Note: Blog hawile, mah ka paper hi draft lawng a si. Introduction le conclusion zong a um rih lo. Cun a chung tial mi zong tlam a tling rih lo (edit tuah rih lo). Nain, a zuam mi rel chung awk le comment/feedback tuah awk ah ka thlah mi a si. Biapi in langhter ka duh mi cu: part 5 nak i "leadership tools for Chin church leaders" khi a si (leadership theory le concept deuh a si i a hawngkheh chom a herh lai). Lungsau in nan ka rel piak ca ah kaa lawm.
The
Chin people, speaking several dozen related dialects, live in the rugged hills area
of western Myanmar. The total population of the Chin people both inside and
outside of Myanmar is estimated at about two million. Scholars such as Lian H.
Sakhong believe that the Chin people descended originally from western China
and eastern Tibet into the present Myanmar via the Hukong Valley.
It
is also believed that the Chin people were the first group who settled in the
Chindwin Valley. Sakhong suggests that the Chin settlement in the Chindwin
Valley began in the middle of the eight century.
According to the Pagan inscriptions, the Chin people were known as the Chin of
the Chindwin Valley. It is believed that they moved over to Upper Chindwin and
were dispersed in different parts of the Chindwin River, after the Chindwin
Valley was destroyed by the flood. The Chin people gradually moved from the
Chindwin Valley to the present area (western part of Myanmar), after the
founding of the Shan’s Fortress City of Kale-myo in 1395.
In
fact, the Chin people had no political relationship with the Burmans until Burma
got her independence from the British in 1948.
Accept
it or not, the British colonial power paved the way for the coming of
Christianity among the Chin people. Western missionaries, with the help of
British colonial power, had easy access to remote areas such as the Chin Hills.
Eventually, American Baptist missionaries came to the Chin Hills in 1899, right
after the British invaded Upper Burma.
A
large majority of the Chin people, since then, began to embrace Christianity
through the untiring effort of American Baptist missionaries. But because of
this, the socio-political and religious identity of the Chin people have
changed, and apparently they also have faced negative political consequences
for it.
The Chin people, along with other ethnic
minorities in Myanmar, are socially and politically discriminated against,
oppressed, and even persecuted by the military regime mainly because of their
faith. Apparently, the regime had made systematic efforts to eliminate the
Christian literature, culture, and traditions of the ethnic people in order to
assimilate them into mainstream Burmese culture.
Donald
E. Smith called this process a “cultural Burmanization” of the ethnic
minorities.
The term “Burmanization” usually goes along with a slogan:
a-myo, ba-thar, thar-tha-na, which literally means one race, one
language, and one religion. Directly related to this slogan is a famous Burmese
phrase: “To be a Burman is to be a Buddhist.”
The political implication of this concept is a belief that Myanmar should be a
country of only one race (Burman), one language (Burmese), and only one
religion (Buddhism). The regime’s government has been upholding this concept as
an unwritten domestic policy. Based on this policy, ethnic minorities,
including Chin, are denied their rights to teach their own language in public
schools. Moreover, they are denied their rights to freely practice their
Christian faith, build religious buildings, and or freely preach the gospel.
There
have been instances of oppressions, persecutions, and discriminations against
ethnic minorities perpetrated by the regime, just because of the above policy.
These serious abuses include “extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest and
detention, torture and mistreatment, forced labor, . . . and religious freedom,
abusive military conscription policies, and extortion and confiscation of
property.”
A
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) survey shows that 91.9% of the Chin people
have been forced to porter military supplies, sweep for landmines, be servants,
build roads, and do other hard labor.
Thousands
of Chin people, because of these atrocities induced by the regime armies, have
left their homeland. The estimated numbers of Chin refugees in India and
Malaysia have reached respectively 75,000 and 50,000.
3. Three
Waves of Burmese Migration
The primary reasons for many people of
Myanmar, especially ethnic minorities, leaving their homeland is because of
poverty induced by the regime, lack of religious and political freedom. More
importantly, many have left their homeland because of human rights violations
such as forced labor, oppression, persecution, torture, rape, social
discrimination, and hope for a better future.
In
his article, “The Function of Ethnicity in the Adaptation of Burmese Religious
Practices,” Joseph Cheah divides the flow of Burmese immigrants in the U.S.
into three different waves.
