Well-Being in the Asian American Church, with Jessica ChenFeng and Daniel D. Lee

Jessica ChenFeng is associate professor of marriage and family therapy. She has years of experience in MFT teaching, research, and supervision, as well as clinical and consulting experience across ministry, community, and medical contexts. She is coauthor of Finding Your Voice as a Beginning Marriage and Family Therapist.

Daniel D. Lee is academic dean for the Center for AsianAmerican Theology and Ministry and associate professor of theology and Asian American studies. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and is the author of Doing Asian American Theology: A Contextual Framework for Faith and Practice and Double Particularity: Karl Barth, Contextuality, and Asian American Theology.

Jerome Blanco: You’ve described the vision of the Asian American Center’s new Well-Being Collaboratory initiative this way: “To realize a flourishing Asian American Christian community that is connected to our racial and ethnic identities, is informed by our cultural and family legacies, upholds personal and community wholeness and well-being, and is transformed by our faith.” It’s an exciting vision, and I’m particularly curious about the concept of “well-being”—what you mean by it and why that is the key word you’ve used for this work.

Jessica ChenFeng: We talked a lot about what we would call this initiative. At the outset, the conversation started with mental health, but there are limits with that term as a primary entry point because of people’s assumptions. Culturally speaking, Asian Americans think of mental health as having a somewhat individual focus—your personal emotional and psychological well-being. Those are good and important things! But in my clinical experience and research, in Asian American communities, it’s actually rarely a matter of individual concern. It’s not simply about addressing symptoms of depression and anxiety so an individual can function better. It’s more relational in nature. It isn’t individual-focused. Well-being better describes this hope of wholeness. We are not taking a white American individualistic perspective of self-care and well-being; this is well-being about relational health—in relationship to oneself, to God, to family, to community, to larger institutions. We’re attempting to establish a foundation of well-being that is integrative across all these relational aspects of our lives.

Daniel D. Lee: Why don’t you explain the five different relationships? They give great insight to how we’re thinking about well-being. They’re kind of a guide for us.

JCF: This is still in the works. For now, I’m calling them the five elements of connection—elements implying Asian forms of medicine and our groundedness with creation and our physical bodies. Asian American Christianity takes so much from white evangelicalism, right? So there’s this disconnect from our bodies. I think that happens through migratory experiences, loss, and grief. In order to survive, you disconnect from your physical self but also your relational self. The five elements I mentioned are our relationship with self, with God, family, community, and institutions.

Historically, in Asian American Christian spaces, we understand relationships with God, family, and community—these are foundational to traditional discipleship. But relationship with ourselves has been distorted. Our second greatest commandment is “love your neighbor as yourself.” And at least in ethnic immigrant churches, serving the church, God, or others often happens at the sacrifice of attending to your own family and even to yourself. People say, “Yeah, my dad was never around because he was serving at church.” There are mother figures who sacrifice their own physical health for the sake of others. So many of us don’t grow up with an imprint of healthy relationships developed for ourselves in terms of self-love and self-value. When I’ve asked Asian American clients, “What do you love about yourself?” I get blank stares in response. Something about our theological orientation or our discipleship or church models of health have not quite addressed what it means to love and relate to myself as I seek to relate to God in others.

JB: We need both a recognition of deeply connected communities and a grasp of the value of our own selves.

DL: We want to establish a solid theological foundation for why we matter. We are Christians in our bodies, in our specific contexts. Who we are and what embodied presence we have matters profoundly to God. This lays the foundation for how we do this work. We’re talking about a holistic, robust, embodied discipleship. This also means we need to understand the great diversity of Asian America: Korean American, Taiwanese American, Filipino American, and everyone. That’s important. We want to make sure we cover East Asian Americans, Southeast Asian Americans, South Asian Americans, adoptees, multiracial Asian Americans—they’re all included. It’s saying, “Hey, this is a significant part of who you are.” We want this initiative and all the work we do with Asian Americans to embrace that diversity.

JB: Can you tease out this idea you mentioned of relationship to
institutions?

JCF: We’re using the term “institutions” to represent various systems of power that shape and affect our relationships. There was a time in Christian America when racial issues were not recognized as a core, relevant part of our faith identity. So, a lot of therapy models didn’t historically integrate issues of race, ethnicity, and culture. Now, we would think that’s incompetent or strange. Training programs all include it. The difference though is that within the Asian American church, many people are still only coming to realize, “Oh, our race matters. People see us in our racial identity even if they don’t understand it. They treat us a certain way.” So, churches are now addressing it. However, just because we understand or see racial issues doesn’t mean we know how to work with them therapeutically. One of our hopes is to offer ongoing training and workshops for Asian American therapists—but really for any Christian therapist wanting to engage with racial issues with Asian clients.

That intersection of Christian faith, identity, and relationships not just to race but to other larger systemic issues is really critical for well-being. For example, a lot of Asian American families and ethnic cultures have histories of patriarchy. You might have a heterosexual couple with egalitarian theology, but patriarchy seeps through unintentionally in the day to day. How do we have language to unpack that? The socialization of Asian-American boys and firstborn sons affect this part of how this person functions as a husband, right? And even if the wife is a strong leader at work, why is it that she has more traditional expectations for herself at home? Not that anything is inherently wrong with this, but these are common marital issues that we see.

