Over the past century, the North American Church has gradually experienced a sense of marginalization, but only in recent decades has the church fully come to grips with this reality. Speaking on behalf of the North American Church, Hauerwas and Willimon write, “All sorts of Christians are waking up and realizing that it is no longer ‘our world.’”^[1] For those who have long held the centers of power and influence, any diminishment may seem like a step closer to marginalization. As Alan Roxburgh describes, “North American churches are … neither on the periphery nor on the margins, but are definitely in a new social location. For a church that has long assumed its monopoly over the private religious world of modernity’s citizens, it does feel like living on the margins.”^[2] This perspective has led to various responses, many of them problematic. For instance, various Christian national and political movements, especially evangelical movements, have attempted to insert themselves—and have in some cases succeeded—into the centers of power to shape the nation’s moral character in their image. Appeals to the government to prohibit abortion, same-sex marriage, gender reassignment, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and even vaccinations have taken on religious connotations. Evangelical groups have frequently alluded to the Judeo-Christian origins of the United States to envision a society that places them at the centers of power. In other words, many Christians in the United States still view their faith and religion as a dominant part of their society.

For those observing the state of the North American religious landscape from the peripheries, it may be odd to think of the North American Church as a marginalized group. In many respects, vestiges of Christendom still permeate American society and culture. David Bosch observes that even with these seismic shifts and the church’s diminished role in the world, “Many of the old images live on, almost unchallenged.”^[3] Today, the North American Church finds itself at a critical moment. As Lesslie Newbigin writes, “We are forced to do something that the Western churches have never had to do since the days of their own birth—to discover the form and substance of a missionary church in terms that are valid in a world that has rejected the power and the influence of the Western nations.”^[4] This situation begs the question: How does the North American Church navigate the shifts in its newfound circumstances, and what resources can guide it to find new paths forward? The answer may not require a search outside but within the North American Church. One may find the solution operating in the peripheries of society, within the existing American ecclesial context of the ethnic minority church. This chapter aims to shed light upon the contributions of the Asian American Church and advance the church’s theology of the missio Dei by developing a theology that considers their experience of liminality. In particular, the liminal experience of the Asian American Church can serve as a framework for understanding God’s mission of mediatory presence, and this framework should serve as a missional model for the whole ecclesia of God. This chapter first identifies the Asian American ecclesial experience within the context of liminality. It then describes and grounds liminality as a missional paradigm for understanding the incarnational ministry of Jesus Christ, which leads the church to communitas, or authentic community. Finally, this chapter constructs a theology of mission that understands the significance of the Asian American liminal experience toward the church’s mission.

Liminality, Communitas, and an Asian American Theology

To construct an Asian American theology of mission, one must begin with their context—the multiple liminalities that Asian Americans navigate regularly. Without understanding this context, theology proves abstract. All theology exists contextually in the histories, cultures, and experiences that shape the reception of God’s revelation and its subsequent interpretation and dissemination. For Asian American theology, that context is liminality.

Liminality serves as a significant concept for understanding Asian American theology because it functions as the context in which many Asian Americans live in the social, political, theological, and ecclesial landscape of the West. Theologian Sang Hyun Lee was one of the earliest proponents of the term “liminality” to describe the Asian American ecclesial experience.^[5] Lee opts for the term liminal rather than marginal to express the positive and constructive aspects of the given transitional space, thereby reclaiming the agency of Asian Americans who find themselves straddled “betwixt and between” two worlds. For him, a person enters into liminal spaces of their own volition, which allows for the possibility of creating new and brighter paths of solidarity and resistance.^[6] Not all in-between spaces are voluntary but may be involuntary or coerced liminalities, which is another way to refer to one as marginalized. However, for Lee, viewing the space as liminal rather than marginal recovers some of the power and agency lost in the marginalization of individuals and communities pushed to the peripheries of society and opens up new and creative possibilities for theology previously unimagined.

Liminality

Liminality, an anthropological concept introduced by Arnold van Gennep and further developed by Victor Turner, describes a transitional period of an individual or collective moving from one social location, status, or condition to another. It characterizes the space of the movement between the separation (pre-liminal) from an initial state and the incorporation (post-liminal) to a newly realized structured state of being.^[7] Individuals in liminality stand at the threshold between the old and the new, so they simultaneously identify with neither and both. They are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”^[8] Liminality describes various rite of passage events in the life cycles of human cultures or mental and emotional periods of transition. For instance, religious and cultural ceremonies, such as bar-mitzvahs and quinceañeras, mark the culmination of a transitional process as children come of age. Less recognized but just as formative is the college or university experience, where the campus serves as a space for fostering transformation among students who move away from their parents’ care to self-sufficiency and independence.^[9] Liminality can also describe the migration experience of those who leave one country, culture, and custom to establish themselves in a new context.

