Are Korean Churches Capable of Being Missional?
Quick update: just finished an intense 7-week course on Biblical Greek which ranks among the top 5 hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life, thus explaining my online reticence. But I look forward to using this vacation for some quality writing, and blogging well.
During the summer term we had a visiting lecturer @ Regent – Minho Song, a Korean pastor from Toronto who taught a class on the missional church in North America. I would have been thrilled to sit-in save for the fact that I was mired in parsing Greek verbs, and juggling two babies at home. Still, his class reverberated throughout the Korean community @ Regent, discussing if it is indeed possible for a church that is bounded within ethnic identity to be effectively missional in a non-Korean context.
My take:
Yes, it is possible. But it is limited. A Korean church in America / Canada can be missional in strategy but not fully missional in nature – my thoughts. As long as ethnic identity maintains the borders of the community, it cannot grow out of that – and maybe that’s ok. There is still plenty of work to do as long as there are immigrants.
Still there is a pushback. In one of my classes a young, if I may say, naive student asked why immigrants (refered to as “they”) cluster together in cliques and do not open to the broader society. It’s a correct assessment but irritatingly ignores the dimensions of social growth and needs. As if European immigrants did not clump together in the New World? Nonetheless I would say that even immigrants have needs, a taste of the Old World, we need to stick together, we need to remember the Old Country and the Old Ways. In time, we eventually assimilate whether we like it or not.
And being both a missional AND Korean church I think is recognizing this dialectic. Preserving culture and at the same time moving outside of culture. How this looks practically I’m not sure but I agree: the second-gen is the key.
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haha you definitely weren’t the punisher guy
Wayne – Oh, you just went there!
You were very gracious in how you described the person who asked the question of why “they” always stick together. I think it’s probably more reasonable to ask why “they” in the majority (who have access to power, resources, etc.) don’t reach out to those different from themselves.
I get the feeling that even first-gen Korean Americans can live missionally in community and minister to those outside the Korean context. Now, I’d be hard-pressed to give a concrete example of an entire institutional church that does this, but I’ve seen pockets of it in many different places across the country. People who love Jesus and want to join in God’s mission, wherever that might be (esp. at their workplaces).
The reality is, even second and third gen Asian Americans will still need a place to be accepted solely as “insider” — the triple consciousness that Soong-Chan Rah describes in The Next Evangelicalism. I agree with you, though: the next gen is the key. Can we *be* the church for a broken and hurting world; can we be humble enough to recognize that we’re not “bringing Jesus” anywhere, but that God is very much at work already, and can our pain lead to past alienation and into empathetic understanding of others who are not like us (whether ethnically, socio-economically, politically, etc.)?
Does being missional presuppose being cross cultural?
oh such a good question… thoughts anyone?