These include: (1) the post-1967
anti-Chinese riots in Burma to the military crackdown on the 1988 pro-democracy
movement, (2) after the 1988 prodemocracy movement until 2006, and (3) the
resettlement of Karen
and Chin refugees, including other ethnic
groups from Myanmar since 2006 to the present.
There were only a very small number of
Burmese immigrants in the U.S., as Cheah notes, in the early 1960s. The
majority of these immigrants from the first wave were Chinese descents and
educated Burmese citizens who later “re-ethnicized” their identity as Chinese
rather than as Burmese on the U.S. census form. Cheah has rightly described
that they “were the kinds of immigrants sought by the 1965 Immigration and
Nationality Acts.”
A majority of Burmese immigrants from the
first wave live mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, and most of them have
assimilated into the mainstream U.S. society.
The second major wave of Burmese immigrants
to the U.S. was more diverse. Many came to the U.S., after the military
crackdown in the 1988 prodemocracy movements in Burma, either as students or
visitors
mainly through India and Thailand. A number
of Chin, and other ethnic groups have left their home country and begun to
resettle in the U.S. since the late 1990s. Many of them entered into the U.S.
after spending years in refugee camps in Malaysia or elsewhere. For example, a
number of Chin and other ethnic people were stuck in Guam Island before they
were allowed to enter into the mainland in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The third wave began with the influx of
Karen refugees in the U.S. in 2006 when the State Department issued waivers of
the “material support” provisions in the State Department’s Patriot and Real ID
Act, which had effectively barred most ethnic insurgent groups, including
Karen, from entering into the U.S.
Thousands of Karen refugees, including other
ethnic groups such as Chin and Kachin, have since then entered into the U.S.
and have formed their own ethnic congregations in many parts of the country.
There are currently more than fifty Chin
immigrant congregations within the Chin Baptist Churches, USA (CBC-USA) alone.
Apparently, these immigrant congregations are
in their early transition period in which they need to go through adaptive leadership
challenges and structural adaptations.
Many
of us have shared the strong inner conviction that as church leaders in times
of change, we must find ways of regaining control over our increasingly unclear
church environment. When we sense that our inner maps of church leadership are
becoming less and less effective and the images of leadership in which we were
trained are not robust enough to encompass our current reality, another inner
map tells us that we have to find a way of taking control in order to make
things work again.
Chin immigrants from Myanmar are in their
early period of forming their ethnic congregations in the U.S. Being in a new
context, as Roxburgh has stated above, their “inner maps of church leadership”
tend to become less and less effective. Moreover, it seems that the images of leadership in which their
leaders were trained no longer fit in the new social and cultural context where
they now live. Put differently, things do not seem to work the way they used to
work. Also, many of these immigrants, as they live in this new context, tend to
have changed their worldviews, values, and behaviors. Thus, Chin immigrant
congregations in the U.S. are faced with adaptive challenges that call for
leadership experiments and ministry adjustments. The question, here, is how
have leaders of these congregations defined leadership in a way that is
effective and meaningful in their new context?
According to Ronald Heifetz and Marty
Linsky, adaptive challenges require “experiments, new discoveries, and
adjustments from numerous places in organization or community.”
The challenge for leaders of Chin congregations,
in this case, is to recognize the reality of adaptive challenges existing
within their own congregations. Recognizing this reality will help them to find
leadership meanings in their leadership experiments and ministry adjustments.
It will also keep them from being tempted to do ministry with a
business as usual mentality.
It is no doubt that Chin immigrant
congregations in the U.S. are challenged to explore new leadership mappings in
their formation of new congregations. In such a context, leaders of these
congregations are challenged to engage in adaptive leadership experiments
within their new social context and cultural environment. Exploring such new
leadership mappings and adaptive leadership experiments is not an easy task,
but it is essential for the formation of these congregations. The question is in
what ways these congregations have engaged in their adaptive leadership
experiments and ministry adjustments. The following is some adaptive leadership
tools for Chin church leaders.
5.
Sensitizing Concepts: Leadership Tools for Chin Church Leaders
American
sociologist, Herbert G. Blumer first coined the term “sensitizing concepts” to
bridge the gap between theories and the empirical world. Blumer contrasted sensitizing
concepts with “definitive concepts.” Definitive concepts, according to him,
“provide prescriptions of what to see,” whereas sensitizing concepts “merely
suggest directions along which to look” in the research field.
