A Day with Dr. David C. Chao

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10:00 am-12 noon: Naming the Worlds that Form Us
Most of the people in our pews are carrying something they cannot yet put into words: a father's long silence, a mother's impossible expectations, an exhaustion that no achievement ever seems to relieve. This opening lecture is about learning to name it.
Drawing on roughly one hundred and eighty oral history interviews behind my forthcoming book, Hope, Love, and Faith, I will tell real stories of Asian American Christians — a refugee boy who found hope in a single greeting, a veteran nurse doubted because of her accent, a college student whose whole life runs through his phone, a father and son ruptured for six months over a “deal” with God — and use them to give ministry leaders a way to name what our people are actually living: the joys and pains of intergenerational family life, the weight of the model-minority story, mental health, and a faith now carried through a screen.
Using the ancient Christian wisdom of double knowledge — the conviction that we cannot truly know God while remaining strangers to ourselves — I will show why learning to name these pressures is not less spiritual work but more, and how a larger language lets us bring more of a person's life to Christ to be healed. An hour of teaching will be followed by an hour of honest conversation about how this lands in your own ministry.

12:00-1:00 pm Lunch and Fellowship

1:00-3:00 pm From Pain Point to Faithful Practice: A Pastoral Discernment Workshop (limited to 5-8 participants)
The morning session names the worlds that form us. The afternoon is where we practice discernment together, on the ground, with the real pressures you carry into ministry. This is a small working cohort rather than a second lecture. I will ask each pastor or ministry leader to come with one pain point — a tension from your ministry or your family life, the thing that has been keeping you up at night.
We will select one or two cases, and we will walk through them as a group. We will listen to the story without rushing to fix it, locate it within the larger histories of migration and racialization that press on Asian American families and churches, bring it to Scripture, and discern together what faithfulness asks. Each of us will leave with one concrete practice to carry into the coming week. Rather than talk about my book, we will do what it teaches.
The cohort work is confidential and relational, and no one will be asked to disclose more than they wish. It is best suited to pastors and ministry leaders who want to think theologically about the joys and pains of Asian American ministry, and who are willing to listen and to be listened to.

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Dr. David C. Chao directs the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. A second-generation Chinese American shaped by Chinese evangelical and Korean Presbyterian churches and by campus ministry with Cru, he equips Asian American churches and their leaders through the Center's conferences, podcast, oral history research, and mental health initiatives. His family's life in America began in Atlanta, where his father came from Taiwan to study at Georgia Tech.