The United States of America is a land of immigrants. In the past few decades there has been a vast increase in the number of immigrants to the USA. The nation’s immigrant population has reached the highest number in its history to 40 million by 2010. It has doubled the immigrant population since 1990. Pew Research Center has noted that immigrant mothers have boosted births in all of the states of the country in the last 25 years. The diversity of nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, languages, and faith is seen and felt in the country. Even the mainline denominational churches in the USA have been impacted and influenced by the different ethnic churches in many ways in the last decade.
The U.S. Asian Christian population is diverse whose roots are from more than 20 countries in the East and Southeast Asia. For this research, I want to focus on the immigrant Asian Churches of the American Baptist denomination. In this paper, I will examine the influence of the American Baptist Churches primarily, the Euro-American congregations on the ethnic Asian American Baptist Churches with a specific study of the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago (ABCMC), a regional Association of American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA) and vice versa. The relationship between the American Baptist churches as a denomination and Indian Telugu Baptist churches goes back to 19th century. As a mission field of ABCUSA, Indian Baptist churches over the past century grew into a sister denomination partnering with the current mission and ministry of ABCUSA. Similarly, the Myanmar Baptist churches are the fruits of the missions of American Baptist missionaries Adoniram and Ann Judson in the early nineteenth century.
The ABCUSA is predominantly Euro-American and African-American congregations. These are large, older and well established churches, while the ethnic Asian Churches are smaller, younger, fewer and still in the process of stabilizing themselves in the country and also within the ABCUSA. It is conventionally believed that the older congregations influence the functioning of the younger ones. However, my thesis is that the older ones do influence the younger ones but also are being influenced by them in many different ways. My thesis is to explore how they are influenced by one another and why is it important to learn from one another for the current contextual ministry. The research includes the study of how the ethnic Asian American Baptist churches has been influenced by the larger American Baptist Churches on one hand and on the other how the functioning of these larger churches changed with the inclusion of the ethnic churches into ABCMC with in the last decade.
The methodology used for this research paper was survey research. Predefined questions were used to collect the information from the sample group. The survey was administered through online, email and telephone. This research focuses on the comparative study of both the churches to derive strategies and approaches that could be learned from each other and implemented respectively. The survey was conducted within the members of 16 churches of American Baptist churches of Metro Chicago of which 10 are predominantly Euro-American or few multi-ethnic congregations and all the 6 Asian ethnic congregations of the regional Association. The people who participated in the research are both clergy and laity answered the questions of survey and interviews sharing their own experiences and perspectives.
