{"id":1193,"date":"2012-09-03T19:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T19:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/what-kind-of-missionary-will-i-be\/"},"modified":"2012-09-03T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-03T19:08:00","slug":"what-kind-of-missionary-will-i-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/what-kind-of-missionary-will-i-be\/","title":{"rendered":"What Kind of Missionary Will I Be?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had a hard time deciding what to blog about for this entry. I could write on what I learned about the history of Christianity in Korea (did you know Korean Christianity is only about 120 years old?), or current issues (decline in\u00a0membership) facing the Korean church. All of these topics would\u00a0merit\u00a0a post to themselves, but instead I’m going to focus on an\u00a0experience\u00a0I had outside the classroom that was informed by a week of conversations and learning inside the classroom.<\/span><\/p>\n

The history of Christian missions is a mixed bag at best. Missionaries often brought their own ‘Christian culture’ and supplanted or outright squashed indigenous ways of understanding and being Christian (check out Stephen Neil’s,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>History of Christian Mission<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>for a great primer). I’m one of those who would love to do away with the term ‘missionary’ because of all the pejorative\u00a0associations with the word. However, in Korea they\u00a0love the\u00a0missionaries\u00a0who\u00a0dedicated\u00a0their\u00a0lives to ensure that the Gospel was brought to the Korean Peninsula.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inside the classroom, that love was evident again and again. They talked about how the missionaries left their homes and brought the Gospel to Korea. Because of their great sacrifices, Koreans want to \u2018pay back\u2019 what was given to them by sending out their own missionaries to places in need of the Gospel. This is driven home by the fact that Korea sends out more missionaries per capita than any other country in the world. Wow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Outside the classroom, this love was most evident then when we\u00a0visited\u00a0the\u00a0<\/span>Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary\u00a0Cemetery<\/span><\/a>. There they tell stories of saintly missionaries giving\u00a0their\u00a0lives, and the lives of\u00a0their\u00a0family, to translate the Bible, to open schools, to heal the sick, and to tell the story of Christ’s love.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the first time in a long while, my cynical self was overcome with gratitude for missionaries who gave their lives in Korea for the Gospel. No, they weren’t perfect, and yes, there were\u00a0absolutely some great Koreans who shared the Gospel along side them, but these foreign missionaries made a difference for the Gospel in Korea.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u00a0cemetery\u00a0experience reminded me that even with all the negative associations with the word ‘missionary,\u2019 we as followers of Jesus are missionaries, be it at work, the grocery store, or in Korea. We have to daily decide whether we’ll be good missionaries who incarnate the Gospel, or bad\u00a0missionaries\u00a0who incarnate our own sick culture.\u00a0Unfortunately, I have a\u00a0tendency\u00a0to be a\u00a0purveyor\u00a0and\u00a0champion\u00a0of our sick culture and not the Good News that ‘Jesus is Lord’. That decision makes me just as questionable as those missionaries I have doubts about. The later allows me to seek my own needs and desires whereas the former requires me to die to my needs, my desires, and to sometimes, as in the case of these Korean missionaries, die in the most physical sense of the word. The choice is mine to make daily, and I’m grateful those who died in Korea have legacies that beg me to ask the question, ‘What kind of missionary will I be?’<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had a hard time deciding what to blog about for this entry. I could write on what I learned about the history of Christianity in Korea (did you know Korean Christianity is only about 120 years old?), or current issues (decline in\u00a0membership) facing the Korean church. All of these topics would\u00a0merit\u00a0a post to themselves, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,448],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-seouladvance","cohort-lgp3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}