Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 8: The Korean Congregation

Posted October 6, 2006 by James E. Nelson

Ethnic Koreans in Alaska? It’s a military thing. In fact there are significant Korean populations near every Army and Air Force base in Alaska. those young military boys do a tour of duty in Korea and fall in love. They do a tour in Alaska and fall in love all over again. The first time it’s with a Korean woman. The second time it’s with the land. Anchorage, Fairbanks, North Pole and Delta Junction (all military base communities) are full of retired military people who married Korean women. And those Korean women brought their Christian faith and Presbyterian sensibilities with them.

In Delta it was a small church community of fifteen or sixteen women and a smattering of men, depending on the personnel rotation at Ft. Greeley. But they took church seriously. They tithed, they worked hard, and they had an almost full-time pastor who had come from Korea and had been educated here in the United States.

American Presbyterians are serious about getting structure right and that group of Koreans couldn’t put forth enough elders to form an acceptable Presbyterian session (the church governing body). In the two years prior to my coming and the first year of my time in Delta a plan was forged that allowed the Korean congregation the autonomy they desired and yet the connection to the Presbyterian Church they needed for the sake of effective pastoral ministry. The “Anglos” (that’s what we called the English speaking congregation) and Koreans worshiped separately in English and Korean respectively, but we were officially a single congregation. Our session was made up of nine members: six Anglos and three Koreans. The Korean pastor was called as an Associate Pastor of the congregation. Congregational meetings were long affairs because all the business had to be translated into both English and Korean so that everyone could understand what was going on. Major pauses in meetings were the norm because the Koreans did business by consensus, not by majority. Caucus time had to be provided before any major vote so the Koreans could come to consensus and the Anglos could get another cup of coffee and a nicotine fix, for those who smoked.

Even though we were a single congregation in the eyes of the denomination, the reality of life together was rather different than the official structure. On the one hand, the Koreans seemed to have a fundamental distrust of the Anglo church. We Anglos didn’t tithe, we didn’t keep the Sabbath, we smoked, in fact we replaced worship with hunting and fishing as often as not on summer Sundays. We only went to church once a week, rather than the three services the Koreans held. We haunted locations (such as bars and liquor stores) that the Koreans would not think of going into.

On the other hand, the Anglos had a fundamental distrust of the Koreans. The Korean community, given its military connections, was not viewed as a stable community. The Korean community was making financial transactions, entering into contracts, considering buying property, independently of the Anglo community. The Anglos were sure the Korean community was going to dissolve and leave the Anglos stuck with the bill.

Then there was this whole issue of consensus versus majority rule, “shame” versus “right to know,” and the clash of cultural values. Communication was rarely clear because of the variety of cultural barriers that existed. This lack of communication only exacerbated the differences delineated above. In official documents we celebrated our life together, this union of cultures in a single congregation. In reality we were more often like two ships passing in the night: We could see the other on our radar screens and certainly feel the wakes left by the other body, but it was little more than that.

I suppose it was the biggest joy and biggest frustration of my ministry in Delta. We were working at taking seriously Paul’s utterly audacious words in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Unfortunately there were still Anglos and Koreans in Delta Junction. Unity, in any palpable sense, remained elusive.

The Presbytery, in all its wisdom, ordered Rev. Johnsong Lee (the Korean pastor) and me to have weekly Bible studies so that we would become more united. Those were tension filled hours. Johnsong lectured and scolded me as to the meaning of those texts. Scandalized by his often bizarre interpretations (he sometimes made the Dispensationalists seem tame and unimaginative!), I argued back. Half of what we said to each other was left hanging in the air like so much morning fog because he could barely speak English and I could not speak a lick of Korean. No doubt one of the great failures of that great cross-cultural experiment was the reality that the two pastors couldn’t even study scripture and pray together without danger of a coronary. And yet when everything was said and done, lives were changed and congregations were transformed ever so slightly through the every day struggles of two very different groups of people.

The Holy Spirit is wonderful, powerful, and mysterious in his work, but given the hardness of the human heart and the distractions of Alaska’s bounty, I often wonder how much the Holy Spirit was able to accomplish. Korean food such as Kim Chee, Chop Chey, and Burlgoki, on the other hand, were probably the glue that held these two struggling Christian communities together. And maybe, given the hardness of our hearts, that is where the Holy Spirit chose to dwell—in all that indescribably marvelous Korean food for which we all set aside our differences once a month so that we could come from East and West and sit at Table, far short of the Kingdom of God, but at least in feeble demonstration of the community that we mostly desired for the Delta Presbyterians.

Korean food is one of the true blessings of the Delta church. The mix of spices and flavors is magical for those of us not accustomed to their food. The Koreans hosted an annual fund raising dinner in connection with the local Festival of Lights. For four hours every year they dished up food and cleared tables while more people than one ever thought lived in Delta Junction crowded the doors to get this annual treat.

The Presbyterians got to eat it once a month at our church fellowship dinners. And wonderfully eclectic dinners they were. Someone always brought salmon. Often there was halibut. Frequently there was other wild meat, mostly moose, occasionally buffalo, and once we were even treated to mountain sheep. For those not quite that adventurous there was always some sort of macaroni casserole and Jello. (We invited the Lutherans, after all, and that seems to be what Lutherans eat.) I never did figure out the ins and outs of identifying Korean food. Some wouldn’t eat it at all because of the variety of ingredients—wild mushrooms, seaweed, tiny, salty, and flavor-packed fishes of various sorts. I found it consistently wonderful. They could even turn tofu—possibly the most boring food in the world—into a taste sensation.

Of course, American food was as mysterious to many of the Koreans as Korean food was to us. We occasionally had picnics in the front yard with Rev. Lee and his family. (Such activities largely depended on the mosquitoes and the wind.) One day Mrs. Lee proudly presented an exotic experimental dessert that she wanted us to try. She was bursting with pride as she offered her strange, never-before-tried-in-her-kitchen experiment: sugar cookies. And she did a good job., although the process was as foreign to her as making kim chee was to us. Chris had once been to their house on pizza night. They tried their best to be American, so they had pizza. Being thoroughly Korean, it was laced with kim chee. But the sugar cookies were a grand and successful experiment in cooking foreign food.

Sugar cookies: That was the heart of the success we did have in bridging East and West to the church in Delta Junction. What the Anglos desired was to be able to create a great Korean feast. What the Koreans desired was to be able to create a great American feast. What the churches mostly desired was some grand feast of kingdom unity. Such visions of instantaneous success were failures. But when we stuck with sugar cookies, everything turned out fine.