A common experience shared among Asian American communities is the lack of incorporation into new structures of meaning in the United States. Thus, the Asian American migration experience is, according to Lee, one of perpetual liminality: “Asian Americans are still in the wilderness of in-between ‘limbo,’ not being able to be reincorporated fully into a social structure.”^[10] This liminal experience proves especially true for second-generation Asian Americans who are neither viewed as thoroughly American by the majority population (i.e., the perpetual foreigner) nor fully integrated with their cultures of ancestral origin.^[11] Instead, Asian Americans stand in the narrow margin where the peripheries of both worlds intersect. This experience feeds into the stereotypical image of Asian Americans in the United States as perpetual foreigners.

Despite these challenges, liminality also has the potential for more constructive outcomes. It is the space, Lee argues, where “a person can become acutely aware of the problems of the existing structure” and therefore offer “alternative ideas of human relatedness and also with a desire to reform the existing social structure.”^[12] According to Peter Phan, being at the margins of multiple social contexts allows for new ways forward not limited to other cultures: “Belonging to both worlds and cultures, marginal(ized) persons have the opportunity to fuse them together and, out of their respective resource, fashion a new, different world, so that persons at the margins stand not only between these worlds and cultures but also beyond them.”^[13] In other words, liminality can be a catalyst for innovative thinking and transformative action.

Lee observes three positive aspects of liminality as he moves toward constructing an Asian American theology.^[14] First, liminality reveals an openness to the new. Because one is not at the center of power, that person is also not bound by its rules, customs, or other normative behaviors or thought patterns. Instead, one remains free to explore alternative ways of thinking. Second, liminality creates opportunities for the emergence of communitas, or authentic human community, in which individuals “confront one another not as role players but as ‘human totals,’ integral beings who recognizantly share the same humanity.”^[15] Communitas entails relationality not based on social norms or constructs, such as ones defined by race, class, politics, or religion, but on individuals’ shared identity as human beings—what Turner calls “social anti-structure.”^[16] Finally, liminality provides the creative space for prophetic knowledge and action. Because those who exist in the liminal stand not at the center but at the margins of society, they remain better positioned to critique the centers of power and influence.

Communitas

The three aspects of liminality—openness to the new, the emergence of communitas, and the creative space for prophetic knowledge and action—all relate. However, the formation of communitas serves as the overarching aspect incorporating the others, for communitas opens paths to new ways of thinking about humanity’s communal and relational nature and prophetically orients the church toward an authentic community. So, further must be said about the notion of communitas.

In The Ritual Process, Turner uses communitas to differentiate between the general sense one gets from the term community and the authentic connection one gets from genuine relationality. One can live in a community by sharing common space and resources without achieving communitas. Turner locates the general notion of the community under the structures of society. On the one hand, societies are structured in ways that define specific communities of people, whether according to race, ethnicity, politics, gender, or religion. So, this might result in the Asian American community, the Muslim community, or the LGBTQ+ community. On the other hand, communitas “transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships.”^[17] It transcends socially established norms. We see this in various pivotal moments in history when people transcended socially conditioned labels and came together in mutual solidarity. The societal lines that differentiated people dissolve in communitas, and individuals get drawn into genuine communal relations.

Turner equates this notion of communitas with Martin Buber’s concept of I and Thou.^[18] For Buber, genuine human relationality involves the relationship between the I and Thou, where the subjective I relates to the objective Thou, and the relationship is reciprocated so that a subject also exists as an object to another I. As such, an individual simultaneously exists as I and Thou. Buber refers to this genuine relationality that takes place between I and Thou as “community,” and Turner further labels it as communitas, which entails “being no longer side by side but with one another … a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the other, a flowing from I to Thou.”^[19] This mutual relationality among individuals provides valuable context for understanding the significance of liminality.