Will C. van den Hoonaard draws insights from Blumer and defines sensitizing
concepts as “constructs that are derived from the research participants’
perspectives, using their language or expressions, and that sensitize the
researcher to possible line of inquiry.”
He says that sensitizing concepts give the researcher a “general sense of
reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances, suggesting helpful
directions along which to look.”
Charmaz defines sensitizing concepts as “tentative tools” that provide ideas to
pursue and sensitize the researcher to ask particular kinds of questions
related to the research topic.
Glenn M. Bowen also views sensitizing concepts as “interpretive devices” and
“starting points for building analysis to produce a grounded theory.”
Keeping the above
definitions in mind, this paper proposes the following five sensitizing
concepts as conceptual frameworks for the Chin church leaders to look into the
lifeworld of their people. These sensitizing concepts include: adaptive
leadership, interpretive leadership, missional ecclesiology, religion and
ethnicity, and open systems theory.
In his book,
Leadership without Easy Answers, Ronald
Heifetz views leadership in terms of “adaptive work,” which “consists of the
learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to
diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they
face.”
Heifetz and Linsky state that “the deeper the change and the greater the amount
of new learning required, the more resistance there will be and, thus, the
greater the danger to those who lead.”
The adaptive work, in this sense, is not an easy work. It calls for a leader to
be both “active and reflective,” which means a leader needs to have the ability
to “alternate between participating and observing.” Heifetz explains this by
using a dance metaphor. He states: “To discern the larger patterns on the dance
floor—to see who is dancing with whom, in what groups, in what location, and
who is sitting out which kind of dance—we have to stop moving and get to the
balcony.”
Heifetz
and Linsky further develop the dance metaphor in their co-authored book,
Leadership on the Line. They state that
the challenge for a leader is “to move back and forth between the dance floor
and the balcony” in order to be familiar with both situations simultaneously.
Using adaptive
leadership as a sensitizing lens, the following questions need to be asked: How
do leaders of Chin immigrant congregations get on the balcony, so that they know what is going on among their members and
in their communities? How have they addressed the leadership challenges within
their new social and cultural context that calls for adaptive changes? How have
they dealt with the social and cultural factors that have brought conflicts among
their members, especially among their young people?
Closely related to
adaptive leadership is interpretive leadership. In his book,
Making Spiritual Sense, Scott Cormode
states, “Christian leadership is fundamentally an act of theological
interpretation.” He further argues that the “purpose of Christian leadership is
to make spiritual meaning.”
Similarly, Mark Lau Branson also defines interpretive leadership as “shaping
meaning,” and it provides the “resources and guidance needed to shape a
community of learners that pays attention to and interprets both texts and
contexts.”
Interpretive leadership challenges leaders to observe and interpret the current
life and ministry of the church. But, as Cormode puts it, leaders do not make
meaning for others. Rather, he states, they “provide a theological framework
that enables others to make their own spiritual meaning.”
Branson suggests
that leaders can create an environment through their practices and words that
makes innovation possible by giving the adaptive work to a larger group of
participants.
This
process requires an interpretive work that connects with the background,
distributes leadership, and experimentally innovates a way into the new realities
of different context.
Dwight Zscheile asserts that interpretive leadership is not simply a process of
leaders interpreting reality on behalf of others. Rather, he argues, it
“involves a deep, relational conversation of listening and speaking in which
all parties risk learning as well as changing.”
Interpretive
leadership takes seriously “the voices, hopes, fears, and dreams of those at
all levels of the church and interpret them communally in light of the biblical
narrative.”
Thus, one
of the main challenges for Chin church leaders is whether they have taken
seriously the voices, hopes, fears, and dreams of their members. Moreover, it
is important how these leaders have interpreted the daily life struggles of
their people in light of the biblical narrative. Also, it is essential to ask
the question how these leaders have taken seriously the daily life struggles of
their people and made spiritual meanings out of it.
Darrel Guder and his colleagues introduced
the missional church conversation into the academic setting in late 1990s by
publishing the book,
Missional Church.
The missional church conversation was
initiated by the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN)
in the late 1980s, as a response to the Gospel
and Culture discussion in the Great Britain that originated with Lesslie
Newbigin’s book
The Other Side of 1984.
Newbigin defined mission in terms of
missio Dei, the mission of God.
In a way, the
Missional Church is a reflection of Newbigin’s mission theology.
