At first, I wasn’t particularly interested in attending Arise Asia 2026.
By then, I had spent several weeks traveling across Asia from one gathering to another, and I was more than ready to go home. But friends who knew I was still in Asia kept urging me to stay a few more days and go to Arise Asia.
Arise Asia? At the time, I thought of it as an “Asian Urbana,” a mission gathering for young Christians across Asia.1 I had also heard mixed reactions from friends, including some reservations about the conference.
What kept Arise Asia in my mind, though, was a question I happened to hear from someone deeply involved with the gathering: Why are mission movements so often framed by a single national or cultural identity? Chinese mission. Korean mission. Other efforts that mobilize and send primarily among “their own people.” When that happens, can mission itself gradually take on a nationalistic cast?
He went on to argue that younger people are growing up in a far more globalized cultural world. They listen to BTS and Taylor Swift, he said, and are increasingly drawn toward something more international. If so, should we still imagine mission primarily through national categories?
Having spent much of my life in Chinese Christian circles, I found the question unsettling. It also made me more curious about the idea of an “Asian Urbana.” I assumed at the time that Arise Asia mattered because Asian Christians were finally convening a conversation of their own. But if that was the point, another question followed: as Asian Christians gain more influence in global mission, are we simply building another center?
I was not fully persuaded. Sharing popular culture is not the same as sharing a history. Christians in Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, or Central Asia will not begin to understand church, suffering, politics, or mission in the same way simply because they use Instagram, listen to Taylor Swift, encounter K-pop, or read manga. Globalization may make distance feel smaller, but it does not dissolve context.
Still, the conversation left me with two questions: What happens when Chinese Christians enter a mission story in which we are not at the center? And what might we hear when Chinese is no longer the main language in a room full of Asian faces?
I went to Manila carrying those questions. Once I arrived, however, they quietly began to shift. I had gone wanting to see what this generation of young Asian Christians was becoming. Before long, I found myself wondering what kind of “older generation” I was becoming.
Agency and Discernment
In church and academic settings, I am used to being among the younger people in the room. At Arise Asia, surrounded by people in their twenties, I was struck by their confidence and initiative, while still somehow imagining that I belonged with them. Then I was invited to speak at the Emerging Leaders Gathering, and the organizers placed me firmly in the “older generation.”
So much for feeling young.
They had asked me, as someone a little further along, to talk about calling and offer some encouragement. Naturally, I prepared a little spiritual chicken soup.
But as I looked at the young faces in front of me, I suddenly found myself telling them about a painful experience from an earlier season of ministry, something I had never intended to discuss publicly. I panicked a little: Oh no. I had gone completely off script! I was supposed to encourage them, and suddenly this did not sound encouraging at all.Yet after the session, young people from different countries began coming up to talk with me. They told me about work, relationships, church, calling, exhaustion, and seasons when they did not know where the next step would lead. The story I had never planned to tell became an opening into much more honest conversations.
Those encounters also changed how I understood the agency I was seeing at Arise Asia. Agency did not necessarily mean certainty. It meant being willing to step forward, speak, ask questions, and take responsibility for what came next even while some things remained unresolved.
That stood in interesting contrast to some Chinese church and ministry environments I know well. We learn early how to read the room: who the senior people are, when it is appropriate to speak, where the boundaries lie, how not to offend someone or cross an invisible line. There is value in that sensitivity. The problem is that sometimes we learn very early not to overstep, and much later what we are actually capable of carrying.
What Comes after Mobilization?
“Mobilizing the next generation” has long been part of the language of missions and Arise Asia itself is a powerful example of mission mobilization.
One Filipino-Chinese participant in her twenties had heard about Arise Asia for the first time only two days before it began. Her church was in the middle of missions month, and she was curious about missions in other parts of the world, so she took leave from work and came.
A few days later, she told me that the conference had made the realities facing Christians elsewhere in Asia feel real to her in a new way. She heard stories of believers facing persecution and of people risking their lives to become the first to share the gospel in their villages and communities. Those stories moved her to surrender her life again to God and ask him to use it.
If we think in terms of mission mobilization, this is exactly the kind of response we hope for.
But she was equally candid about what came next: “I’m still at a loss on how He’s going to do it. I still don’t know where my calling is.”
Toward the end of our conversation, she turned the questions back to me. How do you hold together dreams and ambition with a genuine desire to serve God? What happens when your family has real financial needs and responsibilities? If the desire to achieve or succeed may itself be something God has placed in you, how do you surrender those ambitions while still pursuing them faithfully?
