Welcoming, Hip-Hop Dancing, and the Message Bible: The Onnuri Korean Church on 68th Street

In Which I Do Some Networking
When I decided to investigate New York religious communities, I thought my friend Mark might have some good leads. Mark went to college with me, and his work now runs parallel to mine in some interesting ways. A fearsomely talented, Alabama-born rock guitarist of Korean heritage. Mark now works for a non-profit serving the sizeable community of Korean immigrants in Flushing, Queens. Mark’s organization is a sort of one-stop-shop for immigrants - it connects them to English classes, jobs, health organizations, and the like. Last year I went to Flushing for the Chinese New Year celebration in Flushing and was astonished by the number of parade floats belonging to local non-profits. This struck me as a strong sign of community health.

The reason I thought Mark might know something about religious communities is that nonprofits in Korean Queens often have strong ties to the local churches - not because the organizations themselves are religious, but simply because Korean churches play such a central role in Koreans' daily lives. Korean immigrants are busy, insular and exhausted. Aside from their homes and businesses, the only place many of them go is church. Thus, all information relevant to the community – public health, politics – gets a tremendous boost if it is linked to the church, and the pastors of these churches wield significant local political power. Mark, who is well-educated, nice-looking, and personable, has been working in this community for only a year, and he has already been approached about eventually running for public office in Flushing. (A local paper gave him a front-page article last month, headlined something like “Smart Young Korean-American Comes Back to Help Community.”) However, to do so, he would have to become a presence at one of the local churches, which are overwhelmingly Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian. As Mark is a practicing Catholic, this might take some finesse.

Mark himself attends a Catholic church in the East Village, but many of his friends from college and from work attend Korean churches in the New York area. When I asked him if he had any friends who would let me tag along, he not only volunteered to come with me, but found a friend, Christina, who attended a church with an English-language service. Clearly, this made my reporting job a lot easier.

The Onnuri Church
The church I attended this morning - www.in2church.org - is a year-old branch of the 19-year-old Onnuri Church, a Korean (as opposed to Korean-American) Presbyterian church. It has run a Korean-language service since its inception, but just began an English-language service a month ago, in an effort to attract a larger student population. In fact, its congregation is primarily made up of students and young New York professionals - quite different than the Flushing crowd.

This church is currently holding services in York Prep, a private school on a quiet residential street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Oddly enough, York Prep itself is housed within a Jewish synagogue. Thus, we walked into the building under a stone façade reading “Jewish Institute of Religion,” descended into a basement gymnasium decorated with banners celebrating the achievement of York Prep’s sports teams, and settled in for an English language Korean Presbyterian worship service. The churchgoers, doing their best to improve the ambience, had covered the floor with blue tarps and had decorated their temporary stage with tall banners with quotes from Corinthians and pictures of clasped hands and blue skies.

An entirely separate Korean church was winding up a worship service when we arrived. (“They always run late,” a young deacon informed us apologetically as we waited in the upstairs room.) As the participants filtered out, we went in and took our seats. In the back corner of the room a rock band warmed up.

We were the first people in the room, but over the hour-long service, others kept trickling in, and we were at about 50 by the time the service wrapped up. It was an astonishingly young group, considering it was 10 AM on a Sunday; most attendees were singles in their early 20s. There were at least two women for every man (Jewish worship communies are similar in this respect). As far as I could tell, everyone in the room was ethnically Korean.

An older man in a suit said a brief blessing and then the rock band cranked it up. We all stood up and clapped along. The energy, considering it was 10 AM, was truly outstanding. As they played, a projector threw the lyrics of the rock hymns(?) onto a big screen with a background of sun coming out from behind the cloud so we could follow along.

The rock band's set was followed by a six-person, mixed-gender troupe of hip-hop dancers (“His Groove,”) which danced to two Gospel/hip-hop numbers by performing artist Kirk Franklin.
(

“It's a mystery for someone to give their life just for me /
What you did on Calvary/
Makes me wan’ love you more”.)

I see on Wikipedia that Kirk Franklin was recently on Oprah discussing how he overcame his porn addiction ("Only recently Franklin had informed his wife, after first having proposed to her to share the pornography together, which she rejected"). Hmm. I should also point out that Kirk Franklin has just been nominated for two Grammy’s.

The Message Bible
Pastor Marc Choi, a young guy in a suit and pink tie, began his sermon, which focused on the reading of the week.

