“No.”
He briskly handed me back my passport, giving me a stern look of disgust. Then slowly and angrily punctuated each word:
“You. Should. Learn.”
As I walked away from the gate, I said to myself: “Welcome to Korea, Dave.”
Man, I’m not even accepted in my own country of birth.
I had expected to be fully embraced as a native Korean son coming home. This sort of rejection hurt.
Like so many others I had met in my life, this man was treating me like an outsider. Only later in life did I understand the uncertain feelings Koreans had about second-generation Asians, especially from America. Perhaps they had legitimate reasons to be dismissive of me. As a second-generation Korean American, I was considered a person of privilege. I should have become proficient in both English and Hangul/Korean. I was expected to go the extra mile because I had been given so much as an American. People like the immigration officer didn’t know of my own insecurities and struggles of identity in America. They had remained in Korea and survived the great reconstruction of the homeland after the Korean War, one of the fastest economic, societal, and spiritual transformations of a nation in history. They’d struggled, too. I should have felt some of that pain, but at the time, I just saw a crotchety old Korean immigration officer. In reality, he probably just wished I cared enough to at least learn the mother tongue. Of course, modern-day Korea is much different toward those of us lost sons and daughters.
Rebecca and I married after I graduated from Bob Jones University. Rebecca had finished the year before and had completed a year of teaching English at a private school in Maryland. We were in our early twenties. We had been raised in a purity culture, which, while well intended, had significant flaws. The emphasis was on what not to do with potential partners, rather than what to do to have healthy relationships. I thought I was mature and ready for marriage, but really, my wife married an emotional child. I had a lack of self-awareness when it came to my own personal challenges. In fact, later, I blamed her for some of our issues: “You changed me. I wasn’t this way before we got married. It’s you and not me.” Classic blame-shifting rebuttals of the ignorant and immature.
I had this hubris, because of my religious experience, position, and urgency to do God’s work. But because you can lead in public doesn’t mean you’re mature in private. I created personal illusions based on external indicators more than the state of my heart.
The wounds of my past still lurked in the shadows of my soul, mostly unnoticed and under restraint. However, if I felt slighted, disrespected, or ignored, I would quickly react with anger. When I was young, I’d run away from these feelings by trying to restrain them or avoid thinking about them. As I got older, the feelings were harder to suppress.
Becca and I moved to the Mennonite and Amish farm country of Pennsylvania so I could start graduate school to obtain a master’s degree in theology. But I wasn’t going to be starting school right away. I had read in Jewish history that the Israeli soldier took a year off after getting married. That was a good enough reason for me not to go to grad school immediately. I wanted to spend time with my wife and do something other than study. After seventeen straight years of school, I figured it was time for a break. But what do you do with a bachelor’s degree in Bible and public speaking?
That year, I landed the job of head custodian at an elementary school. It wouldn’t be a job my parents would brag to their friends about, but frankly, it’s probably one of the best jobs I ever had because I had so much fun working with kids. In their eyes, I was cooler than all the other adults. I loved driving the large tractor to mow the grass. Kids would look out the windows at me like I was a superhero. To the kids, I was equal to the principal. Children didn’t care about titles or uniforms.
Before I got there, it had been hard for the kind elementary teachers to quiet the students. But I knew how to engage them after all those years spent working with elementary kids. In the middle of the large lunch room, bustling with the frenetic energy of kids eating lunches, I was able to quiet the kids in a couple seconds simply by raising my arm up and clenching my fist. This had always worked before. The children saw me raise my arm in the cafeteria and immediately started to quiet down, raising their arms too. It became a competition to see who could respond to me the quickest. Teachers were in awe. They didn’t know that by that time I had worked with kids for almost ten years, often hundreds of them at a time at camps or in classes. To them I was simply the blue-collar janitor, the antithesis of the Asian parents’ dream of a child, one who was most likely a disappointment to his family.
Admittedly, custodial work did bring its own set of challenges. I am a germaphobe, so wiping human fluids and other things off the floors was hard. I had to clean excrement, vomit, and who knows what else regularly off walls, desks, toilets, floors, windows, and carpets. But nothing was worse than noticing how I was invisible to some teachers. I’m pretty sure they thought I must not have graduated from college because I was cleaning toilets. They had no idea that I was a university graduate going to graduate school soon. I saw how people judge you by your uniform.
Being a custodian wasn’t what I had dreamed of doing when I was a kid in Maryland, but practically speaking, this custodial job was perfect for a student, so I kept it up even after I started grad school. I was allowed to study when I got my work done. Furthermore, it allowed me freedom to get acclimated to married life and to explore Pennsylvania, including the Mennonite and Amish cultures in the region. When work was done, it was done. I rarely had to think about the job after I left the campus.
