Bubble Tea After Mass

Daniel and I dropped our latest podcast episode over the weekend, and in this episode, we once again dipped our toe into the asianity pool with a discussion on migration and the life of the Church.

In this episode, we not only tapped into our personal migrant backgrounds and also extrapolated that into larger ecclesial patterns, especially in the English speaking world.

And at the risk of sounding cliched, some of these may surprise you.

Among such surprises are the numbers in terms of the rate of migration among Christians, and within that context, how these patterns are feeding into religious practices in parishes in the West, as well as the pastoral realities in our institutional life, most immediately in our schools.

Yet another surprise are the emergence of unique spiritual and pastoral challenges for Christians who are migrant, and also how these challenges feed into the life of the local parish, which then impact on the non-migrant parishoner. Amongst these are the threat nostalgia poses to both migrant and native born, particularly nostalgia for old and familiar patterns of Church life.

Another challenge was the way in which global issues do not become just issues “out there”, for they will become issues that affect parishes “in here”. We opined that this does not dilute the catholicity of the Church, if anything, it brings out the dimensions of catholicity that were not apparent before.

Included in the hot takes were how such numbers meant an increasingly uncomfortable coupling of the religious makeup of migrants and current debates on immigration, particularly as the impulse to restrict migrants. These couplings will not be simply relegated as a political issue, but one that will have an impact on the religious life of our societies, in particular our Churches.

Our latest episode, “Bubble Tea After Mass” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.

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