The language of his reading struck me before the content. It was from the “Message Bible,” which seeks “to capture the tone of the text and the original conversational feel of the Greek, in contemporary English.” There are versions of the Message Bible in all different languages – it simplifies and paraphrases the text for contemporary audiences, so that they can focus on the message rather than puzzling through the words. This would horrify the shit out of a Jewish audience – the core of Jewish practice is the study of the original Biblical texts – but I can see how it would make sense for communities of immigrants, or maybe the younger crowd. Pastor Marc encouraged everyone to go on Amazon.com and invest in a copy of the Message Bible. Below, find the text of our parable for the week, from Matthew. (For a comparison excerpt in King Jamesian, you can go here:

14-18"It's also like a man going off on an extended trip. He called his servants together and delegated responsibilities. To one he gave five thousand dollars, to another two thousand, to a third one thousand, depending on their abilities. Then he left. Right off, the first servant went to work and doubled his master's investment. The second did the same. But the man with the single thousand dug a hole and carefully buried his master's money.

19-21"After a long absence, the master of those three servants came back and settled up with them. The one given five thousand dollars showed him how he had doubled his investment. His master commended him: 'Good work! You did your job well. From now on be my partner.'

22-23"The servant with the two thousand showed how he also had doubled his master's investment. His master commended him: 'Good work! You did your job well. From now on be my partner.'

24-25"The servant given one thousand said, 'Master, I know you have high standards and hate careless ways, that you demand the best and make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you, so I found a good hiding place and secured your money. Here it is, safe and sound down to the last cent.'

26-27"The master was furious. 'That's a terrible way to live! It's criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest.

28-30"'Take the thousand and give it to the one who risked the most. And get rid of this "play-it-safe" who won't go out on a limb. Throw him out into utter darkness.'

This struck me as a little harsh on the unfortunate thousand-dollar-servant, who really did seem like a nice guy – but on the other hand, this gives a lot more sympathetic portrait of the bankers/moneylenders than one usually finds in New Testament stories. (A coincidence that Pastor Marc chose this text to preach to an ethnic community with a strong entrepreneurial presence in New York? I don’t know.)

Next, Pastor Marc did a little stand-up act about his wife and two daughters going to the mall to get their ears pierced together, and made fun of his five-year-old-daughter, who volunteered to go first, then decided that one piercing would do her just fine. (“I told her I couldn’t let her go to school with just one ear done. They’d think her daddy didn’t have enough money to pay for both!”) This girl is going to kill him once she’s old enough to understand he’s preaching about her. Anyway, Pastor Marc then analogized being a Christian to being a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer, all of which he viewed as extremely difficult professions. (“Girls? How many of you want to marry a guy who’s a farmer. I don’t want to be a farmer. No, I don’t want to be a soldier either. I like it fine right here in New York.”) He exhorted his young flock to work hard at being Christians and at being professionals, and to serve as examples in their work places. (“That’s very Korean,” Christina told me afterward).

Wrapping Up
Next was “Offering,” which, when I asked another of Mark’s friends to explain to me beforehand, she just gave me a blank look and said, “You know, the offering.” Okay, so it turns out that “Offering” is when they collect donations – they passed around a red velvet bag and we all put in a dollar. During the Offering, this friend got up and sang. She is a classical voice student at the nearby New School, from which this Onnuri church draws many of its flock. She sang a Psalm, in Korean, while the psalm’s text, in both English and Korean, was projected on the slide projector.

Afterwards, Pastor Marc made the announcements. Finally, something I was completely comfortable with: it was just like in my Friday night Shabbat services at home, where everyone starts to shuffle their feet and pick up their papers, getting ready to jet, and the preacher’s voice takes on this slight edge as he tries to get through all the announcements before everyone runs for the door. However, unlike in my own Friday night services, I was actually paying attention. So I can tell you that the hip-hop dance team was recruiting new members. Pastor Marc is forming an “intercessory prayer team” to meet at 9:00 every Sunday morning, to pray specifically on behalf of us 10:10 AM worshipers. Furthermore, the Onnuri church is running a “40 days of worship” series of morning prayer services at its offices in New Jersey. It’s sort of a New Year’s thing so it goes until early Feb. They run a bus every day from New York City to New Jersey at 5:30 AM, and apparently, people really go. Yikes.

Then one more huge rock number, and it was over, but not before the pastor issued a special welcome to first-time visitors, asking them to stand up and be recognized. Someone gave us each a copy of the Onnuri monthly publication and a baggie with a couple of Now and Laters in it (religious subtext? Oh well, I already ate them), and then he asked us to come over for a few moments after the service for a greeting from the Welcome Committee. At the mention of the Welcome Committee, a young man in the corner sprung to his feet and raised a gigantic banner saying “WELCOME” over his head. The earnest young Welcome Committee didn’t know quite what to do with itself – we all went around the circle and said our names, our ages, and where we lived. There were about seven of us, all between 19 and 27. Half students, half working people. The Welcome Committee said a little prayer for us that we would find God and ideally that we would find God here with them as members of this church, and then they asked us to fill out a form.

