“Not Always…Permanent”: Belonging, Departure, and the Ecclesial Imagination of Indonesian American Emerging Adults

What becomes of ecclesial belonging when the immigrant congregation that formed you can no longer hold you? Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological study of eight Indonesian American emerging adults raised in two Southern California evangelical congregations, this paper argues that departure from the immigrant church is not the failure of an ecclesial imaginary but its reconfiguration. The study surfaces several collective themes spanning the affirmative (resourcing, closeness, formation) and the critical (otherness, differences, schisms), revealing how participants carry the formational imprint of their ethnic faith communities into new contexts—from pan-Asian fellowships to “exvangelical” disaffiliation. Deploying a kinopolitical notion of imagined communities for non-linear faith identity development (Anderson [1983] 2016; Gin 2009; Nail 2015), the paper positions these departures as ecclesial flows rather than mere congregational losses—to reimagine belonging as circulation rather than enclosure—and hears in them echoes of Deus Migrator (Phan 2016), the God who travels with the (ecclesial) migrant.