From the Coalition Gathering
Korean pastor says he'll stay - because racism is the issue, not sex
by Doug King
[posted 10-7-03]
David Hackett of the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship
has sent a note amplifying some of this
report.
Portland, OR - October 7, 2003 - The strongest applause
in Tuesday
morning's
sessions came not for the "stay and fight" statements or for the "gracious
separation" ones. Instead it was the Rev. Jin S. Kim, Moderator of the
Coalition of Korean American Ministries, president-elect of PFR, and
organizing pastor of a new multicultural congregation in the Presbytery of
the Twin Cities Area, who drew the clearest attention and appreciation of
the roughly 200 people in the audience.
Beginning with a picture of a United States in the year
2050 in which the majority of people will be non-white, he then contrasted
"evangelical" and "conservative." Those terms are often linked, or even
used a synonyms, he said, but they're not. Conservatives, he said, "are
people who want to go back to the past - the good old days of the 1950s
and '60s when you couldn't keep people out of the churches, and
conservative churches were strong. Those days may look good to white
people, he added, but not to others. For people of color, those were
not good days. They were the days when black people were beaten and
murdered for seeking their rights, when most Asians were not allowed to
move into this country.
Also, he went on, the word "conservative" is not found
in Scripture, but "evangelical" is a deeply Biblical term. So, he
concluded, "if you want to be evangelical I'm with you. If you want to be
conservative, to go back, you can go without me."
He then turned to the issue of race in our church and
our society. "We evangelicals," he said are fond of Christ's image of the
sheep and the goats, with the goats (all those liberals) being sent to the
left, while the sheep, the evangelicals, are welcomed into paradise.
That's too easy, though. In fact, he said, it's often the conservatives
who are most self-absorbed, concerned with their own salvation.
In contrast, he pointed to the early Presbyterian
missionaries in Korea - the Moffetts and the Underwoods and all the rest -
who "preached the orthodox Gospel, but who also built hospitals and
started schools (even for women, which was unthinkable to Confucian
Koreans), loving and caring for people who were not Christian, without
making conversion a condition for receiving the church's help.
So, he went on, "let's build a church which is truly
cross-cultural, because the Gospel transcends our cultural idolatries of
race and class." That's hard to do, though, in our monocultural
communities and churches. There's no church in America, he added, that is
exempt from the need to talk about racial issues, for we exist in a
society with a very sophisticated caste system, where even property values
shift according to the racial makeup of a neighborhood. An all-white
neighborhood may have stable values; a few black people moving in will
lead whites to move out, values will drop, and the blacks will lose what
they have invested. Asians may live in a neighborhood without seriously
reducing values, although North Asians will be less of a problem than
South Asians.
And, he asked sharply, "what are we evangelicals saying
about that - with our Gospel that's for all people?"
This led Kim to state why he cannot support any proposal
for separation: If it happens, he said, the new evangelical denomination
will be 99.9% white, and the rest will remain perhaps 96% white - not
terrific, but better than the other one.
But there is another reason for refusing to separate:
"For us people of color," he explained, "sexuality is a luxury debate.
We're dealing with issues of justice: jobs, housing, immigration laws. And
the evangelicals are silent - and devoid of racial-ethnic people. We agree
with you about sex, but not about justice. As a leader in the Korean
church I am not going to support separation."
Only a multicultural church, he said, can enable us to
resist our "idolatries of race." For this to become possible "we need
contextual orthodoxy, which embraces the different ways people understand
God, within the framework of orthodox Christianity."
He went on: "We need the Lord to show us the way. But
the way we are going now is the blind leading the blind ... The enemy is
not them, it is us."
And he concluded by saying that racism is the
"mega-idolatry" of America, and "if we evangelicals continue to model for
the world our racism, we have no claim to the name 'evangelical.' "
