Registration for AALC 2026 will go live this weekend! Check back at aalc.network on May 31st to register and for other conference information.
I attended a relatively small seminary in West Michigan that was the flagship learning institution of a Dutch Reformed denomination. One of the Dutch professors remarked that though the seminary has not produced a superstar figurehead in the popular Christian universe, their bread-and-butter was that they produced faithful ministers who were well-equipped to serve their (Dutch) churches with astute awareness and resolve. And they certainly did. They may not admit it, but the institution was steeped in a very specific ethnocentric orthopraxy to which they did a fantastic job training leaders who will shepherd the culture-specific churches in their denomination.
The Asian American Leadership Conference (AALC) is no different. We just admit it.
We admit that the focus of our content and instruction is to benefit a specific (and growing) Asian American cultural orthopraxy. We not only admit it, but over the course of two previous conferences, we’ve embraced it.
The 2024 Asian American Leadership Conference (AALC) was a little over a year ago and with the upcoming AALC in April 2026 less than a year away, here are my lasting takeaways from the previous conference with an appetizer of what to expect in the next.
Do the Work
A morning panel session titled “Better Together” moderated by Hanley Liu, featured guest speakers Aaron Chung and Heidi Wong from Exilic Church in New York City and Owen Lee and Soojin Park from Christ Central Presbyterian in Centreville, Virginia. Whether complementarian or egalitarian, the panel spoke theological and practical truths to the topic of men and women working in ministry together.
Soojin Park communicated an especially sobering appeal to senior pastors: Do the work. Specifically to “[do] the work of leadership” before hiring women to join staff.
“I have seen so many women around me who have the heart for ministry, who have the gifting for ministry, but the thing that burns them out is that they are stuck in ‘I support women’ limbo with their pastor… Their pastor says, ‘I support women.’ But they have not done the work of actually sitting down and thinking through, What does that actually look like at my church? What are the actual roles you can do? What does your job description look like? What are the boundaries? What are the things you can freely run with? They haven’t done the work.”
After the conference ended, our staff spent the majority of our six-hour car ride back to Northern California discussing this panel and how we can better do the work—an ongoing conversation we are still having to this day.
“Maybe we didn’t need to be here?”
On the final day of the conference, Faith Chang and David Larry Kim shared their respective chapters from the newly released book, A Letter to the Asian American Church. Faith doubted their church’s existence amid the backdrop of a new, bright and shiny church that opened across the street. It was a church that was everything they were not. “Maybe we didn’t need to be here?” she questioned. Her trembled voice revealed a cache of raw emotion still making its way to the surface. But highlighting God’s faithful reassurances throughout a decade of steady affirmations, Faith concluded that her church and our ministries—the ones we might deem as expendable—have a God-ordained purpose like “a mustard seed in a field or yeast working through dough” and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I still get goosebumps watching the playback of this session.
An Aggregate of Welcome
I tell the Welcoming Team at our church that we are looking for a very special kind of volunteer. We are looking for the kind of volunteer who relishes in creating a church experience from which others will benefit. Like the parent who plans the family vacation, our joy comes from seeing others enjoy themselves and have a good time.
The AALC planning team is cut from the same cloth. From planning the cadence of events to offering boba milk teas every afternoon. Bentos and churros. Foot traffic flows and Porto’s. AALC is a conference that strives to not be a conference in all the best ways. As pastors and leaders go from plenary sessions to meals, from seminars to socializing, AALC’s intentional hospitality was a tangible message intertwined with honor and dignity. For a group of leaders who are used to serving, being served was a revitalizing experience. It was the opposite of “death by a thousand paper cuts.” More like “life by a thousand gestures of hospitality” and for those two days in April, the warmth of that message was received loud and clear.
AALC 2026 – Defining our own orthopraxy
Our newly unveiled theme for AALC 2026 is “Reimagining Family: Transforming Family Dynamics Through the Gospel.” When SOLA Network’s president, Steve Chang, presented a rough vision of this theme to the conference planning team, there was a deep and collective amen, a weight that permeated throughout the Zoom call. You could call it a holy anxiety. C.S. Lewis would call it a “numinous fear.” We recognized we all have our own culturally-nuanced family wounds for which the salve of the gospel had yet to be applied. The general consensus was simple: This is going to be so good.
With the acknowledgment that our nuclear Asian families served as the template—good and bad—for how theological truths were internalized within ourselves and our congregations, we started filling in the details. Instead of seeking the biggest majority-culture superstars we could find, the planning team sought voices who can speak to our Asian American communities with astute awareness and resolve. To lean into our bread-and-butter. Thus our plenary sessions and seminars, as well as testimonies and meals, are all planned with all of us in mind as we reimagine our own family dynamics in light of the gospel.
Our prayer is that as you evaluate which conferences deserve your time, resources, and travel budgets, AALC will be a vital destination in 2026. As we partner together in our ministries, may we all be encouraged to do the work of determining our very specific ethnocentric orthopraxy for our culture-specific churches. In doing so, may we collectively realize that those bright and shiny churches and ministries are everything we are not…and that’s a good thing.
On behalf of the AALC 2026 planning team, we hope to see you in April!