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1 Chapter 1 Introduction Samuel Hurh immigrated to the United States in 1973 at the age of six. His family settled in a quiet southern Californian suburb, where he rarely saw other Koreans aside from those he met every Sunday at the nearby Korean immigrant church where he and his family worshiped. At the church, Samuel was exposed weekly to his Korean culture; it was where he regularly heard the Korean language, enjoyed home-cooked Korean food, and adhered to numerous cultural norms such as deferentially bowing and showing respect to his elders. In his teenage years, however, the church became an increasingly uncomfortable and oppressive place for Samuel, who was trying desperately to disassociate from his Korean identity so that he could “fit in” with his mainstream white American friends. Much to his parent’s dismay, Samuel, at the age of fifteen, left the Korean immigrant church to attend a large, predominantly white Protestant church where he subsequently accepted Christ into his life, was baptized into the faith, and grew in his spiritual walk.Although he shared a common faith with others in the church, there was a continual nagging sense that he did not fully belong because of his racial status.As a result, he left the white church to return to a Korean immigrant church to serve as its youth minister.Assimilating back into the Korean immigrant church required a significant amount of resocialization for Samuel, who once again had to converse in the Korean language and conform to Korean cultural expectations. After several years of serving in the immigrant church, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the church’s leadership paradigm, which he felt was overly hierarchical and dictatorial. He resented the fact that he was viewed by the senior pastor as merely a worker at the very bottom of the chain of command. Hence Samuel left the immigrant church for the second time and accepted an internship at 2 A F a i t h o f O u r O w n a large white church in Fullerton, where he was ordained and licensed for full-time ministry. It was a wonderful place for Samuel to grow as a spiritual leader, and for the first time in his life, he was personally mentored by seasoned ministers who cared more about him as a person than about his level of productivity. Despite the many growth opportunities at the church, Samuel was uncomfortable with the reality that there was an invisible cultural barrier between him and the white pastors at the church. In short, he felt very Korean there. Although no one had ever implied or explicitly suggested that he was an outsider, his cultural upbringing would bleed through in everyday interactions, reminding him and others of his outsider status. So Samuel left the church in Fullerton and accepted a position to lead the English ministry at a large Korean immigrant church in Washington, D.C. After spending seven years inWashington and experiencing tensions similar to those that he encountered at previous first-generation Korean churches, he left the immigrant church for the third and final time and returned to the white church in Fullerton. Samuel served there for several years as the pastor of evangelism and outreach. After much discussion with the leaders of the church, who felt that he was best suited to be a church planter, Samuel was commissioned to start his own church in Orange County. Not feeling comfortable at either immigrant Korean churches or white mainstream churches, and bouncing back and forth between the two, Samuel tried unsuccessfully for many years to find a church that he could call home. Out of that sense of discomfort and spiritual homelessness, Samuel started his own independent church to reach out to others like him who exist on the margins of multiple cultures. Samuel’s story reflects the experiences of many second-generation Korean American pastors who have opted to leave the churches of their immigrant parents and, instead of joining mainstream white churches, have established their own independent churches where they are creatively fashioning a faith of their own. This book investigates the development and growth of secondgeneration churches in the Los Angeles area, where the largest population of Koreans in America resides. Second-generation Korean Americans , with an unparalleled entrepreneurial fervor, are developing new churches in major cities throughout the United States that aim to shape the future of American Christianity. In Los Angeles alone, over fiftysix new churches have...

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