Oikon members4/10/2023 Tim Keller was capturing the imagination and academic heartstrings of the Asian American community. So was the young and brash Neo-Reformed preacher Driscoll. Mark Driscoll and Rob Bell were YouTube sensations. I started exploring the bigger tent of the Christian faith. This was the beginning of what would be a long rabbit hole for me. This ecclesial and theological disorientation invited me to raise the question: What if praying in tongues and prophesying for a coming revival wasn’t the cutting edge of Christianity, but only one expression of it? I’ve come to see that disruptive pain is often what opens us up to new ways of seeing God and the church. My Christian worldview was deconstructing before my eyes. Finally leaving the church resulted in my reputation being tarnished. I developed a cynicism toward the prophetic ministry and the charismatic gifts. My spiritual heroes were at irreconcilable odds with one another. There was a major severing in the church. Then I experienced what most young, idealistic Christians undergo at some point in their lives - I saw and felt the pain of messy ecclesial relationships and power structures gone awry. It was the best of times.Ī Disorienting Pain, an Untethering Question And our small Pan Asian charismatic church plant, comprised of mostly broke college students, was going to be the means by which the Kingdom of God would arrive on earth, so long as we sang and prayed loud enough for the world to hear. ![]() I had found a theological ideology to make sense of my 16-year-old experience of the world. Leading worship and prayer meetings multiple times a week, I prayed in tongues, prophesied, interceded for revival, and sang for hours about the intimate love of Jesus.Īll was well. ![]() The remnant wave of John Wimber’s Vineyard movement had captured the imagination of a few Asian Americans in the San Gabriel Valley and I fully immersed myself into those waters. But I did not find a faith to call my own until I stumbled across Pan Asian expressions of Pentecostalism. Asian American Charismatic OrientationĪs I grew up in a Korean church, I remember taking in the spectacle of my parents’ piety in the form of early morning prayer, meeting with other Korean immigrant Christians each morning at 5 a.m. But in that complicated space of facetious racial humor meeting academic study of the Christian faith, I began a journey of discovering the beautiful complexity and vastness of the body of Christ. Up until then, my Christianity was devoid of racial and theological diversity. It was normal to make jokes about someone’s particular articles of clothing being fobby or to playfully say, “Man, you’re so Asian.”īut when I transplanted myself from Koreatown to rural North Carolina for a pastoral internship through Duke Divinity School, those same jokes about being Asian didn’t quite have the same tone, because, for the first time in my life, I was the only Asian in the room. It was normal that our youth pastor (whichever one was in rotation that year) would make references to fermented cabbage, Starcraft, and parents who associated our sense of identity with academic performance. It was normal that every year, members of my high school’s prom royalty were in the orchestra or went to SAT prep courses after school. ![]() Having grown up in the Southern California San Gabriel Valley, dispersing my time between a 60% Asian American high school and an immigrant church in Koreatown, Los Angeles, my perception of normal was not hyphenated with the word Asian. I didn’t know I was Asian until I was 26.Ī bubble is a funny thing.
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