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."

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