A Third Culture Community

The term third culture refers to people who have grown up in cultures other than that of their parents. They blend aspects of the foreign culture to their native one to create a "third culture." When I take a quick scan of Manila's landscape, I see an increasingly international and diverse metropolis. When I first returned, I was stunned by how many Koreans there were. Everywhere I went, I saw them: college students, little kids, mothers, retirees playing golf. The Philippines how has the 8th largest Korean community and the largest in Southeast Asia.

I fast forward 10 years from now and try to imagine the cultural tension these kids will experience. It's a journey that I'm all too familiar with. To this day, I can't seem to come up with a cultural label for myself. People ask me what I am and I imagine myself giving a smart alec answer, like "human." In all seriousness however, that's the one label I am certain of! Because when I look at myself, I'm sort of Korean, sort of American, with a splash of Filipino. I'm able to (sort of) fit in to all cultures, but I don't feel like I completely belong to one. This creates a type of tension, a paradox inside me. At first it was a feeling of superiority, then inferiority, then confusion.

I say all this to make a point about community. As I imagine 10 years from today, new ways of community will have to emerge to be in solidarity, and to serve this culturally ambiguous bunch. In particular, I'm calling out the church, which has been predominantly homogeneous and staunch defenders of tradition. Frankly, it's been marked by a rigid institutionalism, unable (and at times unwilling) to change and adjust to a constantly changing cultural and urban landscape. Both my guess and my experience is that the church has focused largely on itself: programs, traditions, attendance, and less on trying to understand the people they are trying to reach.

Here's where I think the issue of Kingdom comes into play. We can no longer view the kingdom as simply how many souls are saved or the number of churches we build. This is a very shallow definition. Rather we need to both broaden and deepen the understanding of God's redemptive work and our role in bringing that to the world. We have too much of an agenda and don't listen to people enough. Understanding people is key in reaching them. And this will be especially true among third cultures.