It's not our parents'. Jay D'Alessandro, of Burke, said he didn't feel comfortable at other churches. D'Alessandro, whose mother was Korean and whose father was white, attended a mostly white Presbyterian church while growing up. He briefly attended a Korean church with his Korean American wife, but he said many members didn't talk to him because he didn't look Korean. You see couples that are interracial . . .
Some scholars expect the second-generation churches to continue growing.
More Korean Americans are marrying outside their ethnicity and the country is becoming more diverse, said Peter Cha, who teaches at Trinity Evangelical School in Chicago. One of the pioneering second-generation ministries, Newsong Community Church in Irvine, Calif., reports a membership boom from eight to nearly 900 in five years. Twenty percent of its members are white or black. But it's not likely Korean churches will die out, said Sang Hyun Lee, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Koreans can't blend into mainstream culture as easily as Americans of European descent, he said.