The central argument of the book is: “mission is not merely an activity of the
church. Rather, mission is the result of God’s initiative.”
Thus, it is not the church that has a
mission, but “it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father
that includes the church.”
David Bosch appropriately defines mission as
“being derived from the very nature of God.”
He writes, “The classical doctrine on the
missio Dei as God the Father sending the
Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include
another ‘movement’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the
world.”
George Hunsberger, reflecting on this, views
missional church in terms of “
a body of
people sent on a mission,” which means the church is by its very nature
missionary, and it represents God’s kingdom as a sign, agent, foretaste, and
instrument.
Many churches,
influenced by the false dichotomy between church and mission, view mission as
something the church
does, defining
the church’s missional identity in terms of what it does on behalf of God in
the world. This functional approach, according to Craig Van Gelder, shifts the
“focus away from the agency of the Spirit” and “redirect it to the primacy of
human agency and responsibility.”
Van
Gelder argues that church and mission are not two distinct entities, but they
are interrelated and complementary. Thus, he advocates for the need to
integrate the two, saying that missiology
and ecclesiology are “interrelated and complementary” and they start at the
same point with the triune God in mission to all of God’s creation in the world.
The Willingen Conference
in Germany in 1952 began to recognize this concept and provided
the trinitarian basis for mission by stressing the idea that mission has its
source in the triune God.
The implication of the triune
God understanding of missional church is that the Trinity exists in relational
community, and the leadership of missional church is called to reflect on the
nature of the triune God and live as a relational community. In his book,
The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann
develops an understanding of the trinitarian history of God with the world
emphasizing the mutual involvement of the triune God and the world.
This social doctrine of the Trinity focuses on “relationships and communities.”
The Scripture teaches that God is a passionate God whose love is directed
towards the world by sending God’s Son, Jesus Christ through the power of the
Holy Spirit. This God’s outreaching love of the world, according to Catherin M.
LaCugna, makes God essentially relational, communal, and interdependent.
The relational, communal, and
interdependent nature of leadership is best expressed through a perichoretic
understanding of the Trinity. The perichoretic understanding of the triune God
is similar to John Zizioulas’s “being as communion.”
For Zizioulas, there cannot be true being without communion, and he asserts
that to be a person is to be in communion with and relation to the other.
Drawing from Zizioulas’s idea, Van Gelder and Zscheile view the Trinity in
terms of a perichoretic community that is interdependent and relational. They
write: “Relational trinitarian theology gives us a vision of God as a dynamic
community of mutuality, openness, difference, and love that makes space for
others to participate.”
This gives us the implication that mutuality, relationality, openness, and
interdependence are essential elements in the leadership of the church. Now,
the question is how leaders of Chin immigrant congregations have used the
relational-communal concept as a sensitizing lens and approached the triune God
from a relational-communal aspect.
Scholars in the
field of sociology agree that religion has long been playing an important role
in the lives of many immigrants in the U.S., while less attention has been paid
to the role of ethnicity or race in new immigrants’ religious experiences.
Will Herberg was a pioneer scholar who argued that religion rather than ethnic
origin “has become the differentiating element and the context of
self-identification and social location” for the European immigrants.
Milton Gordon followed Herberg’s approach and argued that all persons should be
treated equally without taking into consideration their racial background for
any purpose.
Implicit in Gordon’s argument is that race or ethnicity should not be the
determining factor for self-identification. Herberg and Gordon, along with many
recent American scholars, tend to equate American society with the experience
of European Americans.
Many Asian-American
scholars have argued against the above approach. Antony W. Alumkal and Pyong
Gap Min, among many Asian scholars, argue that religion and ethnicity are
equally important in maintaining and preserving the cultural and ethnic
identities of Asian ethnic immigrant congregations.
Alumkal insists that the religious institutions are not simply places where
religious doctrines are taught, but also places where “ethnic and racial
identities are preserved, reformulated, and mobilized and where relationships
to the larger society are negotiated.”
He states: “an immigrant church is not only a source of close social ties with
co-ethnics—an ethnic
Gemeinschaft—but
also a place that reproduces the society of origin on a small scale—in other
words, an ethnic
Gesellschaft.”
Alumkal and Hurh
and Kim use the terms
Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft without providing their
definitions and making proper distinctions between the two. Ferdinand Tonnies,
a German sociologist first coined these two terms to distinguish between two
social groupings—community and society— in which individual’s identity is
formed.
