Sunday, April 08, 2012

Asian followers give life to Christian churches

AUSTRALIA'S churches have been transformed over the past decade or two and increasingly it is Christians with Asian heritage who are keeping them vibrant.

When a former Vietnamese refugee, Vincent Long, was ordained Melbourne's first Catholic bishop with an Asian background last year, he joked the Vietnamese were the new Irish.

Yesterday, he said there were remarkable parallels. Both groups came to this country due to the upheavals and conflicts at home and both made significant contributions to the Catholic Church. 

The Vietnamese, he said, were ''giving a new lease on life to the church in Australia by virtue of their strong faith, commitment and resilience''.
 
Across Australia, Chinese congregations have become commonplace, adding to other ethnic congregations as well, whose services are conducted in their own language.

The Christian Research Association director, Philip Hughes, said second-generation Asian-Australian Christians were increasingly moving to mainstream churches.

''They are far more willing than most Anglos to accept the strong authority system they find in Pentecostal and other charismatic churches, which are a good stepping point away from traditional Chinese churches,'' Dr Hughes said.

Another reason why Asian Australians were disproportionately represented in churches was that, much more than Australians with English backgrounds, they were ''joiners'', he said. 

''They like face-to-face community gatherings and join in. They are not so individualistic as Anglos.''

Inner-city churches tend to be particularly multicultural, partly because of the large number of overseas students at Sydney and Melbourne universities and colleges. 

A Presbyterian minister, Richard O'Brien, said people from different cultures approached religion differently. 

"People from Buddhist cultures question which is the right way to go, whereas people from the west ask 'can we trust the Bible?'," he said.

The increase in churchgoers of Asian background is reflected in the clergy. 

In one example, one fifth of the men attending Corpus Christi College, the seminary for the archdiocese of Melbourne and Hobart, are Vietnamese. 

The numbers could be even higher if there was no cap on their numbers for reasons of cultural diversity at the college, said Father Brendan Lane, the rector of the college.