A conference can help someone see the need, even bring a person to the point of sincerely saying, “I am willing.” But after “I am willing” come work, family, gifts, limitations, ambition, and responsibility. Mission mobilization can help people see the need and awaken a response; discernment often begins in the tensions that follow.
What We Said, What They Heard
After Arise Asia, some criticism focused on the main-stage content, including questions about theological depth and the way missionary calling was presented.2
But another set of conversations was happening at the same time.
One young woman who helped lead workshops later described the contrast. On the main stage, she heard a great deal about “mission, sacrifice, going out, obedience.” Yet twice she sat in rooms filled with hundreds of young people who wanted to talk about sustainability and burnout, identity and calling, and worth beyond achievement. Her own question was deeply personal: “Who am I when my worth is not defined by what I accomplish, even for the kingdom of God?”
Those two sets of concerns do not cancel each other out. A person can sincerely want to go and obey while also being tired, confused, and unsure how to separate worth from achievement. Sometimes the people most ready to say yes are precisely the ones who need to learn when to keep going and when to stop.
Organizers are responsible for the voices they place on a stage. But if formation means constructing a world in which someone older and more experienced has already screened every idea, what we produce is not discernment. It is dependence on our judgment. If we expect young leaders to cross cultures, assume risk, and make costly decisions for the sake of the gospel, we cannot at the same time assume that they are unable to encounter a view that needs to be tested, perhaps even challenged.
Coming to Arise Asia almost directly from the 10th CCOWE made the contrast between the two gatherings especially vivid. CCOWE carries the weight of half a century of relationships, theological reflection, and organizational experience, including forms of judgment shaped over time and often at considerable cost.
Arise Asia, by contrast, felt looser. Some things found their way into public space before they were fully formed. And when uncertain, unfinished ideas collided, they sometimes produced unexpected sparks.
The more I held the two gatherings together, the less interested I became in deciding which was better. CCOWE has accumulated a sense of history, relationships, and judgment that a younger movement simply has not had time to develop. At Arise Asia, the relative looseness also made room for experimentation, surprise, and possibilities that might be harder to see once structures become more established. Each had something to learn from the other.
And the problem is not that young people are absent. There are many, already serving, initiating, organizing, and taking responsibility in different places. The question is not simply how many are present, or whether they have been given a forum of their own. A gathering can make young people highly visible without becoming genuinely intergenerational. The more important question is whether the generations actually meet.
Can the judgment accumulated through experience enter younger people’s experiments without taking them over? Can younger leaders’ questions, creativity, and initiative unsettle practices that have become too fixed?
One young person I met at Arise Asia described two very different ways of imagining intergenerational ministry. One begins with the belief that a movement belongs to God and therefore should “encompass all generations.” The other begins with anxiety: “I cannot let this movement die out, so I need to go and find the next generation of people to take it over.”
Both talk about the next generation, but they begin in different places. The second imagines continuity from the standpoint of the older generation: I am leaving, so someone must replace me. The first assumes that different generations already belong in the same story. 3
How Ready Is Ready Enough?
During the five days of Arise Asia, the Innovation Lab occupied two full afternoons. I remember being impressed that the conference would hand over such a significant block of time to young people. There was a noticeable improvisational quality on stage. At certain moments, I found myself wondering, Are they really ready for this? Then another thought immediately followed: surely, if the organizers were willing to give them this much space, they must have prepared extensively and rehearsed together many times. Perhaps the presentation simply looked more spontaneous than it really was.
Later I learned that, at least when it came to rehearsals, my assumption was wrong. Team members were spread across North America, Singapore, and elsewhere, each with full-time work of their own. They had not walked onto the stage unprepared, but the rough edges, real-time adjustments, and occasional moments that made me nervous were not simply a stylistic choice.
Even the Emerging Leaders Gathering I participated in had something of the same character. It began as a “good idea” relatively late in the process, followed by invitations, conversations, and planning. At one point, even the venue had not been settled. In the end, it came together beautifully and became one of the parts of Arise Asia I treasured most. But I knew none of that while I was in the room.
That was one of the moments when I realized how firmly I had already stepped into the position of the “older generation.” Those of us with more experience are often exactly the people who do not like letting things happen this way. We can see where a program is shaky, which mistakes could have been avoided, and how much more confident and polished everyone would look after a few more rehearsals. Often, we are right.
But if someone must first be judged “ready” before being allowed to carry something of real weight, where exactly are they supposed to learn how to carry it? Poor preparation is not something to celebrate. But some judgment and steadiness can only develop when someone is actually responsible and when things do not go entirely according to plan.4
What interested me even more was that the young person I mentioned earlier did not understand this kind of agency as a rejection of the older generation. He spoke of wanting “to turn our hearts to our fathers and to our father’s dreams as well.”