Gemeinschaft is simply translated as
“community” referring to social groupings based on “mutual bonds.” Whereas
Gesellschaft is translated as “society”
referring to individuals who are in relations with one another but remain
independent and devoid of mutual relationships.
Embedded in the
Gemeinschaft is
mutual bonding, and a person’s identity is ascribed in such a community.
Individualism plays a central role in the
Gesellschaft
and a person’s identity is achieved in such a society.
The
Gesellschaft is best depicted by U.S.
mainstream cultures that give priority to individuals as “potentially
self-sufficient agents endowed with fundamental rights.”
McAdams uses the terms
collectivism and
individualism in line with
Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft concepts. McAdams writes:
Many Americans see life in highly
individualistic terms. We strive to live out fully our own individuality . . ..
We may concede that parents, lovers, friends, teachers, and a few other
important individuals have had some impact on us as we have developed over
time. But we tend to be rather obtuse in sorting through how social
institutions, for example, may have shaped our identities. Beyond making vague
references to things like “my religious heritage” or “the American Dream,” we
tend to have remarkably little insight into the ways our lives are framed by
cultural categories, values, and norms.
In contrast, the collectivist
cultures give priority to the group and emphasize the values of group harmony,
cooperation, solidarity, and interdependence.
Juan F. Martinez
draws insights from McAdams and asserts that the individualist seeks to be
unique or to express the self, whereas the collectivist seeks to fit in or to
find a place in the social order. As a result, he concludes, “individualist
cultures seek to help a person to express him or herself, while collectivist
cultures want the individual to learn to adjust and restrain the self to
maintain shared benefits and social harmony.”
Self-definition, for individualists, does not come from who they are, but what
they do. The self, for them, is the center of action, which “does not allow for
recognition of social control and of the structures that limit the choices of
many people, particularly those in ethnic or racial minority groups.”
It is apparent
that many Chin immigrants, especially their younger generations, are tempted to
escape from their Gemeinschaft culture
and attracted to the mainstream individualist cultures. Unfortunately, they are
caught between two cultures—collectivist and individualist—which usually lead
them into social identity conflict. Thus, the challenge for Chin church leaders
is to discover how they teach their members (especially younger generations)
about the importance of maintaining and preserving their ethnic Christian
identities as they live in this individualistic society.
Rebecca Kim argues
that ethnic immigrant churches can have a “stronger basis for
meaning-construction and cohesion,” enabling “individuals to find community and
construct a religious as well as an ethnic identity.”
She insists that ethnic churches serve as important spaces that offer emotional
and social services that ease immigrants’ sense of loss. She adds that the
“ethnic church is where immigrants find a sense of belonging, value, and
shelter in the new land.”
Helen R. Ebaugh and Janet S. Chafetz
also support this view, though their main emphasis is on religion. They state,
“immigrant religious institutions provide the physical and social spaces in
which those who share the same traditions, customs, and languages can
reproduce many aspects of their native
cultures for themselves and attempt to pass them on to their children.”
Studies among
immigrant congregations suggest that participation in ethnic immigrant churches
contributes to maintaining ethnicity by increasing ethnic fellowship and social
networks among church members.
The
Chin people, in understanding the ethnic church as such, have formed their own
ethnic congregations throughout the U.S. to provide spaces for their people in
maintaining and reproducing their home cultures and ethnic Christian
identities. In fact, Chin immigrant congregations serve as spaces for religious
or spiritual (Christian) fellowship as well as social networking.
Open systems theory is another
sensitizing lens that is helpful to explore the adaptive leadership experiments
among Chin immigrant congregations. The challenge for Chin church leaders is
whether they are mindful of the nature of open systems theory and are able to
use it as a sensitizing lens in order to look into how their congregations are
affected and shaped by their social and cultural environments.
What is open systems
theory? Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a German biologist, first introduced systems
theory into the social science world through his work in biology and
ecosystems, which later became known as
General
System Theory.
Open systems theory, which stems from this general system theory, views
organizations as unique entities influenced by their immediate environment.
This system was developed in reaction to the traditional theories of
organizations that failed to take into account the environmental influences
impacting the efficiency of organizations. The traditional theories usually
treated the organization largely as a “self-contained” entity known as a
“closed-system” theory.
