The First Generation Pastor

Your character

You are devout, bold, and courageous.  You’ve left your homeland to come to a country of new systems, different cultural preferences, and a vexingly complicated language.

Because you don’t know American systems as well as the native-born, and because Americans may not be able to pronounce your name or understand your accent, they’re likely to assume you’re not very bright.  You don’t command the level of respect that you did back home. You are experiencing a clear loss of status.

You deeply love Jesus, the Bible and the Great Commission.  Whenever enough people who speak your language move to a community, you spontaneously launch some level of church or Bible study.  Most of you work full-time outside the church, and on the evenings and weekends raise your family and pastor your church. It’s difficult to get everything done.

You are quite adept at making disciples of fellow first-generation immigrants from your homeland. You’re also skilled at doing missions work back home, whether church planting or caring for the needy.

You are remarkably committed, hard-working, and resilient. You are my heroes!

Your challenges 

Back in your homeland, mature Christians taught you how to trust Christ, pray, worship, preach and plant churches.  You gained experience in these ministries back home.  In the U.S., you are replicating what you did back home.  There’s a big problem: you’re not in your homeland anymore.  Other first-generation immigrants from your homeland will respond well to your preaching and worship.  But your children and grandchildren won’t.  Your church will last as long as there continues to be a stream of newcomers from your homeland, and when the last of the newcomers pass away, your church will close.  Worse, you will probably lose most of your children for Christ in the process.

Many of your members are exhausted speaking English and engaging with Americans all week. They look forward to Sundays as a day to enjoy the preaching, music, dress, foods, language, and friends of their homeland. They will reward you to keep providing them with the style of church services they enjoy so much. But many are unaware or unconcerned that the price of preserving language and culture could be their children’s souls.

Your calling

Just as Christ was called to lay aside the glory of heaven to walk among us, you are called to lay aside any identity with culture or language that comes before your identity as a child of God.

Philippians 2:3-8 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

God’s call to die to self doesn’t just mean die to yourself as an individual.  It means to place your primary identity Christ before your identification with you ethnicity, gender, citizenship, language, culture or political affiliation.  The primary identity of every Christian is as a child of God and member of the global Body of Christ.

If God has brought you to an English-speaking country, he is calling you to ensure that your children have opportunity to fall deeply in love with Jesus in English. One of your most difficult callings will be to help your congregation embrace this reality.

Some of your churches have the capacity to do this yourselves. I’ve seen first-generation churches launch English-language Sunday School, youth ministry, worship services, and daughter churches. As their older generation, it’s a struggle for you to regard them as peers. But they instinctively understand the needs and longings of the second generation more than you or multi-generational Americans ever will.

Most of your churches are too small to have a youth group or quality children’s ministry. In these cases, it’s best to work together with a culturally sensitive American church in your community who will open its ministries to your young people.  The American church will typically be open to your children’s ministry workers serving alongside theirs.  This is a healthy way to develop cross-cultural friendships and partnerships.

Those of you first-generation pastors who are reading this are likely the better-educated, bilingual, bicultural kind of people who will resonate with what I’m saying.  You likely have a passion that other compatriots from your homeland will share the same burden for the second generation.  If you have stories of successfully empowering the second generation for leadership, you must share those stories with the broader Christian community.

Here are some of the resources of Immigrant Ministry Connections you may find particularly useful.

• Subscribing to our weekly blogs will keep you current on what’s happening in North American cross-cultural ministry
• You can find Bibles and solid Christian videos in for your congregation in their mother language on our Media page
• You will learn concrete action steps in our free online course Empowering the Second Generation.
• If you are mentoring other first-generation pastors in adapting to new ministry realities in the U.S., consider peer learning with others like you through membership in The Merging Streams Coalition.