, the stories of church abuse and neglect, and all of these things, they’re so bad, they’re so easy to find. How do you both individually, right, like navigate all of those stories, but as well, how do you help your congregation to understand and have those things be a part of reconstructing instead of deconstructing their faith?
Aaron Chung: Yeah, so the last thing we want to do is shove those stories underneath the rug, because we’ve, we’ve done that for far too long. And when that happens, there’s, there’s more of an explosive reaction to it. And so we need to, we need to pull the rug out. And we need to talk about these stories as painful and uncomfortable as those stories are. So we need to do a better job of telling these stories. And after we tell these stories to one another. And as difficult as this might be, we have to also learn how to understand how these kinds of stories got there to begin with. And more often than not, it’s usually power dynamics, behind abuse, there’s a misunderstanding of power that’s taking place. And when you think about what the gospel is, what is Jesus like serving, washing our feet, is a man dying naked on a cross. And so he subverts our understanding of power. And so there needs to be more teaching done on power as well, because that’s where a lot of the abuse is done from a misunderstanding of these kinds of dynamics. But the gospel is so subversive. And we need to establish a culture in our church, where we have a gospel understanding of power, where we serve one another, we didn’t come to be served, you know. So I think that’s the way of going forward.
SOLA Network: And being part of an Asian American leadership conference. I remember one year when our past conferences was that there was a study in Ivy League schools of like, people who are coming to Christ, right, that didn’t grow up in church, were coming to Christ. And it was actually like, 40% were Asian American. Like we’re the fastest in America. We’re the we’re the segment that people are coming to the Lord and constructing their faith, but first time, A like from your perspective. And that could be a theory, right? Like, What’s your theory on any why that is? And why does that perhaps give us a little bit more relevance of the right word in this discussion of deconstructionism and constructionism?
Aaron Chung: I haven’t seen that study. And I don’t want to make generalizations, either. But I do think that the… so everyone has a worldview. And one of the ways of breaking down a worldview, I would say, is our origin. Where do we come from? What is the meaning of life? Morality, how do I live my life? And then like destiny, what happens after I die? So every one of us has a worldview, whether you’re a Darwinian secular, materialist, Hindu, Muslim, or Christian, right. And I think one of the things that we have to figure out is what makes coherent sense, what best explains what’s happening? And so one of the things I say to our skeptical friends is there are two things that you can do to help me deconstruct my own faith. Because so I was, I was sharing my, I was talking with a skeptic in our church. And I said, I said to them, what would it take for you to believe in Jesus? And they turned the tables on me, they were like, well, what would it take for you to not be a Christian? And I was like, ah, that’s, that’s such a great question. I said, I said, there are probably two things that you can do to make me abandon my faith. Number one, find the missing body of Jesus like Ocean’s 11, that thing, find it, I’m done, because he didn’t, his soul didn’t rise from the dead, his body did, too. So if you find the body, somehow, I’m done, like our fate falls apart. Second thing that you can do is tell me a better story. And to this day, I have not found a better story than Christianity. And so it does. It sounds intellectually credible to me. And then secondly, it is existentially moving to me, I want this to be true. Like, why wouldn’t I want eternal life? And so those two things, again, I think, are one of the it’s hard to say for sure. But I think those two things are one of the reasons why.
SOLA Network: Last question for you in your individual life and your life with your church and the ministry you’re doing. What’s your hope? Like, what’s your excitement in this in this period of time, where everyone is like, oh, you know, break it down, Break it down, right? Like, what’s your hope, as a pastor, that, hey, we’re gonna get through this, and this is what is gonna look like on the other side?
Aaron Chung: Yeah. So I think the question that people have been asking the past two years is how do I lead my company, organization church through a crisis? I think the question now, two years after 2020 is not how do I lead my company, church or organization through a crisis, but it’s how do I lead them out of a crisis? And that’s exciting to me. Because we want to help we’re not the crisis that we’ve had the past two years is not the same now. So how do I lead our people out of this? So a lot of mental health issues, a lot of existential angst, a lot of death, sickness, job loss. How do I lead our people out of this, and into a brighter future? And I think it can be done. But the questions that we have to ask ourselves are a little bit different than they were just two years ago, when we were just going through this crisis, trying to figure out how to use cameras and preaching to no one. It’s very different now. And, and that’s exciting. It’s a lot of work. But it’s an exciting thing.
So you kind of addressed it before, when you said, you know, questions that people are asking today are different than they were yesterday. And so I think one of the things that we have to do when we try to think about evangelism is okay, then what does the cultural landscape look like today? And preacher, so there are four Ds that can help us understand the current cultural moment that we’re in. I think the first thing is that we’re more disenchanted than we’ve ever been before. We’re very dystopian, so. And what I mean by that is like, we don’t feel hope. So a pandemic. This is my second pandemic, by the way, I lived in China during SARS. So I’ve gone through, I can’t handle another one. But we’ve got we’ve gone through a pandemic, we have racial division, we have political strife, our economy is collapsing, gas prices are ridiculous, there’s a war. And it’s just like, how do you not feel disenchanted. And so that’s what’s happening. The second D is, we’re more distracted than ever before, too. So Microsoft did a study a few years ago, and they discovered that a goldfish have an attention span of nine seconds. And they also discovered that humans have an attention span of eight seconds. So we now have an attention span lower than goldfish. And so imagine your attention span is like a glowing ball. every eight seconds is going from here to here to vroom here every eight seconds. And so when you live this kind of distracted life, or Neil Postman also says we amuse ourselves to death. How you gonna think about like the deep questions of life, like what is the meaning of life? Why am I here? What up? Like, you’re not going to think about that stuff. So we’re distracted. So we’re disenchanted, we’re distracted. There’s also more disunity. So we see it with. You see it on Twitter, you see it on social, and even within our own Christian family. There’s a lot more division and disunity than there ever used to be. So that gets hard. And then the last thing I would say is that in the past, Christianity was always seen as dumb. And today, I think that narrative has shifted to not only dumb but dangerous. And so now you have Christian nationalism that was always present, but far more visible than it ever was before. Christians are always seen as bigots because we hate certain demographics. And so it’s not only that I find your religion dumb, it’s actually a threat to my life. It’s dangerous. So why would I want to believe in that? And so one of the things that we have to do in our evangelism is, how do I re-enchant this person? How do I help this distracted person focus and descend that going bonds a deeper truth? How do I unify us rather than cause more disunity? And then how do I make Christianity seen as something that’s more life giving them dangerous to your life, it’s actually the best thing for you. And so we had to do that in our evangelism. The primary way of doing that is by telling stories, I think suffering helps. But you can’t, you can’t make someone suffer you like we have no control over that. But we can control stories. And like Steve Jobs, He once went into the Apple cafeteria, and he asked everyone who is the most powerful person in the world. And like thinking it was a trick question. They were like, is it you? And he was like, No, it’s not me, the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. And so we need to tell stories, again, about identity, who am I? What is the meaning of life? What does freedom really look like? What is hope? And these are the kinds of questions that can lift the spirit up in such a way where they’re reinjected, more hopeful, they’re not distracted, because they find it quite appealing it and it’s not dangerous or a threat to them, but it’s really helpful. And so we have to do it from the pulpit. We have to do it at the cafe. We have to do it at work. We have to constantly be telling these stories to subvert the cultural landscape that we live in today.
SOLA Network: Awesome, wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Awesome.