This volume interweaves contributions from a group of scholars brought together for the 2022 Korean Studies Center Symposium at Fuller Theological Seminary. The collection provides a forum for scholars of Korean American Protestant churches to address key challenges concerning the sociocultural and theological formation of identity and mission as these churches continue to navigate their place in society in relation to others, including Korean churches in South Korea, mainline churches in the US, other ethnic churches, and multiethnic churches. The chapters address the following issues: who the Korean American churches are; God's vision for the Korean American churches; how to interpret Korean Americans' journey in immigrant church history; how heritage sustained them and will keep them; what the immigrant church should know in this post-pandemic time; and the hopes of the next generation.

This scholarly examination specifically focuses on Korean-American identity, particularly in regards to Korean-American youth, after 9/11. The text represents an important contribution to Korean-American studies.

This book studies Korean American girls between thirteen and nineteen and their formation with regard to self, gender, and God in the context of Korean American protestant congregational life. It develops a hybrid methodology of de-colonial aims and indigenous research methods, aiming to facilitate transformative life in faith communities.

The voices of second-generation Korean Americans echo throughout the pages of this book, which is a sensitive exploration of their struggles with minority, marginality, cultural ambiguity, and negative perceptions. Born in the United States, they are still viewed as foreigners because of their Korean appearance. Raised in American society, they are still tied to the cultural expectations of their Korean immigrant parents. While straddling two cultures, these individuals search for understanding and attempt to rewrite their identity in a new way. Through autobiographical reconstruction and identity transformation, they form a unique identity of their own—a Korean American identity. This book follows a group of second-generation Korean American Christians in the English-speaking ministry of a large suburban Korean church. It examines their conflicts with the conservative Korean-speaking ministry ruling the church and their quest to achieve independence and ultimately become a multicultural church.

This book, People of Faith, People of Jeong (Qing), seeks to reveal and understand the current state and the future prospective of Asian Canadian immigrant churches (ACIC), including Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean churches. Starting with a brief chronicle of ACIC history, this book shares the journeys and the stories of current members of lay and clergy from various ACIC. The chapters attempt to explain the influence and the impact that jeong and faith have on these churches, to envisage the future of ACIC, and to draw relevant implications for the betterment of these churches going into the future. This book reflects the real voices and sentiments of the first- and the second-generation members of these ethnic Asian immigrant churches in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It is original, authentic, comprehensive, and inclusive in its perspectives--the first book of its kind on Asian immigrant churches in Canada. The book will serve as an inspiration and a practical guide for immigrant churches in cross-cultural and cross-generational transitions. It offers laypeople, church leaders, and clergies a critical reference as they navigate through the future of churches in North America and beyond.

Megachurches are of relatively recent vintage. Their numerical strength invests them with social and financial power. To whom, if anyone, however, are megachurches accountable? What role do they play as innovators in missions? How have their enormous influence and financial strength been harnessed? What lessons can be learned? What course corrections ought to be made? Over the course of a week, the third meeting of the Korean Global Mission Leadership Forum (KGMLF), held in Korea in 2015, addressed these and related questions. Combining the insights of a rich mix of Korean and international megachurch leaders and scholars, Megachurch Accountability in Missions: Korean and Global Case Studies offers analysis, critique, and positive recommendations for future megachurch engagement in mission.

Marginality proposes a framework that justifies and undergirds development of contextual theologies without becoming itself dominating. Jung Young Lee aims to address the dilemmas of contextual theology, not by moving one or another group from the margin to the center, but by redefining marginality itself as central.

Asians make up the largest and most dispersed peoples of the world, and Christians make up a sizable proportion of this demographic. Asian Christians are more likely to emigrate, and many have continued to embrace Christian faith at their diasporic places of settlement. They are quick to establish distinctively Asian churches all over the world and infuse diversity, revival, and missionary consciousness into their adopted communities. They preserve the ties and cultures of their ancestral homelands while assimilating and adapting into the new setting. They have become a recognizable force in the transformation and advancement of Christianity itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The dozen essays in this volume are written by leading scholars of Asian backgrounds situated in various diasporic locations. The authors trace the contours of their dispersion and highlight diverse missiological themes, including the scattering (diaspora) and the gathering (ekklesia) of Asian Christians around the world. This volume traces the origins and destinations of major Asian migration and diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives and geographical locations. It is pan-Asian in scope and multidisciplinary in nature. It also provides the latest data and infographics on Asian diasporas worldwide.

In this book Sunggu Yang proposes five socio-ecclesial codes as unique faith fundamentals of Korean American Christianity. Drawing from rigorous research and years of ecclesial experience, Yang names the codes as follows: the Wilderness Pilgrimage code, the Diasporic Mission Code, the Confucian Egalitarian code, the Buddhist Shamanistic code, and the Pentecostal Liberation code. These five codes, he asserts, help Korean Americans sustain their lives, culture, faith, and evangelical mission as aliens or “pilgrims” in the American “wilderness.” Yang outlines how his five proposed codes serve as liberative and prophetic mechanisms of faith through which Korean Americans can contribute to racial harmony and cultural diversity in North America. In this sense, Korean American Christianity—its theology and spirituality—works not only on behalf of Korean Americans, but also for the sake of all Americans. Yang shows how the Korean American pulpit is the locus where these five codes appear most vividly.

The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history. Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research. Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.