Korean Baptist churches in America are founded to give Korean-speaking people the most culturally comfortable environment to worship God, incorporating the languages, customs and foods of the Asian people.
Korean churches in the United States are not new, evidenced by the 1956 founding of the first Korean Southern Baptist church in America — Korean Baptist Church of Washington, by pastor Won Yong Kang in Maryland.
But what is new is as Koreans raise their American-born children in the United States, the depth with which the Korean language proliferates Korean Baptist church life is changing. The need for English in Korean churches in America has become a hot topic, especially among younger generations of Koreans.
Jason Kim, multicultural evangelism associate with the North American Mission Board (NAMB), said, “The immigration wave of Koreans was highest in 1970s, and the church planning came with this wave of immigrants. Later, a new generation of young children who came with their parents and newborns in the U.S. began to rise in numbers in the Korean speaking churches. The English ministries were being started within the Korean churches to meet the need of ministering to their own children and youth.”
He said that now those children and youth have reached 40 years old or older and some of them have established English-speaking Asian churches, independent of the traditional first-generation Korean churches.
“If the current trend does not change by a dynamic increase in immigration, there will soon be more Korean-American and American-Korean youth than adults,” said Dan Moon, director of NAMB’s office of Korean ministry. “This younger generation does not have the rigid cultural ties to the old world that the older generation retains. Therefore, the new generation needs ministry on different sociological value levels.”
He said Koreans are making valuable contributions through their churches and are mature, dependable professionals in the communities where they live and work in a mixed environment of English and Korean.
Kim said there are three very real challenges in English ministry in the Korean church today, including “enormous shortages of English ministers,” to the growing demand for English, cultural differences causing conflicts between the first and second generations and deciding on a style of worship, with English ministries tending to have more contemporary styles.
“Across the nation in language missions we’ve been struggling with this for years,” said Richard Alford, director of language ministries at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. “Most of our language congregations are built around the language of the culture. But as they live here the second and third generations become more assimilated and a different culture group emerges.”
In some churches in the southeast, the numbers tell the story. “About 90 percent of our members are American families,” said Michael Kim, pastor of Pensacola Korean Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla.
At Pensacola, home to a U.S. Air Force base which is one of many venues where Korean populations exists across the nation, church members are largely not first generation Koreans. Rather they are a mix of Korean and American or purely Anglos married into Korean families; this presents unique challenges and opportunities to ministry.
“As pastors, we discuss how we can put the two together at such a level — that’s our responsibility,” Michael Kim said. “We try to come up with some ideas and exchange them.”
He met this summer at Enterprise with Korean pastors from Baptist churches in Alabama for fellowship, encouragement and worship.
Moon explained in a phone interview from California that he feels that separate services in Korean and English is a solution that many Asian churches may find.
“The Korean language church is intensely homogeneous and monolingual and the language itself causes an unavoidable condition for their worship experience. The average Korean church needs to have separate services,” Moon said.
Alford said that even with a decline in the use of the Korean language in Korean churches, the need for these and other language congregations in Alabama and the nation would continue to exist.
“The absence of the need for a particular language does not mean the absence of the need for association by common culture. It’s language-culture. Language is part of but not all of your culture,” he said.
In fact, NAMB’s Asian Church Planting Unit estimates that by 2005 there will be 1,000 Korean Southern Baptist churches in the United States.
Moon said that a new Korean Southern Baptist church begins each month in the United States, and 75 percent of Koreans in North America have a church affiliation of some kind, Baptist or otherwise. Of the more than 3,000 Korean-speaking Protestant churches in America, 750 are Southern Baptist, making it the largest group, he noted.
Korean Baptist pastors are keeping focused on the supreme importance of spreading the gospel and facilitating personal spiritual growth.
“We talk about how our church members reach God in their lives,” said Chun Ho Chi, pastor of the Korean Baptist Church in Huntsville.
“We try to make them to know themselves first, and the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ,” he said.
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