Anne Wu and her family walk into St Joseph’s Church and like most Sundays, can’t find a seat.
Anne stands in the corner, looking at the crowd with a quiet sense of pride.
“We’re getting more and more people wanting to serve the Lord and come to church,” she says.
Every Sunday at this chapel in the Asiana Centre in Ashfield is a testament to the awakening of the collective spirit of the Chinese Catholic community in Sydney.
And it’s not just this church.
Over the last decade, the Chinese Catholic community has become a powerhouse of faith and active evangelism, experiencing surging attendance numbers and deeper engagement across the wider archdiocese.
It’s passionate parishioners such as Anne, a Taiwanese-born mother of two, who have sparked the renaissance.
“The sleeping giant is awake,” she says.
But it wasn’t always this way. Anne says just two decades ago, her community turned away from its faith.
“It was as if the Chinese Catholic community had fallen asleep. We weren’t growing. People started to get used to their lives in Australia,” she said.
Anne blames a complacent second-generation of Australian Chinese who weren’t as connected to their faith and community as their parents and grandparents.
“There wasn’t much hardship anymore, we had it too good. And when life goes well, we tend to not prioritise God.”
Anne, a second-generation child of migrants, counts herself as one of these “sleeping flock.”
“I was in university back then, and my faith wasn’t that great. At that time, I just thought, well, this is how the world is; people come and then people go,” she recalls.
However, in 2002, Anne joined a Chinese community prayer group called The Temple of the Holy Spirit, in Ashfield.
“That’s where I reconnected with my faith and was reignited and passionate about Jesus and spreading his love to others,” she said.
The real turning point, though, was World Youth Day 2008, where Anne encountered her faith in a way she’d never experienced before. It reignited a connection she wanted to share with her own community.
“I knew that I had to help others to have the experience that I had at World Youth Day in Sydney,” she said.
But she was unsure of how to take this momentum forward.
She realised that what might have held her community back was an inherent cultural trait within the Chinese faith community, to always look internally for answers.
However, the answers her community sought, she discovered, were out there in the wider archdiocese.
She contacted Father Joseph Yong Lu, the parish priest at St Dominic’s in Flemington and together they asked for help through the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation’s Parish Renewal Team.
The team’s Tania Rimac introduced Fr Joseph and Anne to the Alpha Course, which Anne began hosting online with the young people of her community during the Covid restrictions.
The so-called “locked down” generation, were eager to reconnect with their community and their faith.
“They wanted to wake the giant and be a part of the great mission that Jesus called all of us to do,” said Anne.
Today, as Anne gazes at the booming numbers in her church, she sees a community more engaged than ever.
Across the archdiocese, the numbers only reinforce this belief.
At this year’s Rite of Election in February, where non-religious and other Christians outside the Catholic faith came to declare their readiness to enter the church, one in five were from Sydney’s Chinese communities.
At Easter, the church welcomed 52 new Catholics from these booming Chinese communities, nearly double that of the year before.
To help foster their participation in the liturgy, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney will soon publish the first Chinese translated version of the Catholic Mass booklet.
And this year the Alpha Film series have, for the first time, released a fully re-contextualised Chinese version of their world-famous resource. Anne was there for its launch last month.
“It’s the beginning of a journey together and it’s a sign of how far we’ve come and where we are headed,” said Anne.
Daniel Ang, Director of the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation said that without leaders like Anne, the Chinese community in Sydney would not be what it is today.
“Adult conversions are always a sign of a community that is growing and focused on evangelisation, and to see the tremendous growth in the communities across Sydney in recent years is testament to the commitment of Fr Joseph and so many lay leaders like Anne who are working toward what they pray for,” he said