In open systems theory,
the environment is conceptualized as an entity that lies outside the boundary
of an organization, providing the organization with raw materials and other
resources (inputs) and absorbing its products and services (outputs). In
general, organizations in open systems theory have the ability to adapt to its
environment by possessing permeable boundaries through which new information
and ideas are readily absorbed.
Hence, the survival and growth of a congregation depends upon its relationship
with and adaptability to the changing social context.
Van Gelder, drawing from
open systems perspective, argues that there is a dynamic relationship between a
congregation and its local context. The more changes that occur in context, he explains,
the more adaptive a congregation needs to be to stay in
fit with its community.
Van Gelder, keeping this in mind, suggests that the missional church should not
close itself off from its immediate context and changing community in order to
survive and develop meaningful ministry. Rather, it should learn how to “adapt
and recontextualize its ministry to address the challenges and opportunities
that it faces with such changes—always
forming
and
reforming.”
A
congregation, looking from an open systems perspective, can shape and affect
its environment as it engages in its local community, and it can in turn be
affected and shaped by the people, resources, and other institutions in that
environment.
Drawing from “resource
dependency theory,”
Van Gelder insists that there is always a flow of activity in a congregation
interacting with its environment,
people
and
resources are flowing in, and
ministry is flowing out. In this process, he argues, it is essential for a
missional congregation “to attend to the feedback loop of information regarding
how these flows are functioning.”
He further suggests: “congregational leaders need to attend carefully to the
dynamics of process when introducing
change.”
In the
same way, they need to “help a congregation develop
capacity to respond to change taking place within its ministry and
the community it seeks to serve.”
This is where an open system “provides a framework that can be utilized for
addressing the dynamics of either guiding planned change, or responding to
unanticipated change.”
Human Rights Watch, “We are Like Forgotten People,” The Chin People of Burma: Unsafe in
Burma and Unprotected in India (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009), 4. See
Za Uk Ling and Bawi Lian Mang, Religious
Persecution: A Campaign of Genocide Against Chin Christians in Burma (Ottawa,
Canada: Chin Human Rights Organization, 2004).
Ibid., 390-92. The phrase missio Dei was the outcome of Willingen conference 1952, used by
Karl Hartenstein his report on the meeting. Karl Barth first developed the missio Dei concept, though he did not
use the exact phrase, in his paper read at the Brandenburg Missionary
conference in 1932. Barth rejected the idea of mission as a human activity of
God; for him, mission is not a matter of human goodwill and reparations, but it
is a matter of divine purpose. Mission, for him, began with the divine sending
of God’s self in the Holy Trinity. Reflecting on Barth’s idea, Hartenstein used
the phrase missio Dei in his
Willingen report. For him, to speak of mission is to participate in the sending
of the Son, in the missio Dei, with
an inclusive aim of establishing the lordship of Christ over the redeemed. See Norman
E. Thomas, ed., Classic Texts in Mission and World Christianity (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1995), 104-105; Georg
Vicedom, The Mission of God: An
Introduction to a Theology of Mission, trans. Gilbert A. Thiele and Dennis
Hilgendorf (St. Louis: Concordia
Publication House, 1965); Darrel
Guder, ed., Missional Church, 187;
Van Gelder and Zscheile, The Missional
Church in Perspective; Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission
for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004/2005); John G. Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei,
Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2010).
The term perichoresis has been explained in
different ways. For example, Catherine
Lacugna explains it “being-in-one-another, permeation without confusion.” Paul
S. Fiddes uses “reciprocity” and “mutual indwelling” to explain it. Miroslav
Volf uses “mutually internal” and
“reciprocity interiority of the
trinitarian persons.” See Catherine M. LaCugna, God for Us, 271; Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 71-72; Miroslav Volf, After Our
Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1998), 208-209; Jürgen Moltmann, The
Trinity and the Kingdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 150f.
Ebaugh and Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants, 80. Ebaugh and Chafetz,
“Structural Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations,” Sociology of Religion, vol. 6, no. 2 (2000): 135-153. In fact
religion continues to be an important identity marker for new immigrants in the
U.S. It provides a social space for expressing ethnic differences. See Fenggang
Yang and Hellen Rose Ebaugh, “Religion and Ethnicity among New Immigrants: The
Impact of Majority/Minority Status in Home and Host Countries,” Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion,
vol. 40, no. 3 (2001): 367.
