David Park, a native of Korea and pastor of First Korean Baptist Church, Enterprise, stepped into the elected leadership role of a prestigious group that represents Korean Southern Baptists in America.
He was elected president of the Council of Korean Southern Baptist Churches in North America, a national organization representing 700 Korean Baptist churches in America.
The honor came during the council’s 22nd annual convention held in Washington, D.C., July 1–4.
Park became the only top-level officer from Alabama in the organization.
Park said Korean Baptists remain strong in America today, but that Korean churches are not as purely Korean as they once were, due to second-generation Koreans. “The second generation uses English — English worship, English Bible study — and English in the Southern Baptist Convention, and we support that,” he said.
“The future after 10 years, maybe 20 years, [I’ll be a] Korean old man,” Park said, pointing vigorously to himself.
“The second generation may say, ‘Get away, get away,’” he said. “So we study a new paradigm — how can we do better, make better?”
Unlike Park and others who were born in Korea, American-born Koreans are often more comfortable with the English language and this carries into their worship experiences in church.
According to Richard Alford, language missions director in the associational and cooperative missions office of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, Park is doing an outstanding job addressing the multicultural climate of his congregation.
“If a church is not sensitive to that, they will begin to lose the kids and teenagers who are in our churches — that becomes a dynamic that most churches deal with, not just Koreans. [Park] has done a great job of that,” Alford said.
“He has the largest [Korean] congregation in the state so that affords a greater opportunity to do that.” The youth minister at Park’s church is Caucasian, Alford noted.
Park has reached the heights of education, earning his doctor of ministry from the International College in the graduate school of theology in 1986.
He has two master of divinity degrees, one from Luther Rice Seminary in Lithonia, Ga., in 1984 and the other from the Korean Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1974.
Some 120 years ago, a Presbyterian missionary brought Jesus to Park’s grandfather in Korea. The message of Christianity came to Park’s father and then to him.
Baptized when he was 17 years old, Park grew up as a Baptist in North Korea. He moved with his family to South Korea when he was 10.
Before being a Baptist pastor in America, he was a pastor in Korea for 16 years.
Park’s church in Enterprise — which is a member of the Coffee Baptist Association — will celebrate 22 years of existence in February 2003.
The church driveway is within 50–75 feet of the Enterprise gate of the U.S. Army base, Fort Rucker. This makes it one of several Baptist churches along Fort Rucker Boulevard, a highly commercialized stretch of about five miles leading to the church and the Army base.
Enterprise is in the Wiregrass region of Alabama, which salutes the cotton crop pest known as the boll weevil. An impressive statue of an unknown lady holding the pest above her head dominates a downtown intersection.
The community’s collective hat-tip to the weevil comes because its attack on the cotton crops many years ago forced the region to diversify its agriculture, creating greater prosperity.
Agriculture joins retail, manufacturing and the military as the main economic components with which the area’s Korean population chooses to identify.
Park said his church is poised to provide evangelism and to witness to Korean newcomers to the Enterprise area.
City and county leaders are seeking to bring more industry into the area, which Park believes will attract more Koreans and people of other nationalities.
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