For those of us with experience, the hard part may be seeing exactly what could be improved and resisting the urge to take over. If every C is immediately turned into an A by someone more experienced, whose A is it in the end? And where does the judgment that normally grows through a few imperfect attempts ever come from?
The same young man described another situation he was unhappy with. As he heard himself criticizing it, he realized that if he had so much criticism, he should also be willing to take responsibility for doing something better and put in the time and effort, rather than only talking. So, he stepped forward.
Responsibility lands on both sides. The older generation cannot use experience as a reason to take everything over. The younger generation cannot demand real agency while leaving the consequences and cost to someone else.
The harder question may not be whether to “let go.” It may be whether we can remain present without taking over, and whether those given room can truly carry what has been entrusted to them.
That answer, however, has limits. Some things can be learned while doing them imperfectly. Some risks cannot simply be dismissed with, “Let them try.”
Protection or Restriction?
Another scene that made this question more complicated came from a regional gathering for participants connected with China. There, decisions about who could enter, what information could be retained, what could be photographed, and what could be recorded carried very real consequences. The regional coordinators had put necessary safeguards in place. From the outside, arrangements like these can look excessively secretive, even overcautious. Once inside the room, however, it was easier to understand the risks those restrictions were responding to.
Protection suddenly became harder to define. It often takes the form of restriction. The same sentence, “I’m doing this to protect you,” may mean taking responsibility for a danger someone else cannot yet see. It may also become a reason to make decisions on that person’s behalf. An older leader may see risk first. A younger person may feel mistrust first. Either can be seeing only part of the picture.
At the same gathering, one of the leaders also addressed the accommodation problems from the first few days: rooms that had not been ready, no hot water, and the work that had gone into fixing the situation. At one point, the leader said, “We were thinking of moving you to… (paused and looked at these young people) worse rooms.”
For a moment, everyone froze. Then the room burst into laughter.
The laughter stayed with me. The problems had not been denied, and they had been addressed. The young people sitting in that room had come to Manila from different parts of the world, and for some, the cost of being there involved far more than airfare and a few days of inconvenience. The frustrations of the previous days had not disappeared, but for a moment they no longer filled the whole room.
Responsibility also appears after something goes wrong: in whether we can acknowledge what happened, repair what we can, and help a community move forward.
I still do not know exactly where the line lies. I came away more alert to one thing: people who hold more information, resources, and decision-making power may indeed see certain risks earlier. But seeing more does not automatically give us the right to decide more for someone else.
Learning to Leave the Center
In Manila, another center I had grown accustomed to quietly shifted. I was no longer automatically one of the younger people in the room. And I was no longer participating in a mission story centered on the Chinese church.
What Might the Chinese Church Need to Receive?
Over the past several decades, growing numbers of Chinese churches have moved from being primarily on the receiving end of mission and ministry toward becoming active senders and participants in global mission. We have therefore become accustomed to asking important questions: What can the Chinese church contribute? How can Chinese churches participate in the unfinished task of global mission?5
Those questions still matter. But sitting with Christians from the Philippines, Singapore, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Central Asia, and elsewhere, another question came to mind: As we tell the story of the Chinese church to the world, what might the Chinese church itself need to receive?
The Filipino-Chinese young woman I mentioned earlier lives inside this kind of layered identity. She had once wondered whether she was “really Chinese” or “really Filipino.” Eventually she found a simple way to say it: “Chinese by blood, Filipino by heart.”
She continued studying Mandarin because she wanted to remain rooted in both cultures. At Arise Asia, she could speak Mandarin with participants from Taiwan and connect naturally with Filipinos because she had grown up there. What felt genuinely new was becoming friends with people from India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and beginning to see cultures and forms of ministry she had known little about before.
Cross-cultural encounter does not mean that difference disappears. It means knowing where you come from while discovering that your own story is not the only story in the room worth understanding.
By then, I understood my earlier question about an “Asian Urbana” differently. I had been asking who convened the conversation. But what changed for the young Filipino-Chinese woman was not that Asia finally had a gathering of its own. It was that she met Christians from India, Nepal, and Pakistan for the first time. What opened up did not happen on the stage. It happened in who was in the room with her, and a conversation like that cannot be convened from any single place, because its content depends on who shows up.
