Mission Yearbook: In South Texas, First Korean Presbyterian Church builds trilingual, multicultural ministry

A boldly painted sign advertising “Korean classes and fellowship” may strike passersby as out of the ordinary on a farm to market road in rural South Texas.

Yet all signs suggest that something extraordinary is in fact happening on State Highway 495 in McAllen.

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First Korean Presbyterian Church of McAllen, Texas, is a trilingual congregation (photo by Randy Hobson).

The sign — with the perhaps unexpected invitation it offers — is the handiwork of the Rev. Jacob Keunhyung Lee, pastor of the First Korean Presbyterian Church of McAllen. Lee, a former businessman, is no stranger to reading and testing signs of all kinds “to see whether they are from God.”

It was in his native South Korea where Lee was called to study theology at the urging of his beloved mentor, the Rev. Seo Ja Il, before following the signs that pointed him to the United States.

“In Korea, I was thinking about my daughter and my son,” said Lee, who was ordained in 1999 to the ministry of Word and Sacrament by the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea. “I wanted my children to grow up in the United States and get an American education. I was drawn to American Christian culture and history, but I knew life in America wouldn’t be easy. To be a minister in the U.S., I knew I needed more study. I needed to know how to preach to people in their life.”

Once Lee and his family took their leap of faith to immigrate to the U.S., they settled in Dallas, where he opened — and subsequently sold — his dental laboratory business “because it was not satisfying.”

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The Rev. Jacob Keunhyung Lee stands outside the church he serves in McAllen, Texas (photo by Randy Hobson)

“I used the proceeds of the sale to pay off my seminary debt,” he said, “which freed me to minister to the homeless through a program of Grace Presbytery. We served meals and talked with the people on the first Saturday of every month. The experience prepared me for my first call at a new church plant in Buena Park, California, where there was a large Korean population.”

While serving that congregation, Lee earned a doctoral degree from Fuller Seminary, a course of study that led him three years ago to return with his family to Texas, this time to accept the call in McAllen.

“It was a big cultural change,” offered Lee’s wife, Diamond.

The family was soon to discover that many Koreans live and work in the area.

“There are maybe five or six Korean restaurants here,” Lee said. “And if the Korean people aren’t restaurant owners, many of them work in the maquiladoras [foreign-owned factories primarily in Mexico]. They want their families to move to McAllen even though they work in Reynosa [Mexico].”

Lee added that the Rio Grande Valley is also home to many laborers from Peru, Nicaragua and other Latino/a countries.

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Diamond Lee is pictured at First Korean Presbyterian Church of McAllen, Texas (photo by Randy Hobson).

“I focus on evangelism,” he said.

Welcoming Spanish speakers to First Korean Church alongside its Korean and English speaking members was a natural for Lee, in large part because a former congregation of Mission Presbytery, Nueva Vida, had recently closed.

Once the Nueva Vida project had dissolved, a handful of its former worshipers chose to join First Korean.

“Now we always have three languages in our trilingual worship,” said Lee. “Praise songs are sung by everyone together, each in their own language, with Korean, English and Spanish subtitles. I preach the sermon in Korean, with my daughter, Jasmine, translating it into English. Jasmine also sings with our praise band.”

Lee said that the worshiping community evokes the vision in Revelation 7:9–10 of “a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language.”

“We started a Korean language class and resource center to serve the local community, and there’s more to come,” he said. “We’re also planning a Korean library as a cultural hub. We’re working with Puentes de Cristo to do ministry at the U.S.-Mexico border. We’re addressing big issues like immigration, education, jobs and the health needs of our community.”

Emily Enders Odom, Associate Director of Mission Communications, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Lisett Cruz, Administrative Assistant, Interim Unified Agency
Jayne Culp, Administrative Manager, Office of the Stated Clerk and Executive Director, Interim Unified Agency

Let us pray:

Holy God, keep the eyes of your faithful always looking for those in need, and make our hands willing to serve, so that others may glimpse your kingdom until it comes in fullness. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Becoming an intercultural community

Minnesota church embraces a more expansive covenant

March 24, 2020

The Rev. Andrew Davis is pastor of Union Presbyterian Church in Saint Peter, Minnesota. He’s pictured here during a chapel service in the Presbyterian Center in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Tammy Warren)

SAINT PETER, Minnesota — When I think of multicultural churches, I do not necessarily think of my own — I picture congregations that reflect many different races and ethnicities. Like most Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) churches, Union Presbyterian Church of Saint Peter is a predominantly white congregation. What does multicultural ministry mean for my rural Midwestern church community?

I believe it first entails shifting from a “Chosen People–Promised Land Model” (suggested by Steven T. Newcomb in “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery”) to a sense that being the church is about including everyone within God’s expansive covenant.