One virtue that characterizes the Asian American Church is its emphasis on community. For instance, Helen Lee writes, “Given the Asian American temperament to place a high value on community and relationships, the experience of belonging to a community of Christians often leads to an unbeliever placing their faith in Christ.”^[20] Likewise, Pyong Gap Min contends that “Asian Americans are more or less group-oriented, in sharp contrast to the individualism that characterizes American values.”^[21] Jung Young Lee attributes this to an Asian understanding of the self, saying, “I am is … pluralistic because it is relational. … In Asia we-are takes precedence over I-am, because the latter is always relative to the former. In other words, I-am is defined in terms of we-are, because we-are is considered to be more fundamental than I-am.”^[22] Conversely, American culture is caricatured by a deep sense of individualism. For instance, Soong-Chan Rah describes individualism as the “central theme of Western philosophy.”^[23] Individualism permeates American worldviews, structures, institutions, and even the church. Rah continues, “The American church, in taking its cues from Western … culture, has placed at the center of its theology and ecclesiology the primacy of the individual. … The church is more likely to reflect the individualism of Western philosophy than the value of community found in Scripture.”^[24] In short, many people see culture as pivotal in shaping one’s perspective on relationships.

Based on these observations, one might assume that the cultural influences of their ancestries drive the communal character of Asian American Christianity. Likewise, one might also assume that the individualism of American Christianity also exists as a cultural phenomenon stemming from Western philosophies. However, this presumes a linear, logical progression of values originating from culture rather than the reverse. Social psychologists Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede describe culture as a composite of symbols, heroes, rituals, and values, with values being the constant determinative element of culture. Values serve as “the core of culture” that deal with life’s most basic yet essential questions, such as good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral, beautiful and ugly, and so on.^[25] The collective experience then determines values. According to George Mandler, human experiences of congruity and incongruity within a given system and the subsequent emotional response shape our perceptions of that given system and add a value judgment upon it.^[26] For instance, an individual who experiences suffering may attribute a negative value to that experience. A person who experiences forgiveness may elevate it as a virtue. In short, experiences inform values, and values shape cultures.

Benjamin H. Kim

Graduate Theological Union

^[1] Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 17.

^[2] Alan J. Roxburgh, The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 15 (emphasis added).

^[3] David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 381.

^[4] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: Sketches for a Missionary Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 6.

^[5] Lee briefly introduces the term in his essay, “‘Called to Be Pilgrims’: Asian American Theology in Immigrant Perspective,” in Korean American Ministry: A Resource Book, ed. Sang Hyun Lee and John V. Moore (Louisville: PCUSA, 1987), 39-65, and further develops it in his book, From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

^[6] Lee, From a Liminal Place, 5.

^[7] Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 21.

^[8] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), 95.

^[9] Jessica Daniels, “Christian Higher Education as Sacred Liminal Space,” Christian Scholar’s Review 51, no. 2 (2022): 189–200.

^[10] Lee, From a Liminal Place, 6.

^[11] Koreans use the term gyopo to describe a Korean raised and enculturated with another country with negative connotations of varying degrees. According to Christian J. Park, “Ethnic Return Migration of Miguk Hanin (Korean Americans): Entanglement of Diaspora and Transnationalism,” in Diasporic Returns to the Ethnic Homeland: The Korean Diaspora in Comparative Perspective, ed. Takeyuki Tsuda and Changzoo Song (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 122–24, gyopo “connotes co-ethnic subordinates living away from the center (the South Korean state). … It is also framed in a center/periphery model where the center is the South Korean nation-state and the periphery is Korean diaspora.”

^[12] Lee, From a Liminal Place, 6.

^[13] Peter C. Phan, “Betwixt and Between: Doing Theology with Memory and Imagination,” in Journeys at the Margin: Toward an Autobiographical Theology in American-Asian Perspectives, ed. Peter C. Phan and Jung Young Lee (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1999), 113.

^[14] Lee, From a Liminal Place, 7–11.

^[15] Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 269.

^[16] Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 45.

^[17] Turner, Ritual Process, 128.

^[18] Turner, Ritual Process, 126–27. Cf. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1937).

^[19] Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 31 (emphasis original).

^[20] Helen Lee, “Hospitable Households: Evangelism,” in Growing Healthy Asian American Churches, ed. Peter Cha, S. Steve Kang, and Helen Lee (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006), 136.

^[21] Pyong Gap Min, “An Overview of Asian Americans,” in Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, ed. Pyong Gap Min (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1995), 30.

^[22] Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 8 (emphases added).

^[23] Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 29.

^[24] Rah, Next Evangelicalism, 29–30.

^[25] Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2005), 6–8.

^[26] George Mandler, “Approaches to a Psychology of Value,” in The Origin of Values, ed. Michael Hechter, Lynn Nadel, and Richard E. Michod (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 229–58.

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