This is close to what mission thinkers increasingly describe as polycentric mission: replacing one center with another misses the point. Different places and communities must be able to initiate, carry responsibility, and receive from one another. Seen this way, what Asia needs may not be its turn at the center, but to take its place more fully in a mission landscape no longer organized around a single center.6
For Chinese Christians, that also means changing the direction of our attention. If “What can the Chinese church offer the world?” has become one of our familiar questions, perhaps we also need to ask: What is God doing in other churches? What have we not yet seen, understood, or learned to receive?
The same holds between generations and between the Chinese church and the wider Asian church. Perhaps what unsettles us is not that we are becoming unimportant. It is discovering that being important does not require being at the center.
Near the end of the gathering, several younger friends from Singapore gave me a handwritten card. One line read, “We thank God for you and the gentle strength you carry.”
That caught me off guard. I had spent much of the week watching the younger generation, but they had also been watching me. What they saw was not entirely how I saw myself.
Those days had not felt particularly gentle to me. When I see a problem, my instinct is to fix it. I become impatient with inefficiency. Left unchecked, I can start grading people in my head.
Even more interestingly, when they prayed for me, they asked the Holy Spirit to give me more boldness, so that when I needed to stand up, I would not shrink back.
I have often thought about those two things together. What they saw in me was gentle strength. What they prayed for was greater boldness. The two may sound contradictory, but together they name something difficult about becoming the “older generation.” Becoming the older generation is not only stepping back. Some things need to be named. Some boundaries need to be held. But boldness is not taking over, and experience does not need to prove its value by constantly correcting someone else.
What I brought home from Manila was a harder question: As we gradually gain more experience, more standing, and more power to shape the lives of others, how will we use it?
- Arise Asia 2026 was held in Manila from July 27–31, 2026. Drawing on Hebrews 12:2, the gathering used the theme “For the Joy” and brought together more than 4,000 participants from over 50 countries, primarily young Christians ages 18 to 30, with a call to “go where there is no gospel.” The first Arise Asia was held in Bangkok in 2023. See Arise Asia 2026 and ChinaSource, “Arise Asia: Inspiring the Next Generation.”
- After the conference, Hong Kong’s Christian Times published 〈對 Arise Asia 2026 亞洲青年宣教大會的失望〉(“Disappointment with the Arise Asia 2026 Asian Youth Mission Conference”) on August 4, 2026, raising questions about the theological depth of some main-stage messages and the framing of missionary calling. The conference program as a whole was considerably broader, including cross-cultural ministry, suffering, the unfinished missionary task, digital ministry, business, burnout, mission in restricted contexts, funding, and calling. In the final session, Paul Elliott returned explicitly to discernment and cautioned participants against equating the emotional intensity of a conference with missionary calling. See the Christian Times article (in Chinese) and the Arise Asia 2026 Program and Workshops.
- This comparison continues an observation I made after the 2025 Toronto Consultation: generational transition should not be understood only as “passing the baton,” but as intergenerational sending, in which generations support and send one another so that no generation is absent. At the 10th CCOWE, participants under 35 made up roughly 15 percent of the gathering, while Arise Asia was designed primarily for those ages 18 to 30. The contrast is worth noting, but the point is not that one gathering had young people and the other did not, or that a certain proportion of younger participants makes a gathering truly intergenerational. Nor is intergenerational ministry achieved simply by creating a separate forum for younger voices. The more revealing question is whether generations actually enter one another’s conversations, learn from one another, and share meaningful work and responsibility. See Andrea Lee, “What the Chinese Diaspora Is Talking About”; Jerry Chang, “After Passing the Microphone”; and Brent Fulton, “Charting a Path Forward”, all on ChinaSource.
- During the Innovation Lab, one speaker used F.A.I.L., “First Attempt in Learning,” to describe experimental learning. Rather than trying to build a perfect rocket at the outset, start with a paper airplane, throw it, observe what happens, and learn from the result. The point was to allow judgment to develop through real attempts and real responsibility. See Arise Asia 2026 Innovation Lab, “Innovation Is Not Optional,” July 29, 2026.
- For an earlier ChinaSource discussion of Chinese churches becoming more active senders in global mission, see Ezra Jin, “The Chinese Church and the Global Body of Christ” (2012). The question here is what comes next: once “What can we contribute?” becomes familiar, do Chinese churches retain the posture needed to receive what other churches have already learned?
- Polycentric mission became an important framework of discussion around the Fourth Lausanne Congress, recognizing multiple sites of initiative, responsibility, learning, and mutual correction. See ChinaSource, “Who’s in Charge?” and “Reflections on Lausanne’s Fourth Congress on World Evangelism.”