Union was founded by missionaries whose methods of evangelism were based on conversion techniques typical of the 19th century. The emphasis was on denying all aspects of one’s birth culture in order to convert to the traditions of Western European Christianity. Many of the Sioux understandably resisted such attempts at colonialism and conversion.

The Rev. Stephen Riggs, a founder of the church that would become Union, noted, “Preaching seems like pouring water upon a rock.” Subsequent military and governmental injustices culminated in the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 and the removal of remaining Sioux peoples from their lands in south-central Minnesota.

I know this history because church members compiled a book about Union for its 150th anniversary. Telling the truth about our own history is an important first step in working for racial justice.

Union became a mostly white church in a mostly white city because of this unjust theology of domination. Truly, it is by the grace of God that we have been moved to a new paradigm for ministry.

Today, Saint Peter is becoming more diverse. Thanks to good wages and a low cost of living, refugees from Somalia are choosing to make this land their home. These Somalis are Muslim; they worship in a small mosque in town. It would be “like pouring water upon a rock” a second time to try to convert them to Christianity. Instead of adhering to a theology of domination, Christians in Saint Peter are embracing a theology of what I call “expansive covenant.”

In the Hebrew scriptures, covenants delineate the neighborly duties and responsibilities of people to each other and to God. Biblical laws set forth how God should be worshiped and how God’s people should treat one another.

However, peoples outside the covenant (such as Samaritans) were not given the same neighborly designation. Shockingly for the Jews, Jesus taught that the essential terms of the Jewish covenant could be fulfilled by non-Jews.

In the parable of the good Samaritan and in the story about the Samaritan whose leprosy was cured, Jesus provided examples of Gentiles who loved God and who loved their neighbor as themselves, thus fulfilling the greatest commandments of the Jewish covenant.

In Jesus’s teachings and through the movement of the Holy Spirit, Gentiles were graced with the benefits of the covenantal relationship with God and neighbor, even though they worshiped God in their own different ways. Likewise, Christians can recognize the Muslims who recently moved to Saint Peter as being in a covenantal relationship with God, even as they worship and think about God in distinct ways. We are obliged to love with the same love that God offers us in Jesus Christ. Love, not domination, is at the center of a multicultural theology of expansive covenant.

Another aspect of covenantal theology is that it concerns public goods. In ancient Israel, the terms of the covenant described the ordering of public life and property. For example, in Deuteronomy 19:14, the law prohibits the movement of a neighbor’s property boundary. Although our modern and secular democracy is radically different from the theocratic monarchy of ancient Israel, we can still use covenantal theology’s concerns for public order to the good of our communities.

In a secular democracy, public goods are available to all, regardless of religious affiliation. As Christians operating within a secular democracy, though, we recognize the value of religion, and we can work to ensure that the public order protects the right to religious assembly for all.

I’ve had some success in helping to protect religious assembly in Saint Peter by joining and then chairing the Planning & Zoning Commission, which operates under the authority of the Saint Peter City Council. Zoning laws regulate land use, and the commission decides whether an applicant for a zoning variance can move forward.

In many cities, new places of worship require a zoning variance. I was happy to chair the meeting when our Somali neighbors applied for such a variance for their new mosque. The meeting went well, with no pushback from neighbors, but some cities have experienced attempts to block zoning variances for mosques. To prevent possible obstructions from occurring in the future, Saint Peter changed its zoning regulations so that fewer new houses of worship would need to apply for a zoning variance in order to build.

The Christian witness to God’s expansive covenant can move us to act, even in seemingly mundane city meetings! In addition to my work on the commission, I have been involved as our Habitat for Humanity chapter has made it easier for Muslims to apply for mortgages, I’ve posted “Blessed Ramadan” yard signs around town, and our church has gathered mittens, scarves and socks to help keep our neighbors warm during their first Minnesota winters. Working with the Episcopal church in town, we are developing casual friendships with families at the local laundry, and a community-based “Tapestry Project” set to launch in early 2020 will strive to deepen relationships between our church members and refugees.

My heart despairs at the grave injustices inflicted on the Sioux peoples by the settlers who also established my dear church. If only they had sought to be loving neighbors instead of colonizers! Now, in this time, I hope we can be faithful to the expansive gospel of Jesus Christ in all that we do.

Rev. Andrew Davis, Pastor of Union Presbyterian Church in Saint Peter, Minnesota

Let us join in prayer for: 

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Kelly Abraham, Presbyterian Association of Musicians
Susan Abraham, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray:

Almighty God feed us today with the presence of our risen Lord Jesus Christ and the breadth of your Holy Spirit, that we may be bold witnesses and bear abundant fruit in all we say and do to the glory of your holy name. Amen.