My name is David Yung. I am the senior minister of St Paul's Anglican Church Kogarah, in southern Sydney — about ten minutes from the airport, twenty from the city.
I have been married to Jenny for almost twenty-five years, through the ups and downs of life and of ministry. We have three children. Our eldest is studying psychology and primary education, and was married last June to a wonderful Christian man. Our second is studying secondary education at university, majoring in history, and boarding at a Christian college. Our youngest is in Year 11, preparing for her final year of school. We thank God that we have been able to serve our Lord together for many years, and that the older two now serve him in churches of their own.
A church older than the country it sits in
I have been at St Paul's for almost eight years. The church itself has stood for more than a century and a half. It is an Anglican church — Church of England — but it was German immigrants in the 1860s who helped get it started. That detail has come to mean a great deal to me. The congregation that some now think of as the old church, the English church, the one that was here first, was itself planted with immigrant hands.
For a long time afterwards the church was made up almost entirely of people of English origin. In recent years that has changed. More and more of those who come were not born in England, or in Australia. Some speak English. Many speak Mandarin.
When we arrived there were two very small services. We started a third soon after. Coming out of the COVID lockdowns our resources were stretched thin, and we made a decision that has shaped everything since: we folded the services into one bilingual gathering, where most of the service carries both languages. Sermons are translated from English into Chinese and given out either in written form or through an AI voice that reads the sermon in Mandarin.
Under God, we have grown — to the point where we are reaching the capacity of our building. And so we have now planted a Chinese parallel congregation to make room for that growth.
Alongside Sunday, we run growth groups through the week, a children's ministry, a youth ministry, food assistance for those in need, and Easy English conversation classes. In Sydney we also have the tremendous privilege of being able to teach the Bible in public schools. Our church is involved in five local schools, with a potential reach of well over two thousand students, and we are in the process of starting a new class that would take the total number of students we are responsible for to around three thousand.
The long shadow behind all of this
None of it makes sense without the history, and the history is not comfortable.
Chinese contact with Australia almost certainly predates European settlement — there is a Chinese map, dated 1477, that appears to show the outline of the continent. Records show about eighteen Chinese settlers arriving before 1848. Then gold was discovered, and the numbers jumped. By 1861, 3.3% of the Australian population was Chinese.
As the numbers rose, so did the violence. Chinese miners became the target of European diggers, and then of those who held political power, in a series of laws designed to restrict how many Chinese people could live here. Soon after federation in January 1901, the government of Edmund Barton passed the Immigration Restriction Act. The White Australia policy was a set of racial policies designed to keep people of non-European origin — Asians, primarily Chinese, and Pacific Islanders — out of the country.
The consequence was a collapse in Chinese migration, and with it, in Chinese ministry.
One notable example is the ministry of the Reverend George Soo Hoo Ten.
Soo Hoo Ten was an Anglican minister who worked among the Chinese from 1879 onwards, largely among Chinese market gardeners. There was a real unity between the Chinese and the English Christians of that time — so much so that a church was built specifically to reach Chinese people. But the sentiment outside the church was harsh, and people spoke poorly of his appointment. The growing anti-Chinese feeling culminated in the White Australia policy, the number of Chinese speakers and Chinese Christians in the area fell away, and the church was eventually knocked down. The Sydney Anglican Church would not see another Chinese-speaking ministry until 1983.
Nineteen eighty-three is the year my family arrived in Australia. I have never been able to read that date as a coincidence.
With the relaxation of the White Australia policy, the number of Chinese Christians in Sydney grew again. There are now at least seventy-six non-Anglican Chinese churches and forty-five Anglican parishes in Sydney with some form of Chinese-speaking ministry. The larger Chinese churches tend to be non-Anglican and fairly monoethnic, though many run several congregations in different languages. The Anglican churches tend to be more multi-ethnic, and most of them have a non-Chinese senior minister.
The question in front of us now
There are still many people of Chinese descent in Australia, and after English the most common language nationally is Mandarin. But the largest growth in immigration now is from South Asia. As the population changes, both Anglo Christians and Chinese Christians have to think about how we engage with our South Asian neighbours. This was asked at a recent cross-cultural conference, and it is something we will be exploring as a diocese in the years ahead.
It is easy, as a Chinese-background minister, to assume the cross-cultural question is settled the moment a Chinese congregation is established. It is not. The next wave is already here, and it does not look like me either.
For now, my hope is that we will reach our Chinese-speaking and English-speaking neighbours well — and that we will be ready, when the time comes, to be as glad about the next arrivals as somebody once was about mine.
The essays that follow come out of a Doctor of Ministry programme at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in the Thriving Immigrant Churches track. They have been reworked for reading rather than for marking, but the arguments and the sources are as they were.