Still finding my bearings after graduating from Bob Jones University, I attended a seminary known for its local church emphasis and practicality. It was not Bob Jones, but it was one small step removed. It was still a fundamentalist institution, but it felt a lot less rigid than Bob Jones. A couple of my close friends were also attending here, and learning was fun because of the people I had around me. Guys who would be friends for the rest of my life. There were four of us couples who did everything together. We were all newly married and recent graduates from Bob Jones University. The joy of this time came from our picnics, barbecues, and corn picking and husking parties. We would make creative videos and dream about the future. They were all white, and occasionally, someone said something insensitive about race, but I just laughed it off. I knew their intentions were innocent. We had built enough trust to give each other the benefit of any doubt.
School itself somehow seemed easy. Too easy. So I decided to leave and go to the graduate school where all the authors I was reading in books and commentaries were professors. I wanted to attend the renowned Dallas Theological Seminary, which offered a four-year master of theology program. I had never thought I would do more formal education, but I wanted to be prepared to be the best I could be in the pastorate.
Enrolling in Dallas Theological Seminary was considered a move away from my fundamentalist roots. In fact, my founding pastor, Dr. Simpson, who I grew up with in Arizona, wrote me a scathing letter when he found out I was going to DTS. He wrote: “I’m sorry that I taught you the things I did. You will curse the cause of fundamentalism. You have become a new evangelical [meaning I had compromised the truth I was taught as a fundamentalist Christian]. You are a liberal.”
He called me the “L” word. It was like being called a “heretic.” At the same time, Bob Jones University discovered I was going to DTS and wanted to get in on the fun of excommunicating me, so they sent me a letter letting me know I was kicked out of the Alumni Association. Interestingly, the letter was signed by the man who spoke at the camp in Telluride when I made a commitment to God. I felt sad for both these men, but I was convinced that there was a larger perspective of faith that I needed to explore. My time in seminary was some of the best years of my life as I gained confidence with spiritual matters and was humbled by how much I didn’t know.
When I’d finished graduate school, I was hired to be on the staff of an innovative Korean church in Ellicott City, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. It was led by a bilingual first-generation Korean pastor and professor, Dr. David Sang Bok Kim. Dr. Kim was educated, well spoken, and elegant in his manner. Gentle and intelligent, he was brilliant and artful in his ability to work with opposing opinions. I had heard many stories about Korean churches where it was not uncommon for leaders to get into shouting matches or fistfights as praise and worship music was playing in the background, but there was none of that here. Heated exchanges but no physical altercations yet.
After the Bob Jones interracial dating experience, I had expected that I would be welcomed wholeheartedly at this Korean church, but while I was being interviewed for the pastoral role, I learned that there were some who didn’t want me to pastor at their church because my wife was white. They thought we would be a negative role model for their children, since they wanted their children to marry Koreans. I was surprised to see how those who experience prejudice can unknowingly still perpetuate it.
The leadership of the church still decided to hire me. They would soon discover my wife was more Korean than I was! At the time, she was more sensitive and appreciative of Korean culture than I was. She felt more at home with Koreans than I did. She eagerly jumped into learning to speak Korean, became proficient in making Korean food, and ate all the Korean foods. She enjoyed wearing a hanbok, a traditional Korean clothing. Becca and I overturned some misconceptions about us, just probably not in the way they were expecting. To this day, there’s only one place outside of America that Rebecca says she would feel comfortable living—the nation of Korea. It’s now home for both of us.
As I began to settle into the Maryland church, it felt a little like we were living in Korea. I was embraced into a subculture that was new to me.
Living in Maryland, pastoring at the church—which to many Asians is their cultural and community social center, a home away from home—I felt genuinely happy. It was like I had hundreds of people like my mom all around me, all the time. I enjoyed it. And once the leaders who were concerned because of my American cultural personality and my white wife got to know me, they welcomed us with open arms. I saw how love could win over time.
The church was good to Becca and me. I was given a new car. It was one of the perks of being at this Korean megachurch. It was a Korean car. All the other pastors at the church had been given nice Toyotas and Buicks, but I was given a Hyundai. At the time, Hyundai was a new automaker and their quality was considered substandard. Breakdowns and mechanical failures were common. I wondered quietly why I was the only one out of our large pastoral staff to get a Hyundai. One day I mustered up the courage to ask some of my elder friends who were on the board.
“Why did you get me a Korean car when all the other pastors got American or Japanese cars?”
