What’s it like growing up Chinese in the United Kingdom? What are the challenges of immigrant churches or second-generation churches? How can we pray for and encourage our brothers and sisters there?
In this interview, we delve into the experiences and ministry of Josh Shek, who works for Chinese Overseas Christian Mission, an organization that supports Chinese churches across the country and Europe UK and Europe with leadership development, training, missions, and more. He is interviewed by SOLA Council member Daniel K. Eng.
Shek gives insights into the history of Chinese immigrants in the UK, from sailors to takeaway workers to British nationals from Hong Kong. He also shares about the struggles and hopes for the Chinese church, and asks that we pray for them.
You can watch their conversation below, on our YouTube page, or via our podcast. We have also provided transcriptions of two portions of their conversation.
Editor’s Note: Below is a lightly edited automated transcript of their conversation. There may be typos or grammatical errors.
Daniel K. Eng: Josh, you mentioned earlier about fellowships that form, you mentioned briefly about churches. And so you’ve also talked about how, how the experience is for British, Chinese and some and some British Born Chinese as well.
Can you tell me about how churches are reaching folks and and, and discipling them?
Josh Shek: So, churches so far, I mean, what’s interesting about the UK is that because our numbers, the numbers of Chinese in the UK is actually so small. Like I mentioned before, though, once you add in the most recent Hong Kong-ease, migration as well, you’re looking at around maybe half a million. I’d like stable long term Chinese in the UK. And that’s a reasonable number relative to the rest of the UK population. So we only make up maybe about 1% of the entire UK population.
But as a result, what’s happened is that you’ll only really find one, maybe two, maybe three Chinese churches or fellowships. In any in any town or city, obviously, like London and the big cities like Birmingham, Manchester, you’ll see you’ll see more so London’s got dozens, Birmingham’s got about three or four, Manchester’s got about two, three or four as well. Everywhere else, you can kind of expect there’s going to be one Christian group, maybe two, as a fellowship, or a church.
So maybe like a university student’s Bible study that’s on campus. And then you’ve got a church who and that group, they might rent out the local Baptist churches building on a Sunday. So that’s still room for practice over here. So one of the immediate context is that what you don’t have the numbers to reach out. So how do you then bring in all these all these people.
And again, thinking about the idea of just like the British reservation, as well as the Chinese reservation. What we find is that a lot of these Chinese communities are essentially just like these, these little clans of people who all move together from whether it’s Hong Kong or China or anywhere else, they come to the UK, they go to where their friends are in the first place. And then they stick to themselves. So you never hear about them, even as other Chinese you know that they’re out there somewhere. But you don’t know where they are.
Part of that was also the way that the takeaway industry kind of dispersed everyone. So there’s kind of like this, this, this kind of bigger idea where when you come to the UK and you decide to start your own takeaway or restaurant business, while you’ll make sure that you don’t set up that business anywhere too close to where your nearest competitor is. And then so, naturally over time, you get all these 1000s of different small, small businesses being created around like two three miles away from each other. And that spread us all out.
But it’s also meant that when not in very, very close contact with each other that they are so you get these pockets where these networks all know each other. But then when you apply that network on to the context of the church, you either know someone in the church or you’ve got you have a relative idea of what’s going on.
So in terms of like an evangelistic kind of routine. It was harder for the earlier Christian Chinese Christians in the UK to reach out. There were a few programs so CSM, the organization I was was with a lot of his work was to try to evangelize to all the different trainees that were spread out.
One of the big things that CSM and a different organization tried to do was to basically establish kind of like a restaurant workers ministry, specifically tried to get it tap into that network of catering workers, evangelize them, brought them into the church. And then that’s where you see, like a new community start to form around that kind of spiritual community that was there.
So that’s kind of like the context that I was I was raised in, like, where half of the adults in the church were catering background. The other half were were students. And so now what we see is, all of these individual churches, again, just the one or two, in any major city or town, trying to reach out, and it finds it difficult, like how do you reach out to a group that has hidden itself away so well? And when your own resources are already so low, within within your own churches, so you don’t, you don’t really see that many professional ministers, so we’re talking about full time pastors. We don’t, of course, they exist in our in our churches, but the proportional number of them in the UK, given how much smaller our churches are much, much more smaller.
A lot of church workers, if they were trained out in Asia, and may have come to the US very, very few of them, relatively speaking, have come to the UK into Europe. So in terms of even just the number of professional ministers that we have access to, and can spearhead a lot of that work much, much less we rely a lot more in terms of lay leadership. So leaders that God has raised up locally to do whatever it is whether it’s pastoring, teaching, preaching, disciple making. It’s a lot more family oriented. And so I’ve been it’s been that in terms of like, the cultural context, but a lot of the churches here are just collections of close knit families. So the entire kind of mode of church life is very familial.
So I think that’s one advantage. Whereas the UK, the small numbers actually means that you know, everyone in your church. If it’s, if it’s a Chinese church, you know, the four or five families that are there, it might be more, but there’s this idea where, as a church culture, everything kind of revolves in in a very much like a tribal kind of way. The preaching, the teaching, the disciple making happens within a context that is incredibly familiar in that sense. And that’s good. And in many ways, like it grounds our faith life, it grounds our discipleship in ways that are very much concrete. And so we apply a lot of that faith expression within the church context as a spiritual family in that sense. And then that allows us to then bring that out into our workplaces, in our schools.
But I’d say like that’s, that’s still then one of the biggest challenges. So how do you do that in ways that are going to be effective and long term? When it’s so familiar, and it’s so short term short term sensitive, it’s almost it’s week to week, rather than having a long term worker that is thinking far ahead into the future? I’m painting more of a general picture. Yes, I think we still see like in the big cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham, where there are resources at every level, whether that’s in the different language ministries, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and at different generations as well. So there are some places that have youth workers, most places don’t have youth workers. Some places have English ministry pastors, again, the overwhelming majority of them do not have English ministry workers in their churches.
So where those resources do exist, those churches then look a lot more stable. They actually have programs, they actually have workshops, they’re able to teach a lot more far reaching, longer thinking kind of things. Whereas in most places, though, you’re still basically trying to get by week to week. You’re seeing all these inorganic changes happening to your demographic, all these new families coming into your your context, and you’re just reacting to it, rather than being able to plan for long term discipleship, in essence.
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Josh Shek: And I think even before that, one of the biggest prayer requests that we can make over here is in terms of discipleship of the BBCs, second generation migrants here in the UK, because there’s because the resources are so lacking, because the program’s the churches over here, haven’t worked out yet how to engage in effective evangelism, how to engage in effective disciple making yet, and a lot of this still basically just importing a Western program of disciple making and Bible study, focus in our churches.
There still, I think, I’m still hoping to see a deepening sense of personal devotion, personal faith amongst the majority of the individuals that go to the churches that I’m I’m involved with. So how can our churches develop bigger ideas of not just bigger, not just bigger ideas, but more effective, more holistic ideas of disciple making that take into account both of their cultural heritages thats help them understand that their position as bicultural is actually an advantage and not something to escape from one way or the other. And eventually, through that personal discipleship to then become leaders in their own churches as well.
So I think yeah, personal discipleship, personal devotion, personal faith. It sounds very simple, but I think it’s, it’s something that I’m praying for, and I’d love prayer for from my cousins elsewhere in the world for our churches in the UK.