This is all to say, addressing institutions and understanding our relationship to things like racism and patriarchy with our Asian American lenses matters for well-being.

JB: The complex intersectionality of these relationships and categories of relationships really speaks to the need for an integrative approach. Can you speak more about the integrative and collaborative aspect of your work? The Collaboratory is intentionally a partnership between Fuller’s two schools and your respective disciplines.

DL: In my own work in theology, even when I teach classes, I integrate trauma studies, family systems, attachment theory, because all these tools help us understand who
we are and what experiences we’re having—to really explain what’s happening in Asian American lives and contexts. As a theologian, I’ve had to look through these fields and integrate them because every discipline has its own limitations.

I’m part of the Association for Asian American Studies. I’m also part of the Asian American Psychological Association. Why? Because they each offer different things. For our course on “Asian American Identity in Ministry,” our main textbook, along with my book Doing Asian American Theology, is the textbook Asian American Psychology—because psychological concepts help us understand reality.

JCF: There’s also a real need in Asian American churches. We are sort of at this inflection point where, if you’re 40 or younger, you’re open to therapy—it’s a cultural shift. Previously, that has not been the case. But in average Asian churches, congregants still go to their pastors first for most kinds of support—marital support, parenting issues, and whatever it is, because we care a lot about discipleship and spiritual formation. So we need good, robust theology among pastors and lay leaders—because this is still where many Asian American Christians see wisdom coming from. And we also have to get our therapists and their amazing clinical expertise in this. We need to do this together. We’re not centering anyone’s knowledge or wisdom.

JB: What does this look like, on a practical level, for the Well-Being Collaboratory? What are the first steps for equipping leaders for this important work?

JCF: We have a couple of things planned. We’re working on a podcast that I’m excited about, as well as online CEU training for Asian American Christian therapists. During Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, we’ll have our inaugural Well-being Conference—bringing together pastors and therapists, lay leaders, and others who care about well-being and relational health within our communities. There will be didactic portions, but we’re also really hoping for deepened networks and relational connection between leadership, so all of our ongoing work can be improved and supported.

We know there are theological divides around many of these questions—even the question of whom you turn to for mental health care. These are real questions pastors deal with in the Asian American Christian world. So, we want to emphasize developing relationships even as we offer research- and Bible-based wisdom for life together as a community. The hope is that we are going to be part of the fullness of life that Christ came for, and that requires relationship development.

DL: To add a little bit: We reaffirm the different ways in which people receive healing. We affirm prayer, communal life—it’s all good. It isn’t this or that. We want to broaden people’s understanding of resources.

A friend of mine was sharing recently about our being faced with a number of mental health crises—suicides and other things—in his own church. He was totally unprepared for that level of crisis. The question is, how do we prepare for these things? How do we make sure that we know what to do when things become very difficult? When you’re in the middle of a crisis, that’s really too late. You’re scrambling and overloaded. So, how do we make sure there are resources from the beginning? Counseling, pastoral care—we believe in that. We also believe that God supernaturally heals. There’s room for coaching, for therapy. The question is how pastors, churches, and leaders can have a wide range of these resources at their disposal, for the health and wholeness of our community.

JB: What are you particularly hopeful about seeing in this work—not only at Fuller but for Asian American and Asian Christian communities as a whole? Is there something uniquely hopeful about our current landscape?

JCF: I was listening to a podcast this morning where they talked about the tribalism that’s present within Asian American Christian families—for all kinds of reasons, whether political, religious, theological, or a number of things. I believe that at the heart of this, there is a desire for our well-being as families and communities, but the ways we imagine getting there are different. And this is where trained clinicians, pastors, and leaders can come together to engage thoughtfully and say, “How are we going to care about intergenerational healing? How can we improve marriages for Asian American Christian families? How can we equip parents to communicate with their teenagers in a way that holds all of these tensions? How do we talk about this as a community?” My hope is that we bring in clinical expertise in concrete ways and get leaders on board. The fullness of life that Jesus came for unfolds through our relationships, and I dream of individuals, families, and communities experiencing healing and relational freedom so that we can live the full lives God envisions for us. That’s what I’m hoping will be realized in the next decade.

DL: I’m hopeful because when I go to theologically different spaces, there’s a great openness to learning about all of this. I think people are realizing more and more that our cultural and racial identities matter and are trying to figure out how we make sense of it. We’re asking, how do we create resources for ourselves? How do we train ourselves better? How do we make sure that we leverage the gifts in our community? Obviously, there are still a lot of people who are struggling to understand why this is important. But I do see a wide range of theological and spiritual places where people really care. The key is to keep on having these conversations and keep on creating resources that actually help. We can talk about it, but when the rubber meets the road, that’s when we know it’s making a difference. That’s the challenge. That’s the struggle. That’s where we need the community to continue to do the work, to invest and see the benefits in our community, to see the health and wholeness and deeper discipleship in Christ. That’s what we want to see