On Prayer and Evangelism
I used to get kind of upset when people prayed over me, but I’m over it. It was certainly fair game this morning, given that we had just attended an entire worship service. But more than that, I’ve grown into my own skin. I"m not worried that anything's going to, you know, happen. Christianity is belief-based; if you believe in Christ, according to Christians, you’re in. Judaism is much harder to pick up and also harder to cast away. Most Orthodox Jews will accept converts to Judaism under extremely specific circumstances, but they often don’t accept that people convert out at all – they simply view them as Jews who have adopted some exasperatingly incorrect talking points. Christians will often identify Jews as those who don’t believe in Christ – but the truth is, we really just don’t think about him much, one way or the other. By this logic, you can’t really do much to us by praying over us. I remained a Jew. It was a very nice sentiment on their part. End of story.

Most Korean churches are strongly evangelistic. According to the New York Times, after the United States, South Korea has more missionaries abroad than any other country: 12,000 at any given time, in 160 countries. In fact, the main purpose of the 19-year-old Onnuri church is the training of missionaries. According to Pastor Marc, there are currently 614 missionaries abroad who belong to the Onnuri Church.

On Koreans and Jews
Christina explained to us that Koreans, even those who are practicing Buddhists, often attend Korean churches simply for the Korean network that they provide. Christina herself used to attend the interdenominational church in Times Square, but it “just didn’t feel right,” so she went back to worshiping with Koreans. We discussed the analogy to Jewish communities – the large and energetic subpopulation of Jews who are deeply committed to their Jewish identities but who are indifferent or even contemptuous for religious observance. They just like to hang out together.

Apparently we weren’t the first ones to think of this parallel – Mark just sent me an article from KoreanVoter.com that discussed the success of the Jewish community in achieving success in the broader American community while retaining its own identity.

The article, by Professor Pyung Gap Min, is called Korean Community at the Crossroad: What Can We Learn from the Jewish Community?

According to Professor Pyung Gap Min, “The Korean community in New York, as well as those in other cities, is currently experiencing an intergenerational transition….”

He contrasts the position of Korean immigrants, who are prevented by the language barrier from dispersing into the general labor market and who are thus highly dependent on their ethnic community, with the position of native-born Korean Americans, who “are greatly detached from the Korean community.” Professor Pyung Gap Min believes this is because native-born Koreans “have achieved social mobility largely based on their educational credentials and individual achievements,” and thus that they “do not feel the need for ethnic solidarity to protect common interests.”

“Moreover,” he writes, “since Protestantism is not a religion indigenous to Korea, Korean English congregations have eliminated much of Korean cultural traditions, with native-born Korean Protestants accepting Christian, rather than Korean, as their primary identity. Finally, native-born Korean Americans are very much detached from ethnic media because few of them can understand Korean-language ethnic media.”

He then contrasts this division among Koreans with the solidarity of American Jews [really? Solidarity? this is the only point at which I would quarrel with this article], writing that “Jewish Americans have been more successful than any other ethnic group in combining the adaptive assimilation with the ethnic retention.”

The rest of this article is so eloquent I'm just going to leave it in its own words:

“First, [Jewish Americans] put a great deal of emphasis on children’s education as the major channel for social mobility…However, Jewish Americans have also made great efforts to preserve their ethnic traditions and to help their members by establishing many Jewish organizations. …. Jewish Americans have had a huge advantage over Korean Americans in maintaining ethnic traditions and ethnic identity through their religion because Judaism is their ethnic religion. The Korean community in the New York-New Jersey area with about 200,000 Korean Americans has more than 1,000 ethnic organizations, far more ethnic organizations than the Jewish community in the area with about 2 million Jews. But almost all these Korean organizations are Protestant churches (about 600) and friendship associations based on pre-migration ties, such as alumni and district associations, with social service and empowerment agencies comprising a tiny fraction of the organizations.

“Moreover, Jewish Americans have made great efforts to protect their civil rights and to empower their community by establishing a number of civil rights and political organizations.... An important lesson we can learn from the Jewish community is that we need more and stronger social service and empowerment organizations in the Korean community to provide social services for different segments of the Korean American population, protect Korean Americans’ civil rights, and enhance Korean-American political power.”

Thank you, Christina, for being such a friendly and helpful guide. I learned so much today and I appreciate your time and the generosity and Godliness of your community.

Very best,
Hannah

Next week: The trendiest Jewish prayer community in Manhattan?