“Because we want to make you more Korean.”
I chuckled with them, but truthfully, I had been hoping for a Toyota. At that time, they were better cars!
The others on the pastoral team also treated me like a younger brother and took care of my family; they treated my three children (at the time) like their own children. Most of them. There were always a few I could tell who were still not happy that I didn’t act more Korean. But somehow in my heart I knew if I loved their children well, these uncertain and concerned feelings toward me would vanish.
The more I stepped into the cultural dynamic in the church between first- and second-generation Koreans, the more I realized I was neither. I wasn’t fully part of one culture or the other. I was living in a third culture. It wasn’t either/or; it was both/and. I’m not even 50 percent Korean and 50 percent American. I’m 100 percent Korean and 100 percent American. I’m 1 + 1 = 3.
The term “third culture” is credited to American sociologist Ruth Useem, who is known for coining the term from her studies of expatriates living in India in the 1950s. “Third culture” refers to those who have a mixed identity rooted in their parents’ culture of origin and the culture they themselves were raised in. While the term may have been created in the 1950s, it became popular in the 1990s, during the same time I started talking and writing about it. I had only read about the study, so I decided to apply it to myself and to my work. I concluded “third culture” was a term that could describe a growing group of globally minded citizens who knew how to adapt to any culture. While it may feel negative and debilitating at first, these third culture kids were gifted a superpower.
To me, being third culture was all about adapting. It was about having the mind-set and the will to love, learn, and serve in any culture, even in the midst of pain and discomfort.
The hard thing about being third culture is that initially you feel like you don’t have a home. There is always this uneasy tension of being in limbo, an in-between state. Yet this is a gift in the long run, because you are forced to adapt. In order to thrive, you learn to function in multiple cultures and contexts. It’s living in the AND. You live in the margins, yet know how to adapt into the middle of any cultural space.
I still had to learn about how third culture all worked, but I discovered that the foundation of third culture was rooted in the Scriptures that every church I knew based their vision on: love God and love your neighbor. At the time, the evangelical church was promoting church growth based on a homogeneous model—in other words, it focused on growing a church with people exactly like you. However, when I looked at Scripture, I saw that when Jesus was asked who one’s neighbor was, it was the exact opposite of this. It was someone not like you. When Jesus was asked who a neighbor was, He shared the story about a Jew who was rescued by someone that he hated—a Samaritan. A Samaritan was half-Jew and half-Gentile, despised by the Jews. Your neighbor, according to Jesus, is someone culturally different than you. Someone you might even naturally hate.
It’s not a big deal, Jesus seemed to be saying, if you love someone like you. What is miraculous and noteworthy about loving someone who loves the same things you do? The worthy ambition is when you can love someone who is not like you, someone you might even hate or have a tough time forgiving. Someone of a different culture, or someone you want to stay away from. The third culture person was made to love the outsider because they are an outsider. In fact, Jesus said if you can love the least of these, you’ve done it unto me. Jesus is the most alien among us. Our love for the outsider is like learning to love Jesus Himself.
This beautiful idea of loving the marginalized took residence in me. I knew in my soul that just because you were marginalized didn’t mean you had a marginal mind or marginal gifts. Movements start in the margins. This is where Jesus is. I hungered to be in this space with other outsiders, a third culture community. I wanted to create a haven for the misfits. A place even my mom could call home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN A Haven for Misfits
Newsong Church began in 1994 in our living room with a small group in Orange County, California. Most of the original crew was my family. I had never intended to start a church. When I was in graduate school, I told myself I would never start a new church. There were enough great churches to participate in. My plan was to take the safe path of being an associate leader, and then becoming a senior leader at one of these churches someday. Never to plant a community of faith from scratch.
But the conviction that this was the right thing to do had been growing in me as I had been seeing a generation of young Asian Americans and other people of color exit the church. Some respected Asian leaders were saying 97 percent of Asian Americans who had once gone to church were quietly exiting the church post-college. At the same time, I was seeing an ever-widening gap between the Jesus I was personally still learning about and the Jesus who had been taught to me. I was grateful for the positive gifts I’d received from many of the leaders who’d trained me, and for the ways they’d shown me the excitement of pursuing a life with God. However, I was still exploring, still trying to unravel the inconsistencies in what I had been taught. I felt an urgency and a passion to create a safe place for people who felt lost like me. I wanted to create a home for people who felt like they didn’t fit in church, a place where they would feel seen, loved, affirmed, and resourced to achieve their dreams. A place where questions were welcomed. A place where their pain could be shared and eventually turned into a superpower.
