I found this chart on Ken Carlson’s blog. It’s taken from the 2000 census data. What’s interesting about the 2000 census is that it differentiates between those born in the US and those not born in the US. This is a graph of those who identified themselves as Chinese, but were born in the US and distributes them by population and age.

Now this was 8 years ago, but I think its very interesting that there is basically a “baby boom” for American Born Chinese (ABCs) from 1975 to about 1995… at twenty year period where the ABC population rose dramatically. The edge of this baby boom, is now just entering their 30s. A large portion of the ABC population is 15-22 right now. This huge population of ABCs are just beginning to leave college and get into the workforce.

What does this mean for the church? What it means is that there is a huge population of people that need to be reached. And this is a “new” population of people. The ABCs who have grown up in church will be choosing their own churches for the first time and will cause waves and ripples in the Chinese church community. The ABCs who are unchurched will be entering workforces everywhere… creating a potentially plentiful harvest.

Here is another chart plotting the population of the United States as a whole broken down into ethnicity taken from this article and based on the 2000 census:

You can see the Hispanic population as a percentage is growing rapidly as well as the Asian population. In fact, according to the article, the Asian population from 1990-2000 grew an astonishing 63.24% which is faster than the Hispanic population growth which was 39.42%.

What does all of this mean? It means a ton of Asians and a need for more churches to reach them.

But what kind of churches? Will it continue to be the bilingual churches with English ministries? Will it be the Asian-American church consisting largely of 2nd and 3rd generation Asians? Will it be the multi-ethnic brand?

It will be a combination of all three.

Right now I know of maybe 3-4 “Asian American” churches in San Diego county. They may call themselves “multi-ethnic” but essentially they are Asian American churches. There are probably over 20 Chinese churches alone in San Diego county… not counting other Asian ethnicities. I’ll write more on this later explaining more reasons… but I believe that Asian American churches are going to grow rapidly not only in the size of individual congregations, but the number of Asian American churches out there. In 10 years I wouldn’t be surprised to see 20-30 Asian American congregations in San Diego county. There will be hundreds more in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Next post: Why a growth in Asian American churches rather than bilingual Chinese churches or even multi-ethnic churches?