A Faith Of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches

2. Generational Tension within Korean Immigrant Churches

21 Chapter 2 Generational Tension within Korean Immigrant Churches At one church meeting, a deacon brought a gun and started waving it around threatening to shoot if he didn’t get his own way. Soon after, the church quickly divided into two bitterly opposing factions. The fight was over the use of funds in building a new structure. The whole culture of the church degenerated. The fighting got so ugly, that once an elder charged at me in the church parking lot and took me by the collar and called me all kinds of names. Within a month, the church went through a split with nearly half of the congregation leaving to start their own church. —Pastor Chang, minister of a second-generation church Korean immigrant churches have experienced more than their share of internal conflicts and tensions. Sadly, numerous reports are heard of bitter church splits within Korean congregations where long-simmering tensions boiled over into shoving matches and fist fights that brought in the police. In fact, several scholars have argued that the large number of Korean churches in this country has been due, in significant part, to the high rates of internal strife that have led to church splits (Shin and Park 1988). Dissatisfied with the heated political struggles within immigrant churches along with a host of other generational tensions, second-generation ministers have launched out in new directions, fashioning their own independent and improvisational models of ministry. As the second generation started coming of age, generational tensions and challenges began to emerge and occupy center stage within 22 A F a i t h o f O u r O w n immigrant churches. In the first half of this chapter, I document the myriad of generational conflicts that erupted within immigrant churches, particularly during the late eighties and early nineties. In the latter half of this chapter, I present the different solutions and ministry paradigms that were birthed from these generational schisms. The available literature indicates that generational clashes are common among many immigrant churches in the United States; what is unique to second-generation Korean Americans, however, is the manner in which they have attempted to resolve these conflicts (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000;Williams 1996;Yang 1999b). It is only within the Korean American community that one witnesses large numbers of the second generation leaving the immigrant church to develop entirely autonomous religious institutions apart from the immigrant context. In order to understand the causes of the generational conflicts within immigrant churches and the differing responses by the first and second generations, it is necessary to understand the traditional role of the ethnic church for the immigrant generation. The Traditional Functions of the Korean Immigrant Church Scholars have identified three distinct waves of Korean immigration to the United States.The first was in 1903–1905, and consisted primarily of laborers seeking work on the sugar plantations in Hawaii. Religion played an important role from the beginning, as recruiters for American companies called upon Protestant missionaries in Korea to persuade Koreans to immigrate to Hawaii to fill the need for plantation labor. Consequently, Protestant converts were among the first Koreans to travel to the United States, and approximately 40 percent of the first wave of Korean immigrants was composed of Protestant Christians (Yoo and Chung 2008).The churches functioned as quasi-governmental and cultural centers; pastors possessed the dual roles of community leaders and spiritual counselors. In contrast to the Japanese and Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, almost every Korean in the Hawaiian Islands eventually came to be identified with the Christian faith (Hurh 1998). The first wave of immigration ended with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, which made immigration from Asia illegal.AfterWorldWar II, a limited number Generational Tension 23 of students and professionals were permitted to enter the United States— about 6,000 between 1945 and 1965 (Hurh 1998). Students and their families were thus the most visible segment of this second wave within Korean American communities and religious institutions. In addition, during and after the devastation of the Korean War (1950–1953), large numbers of wives of American servicemen and KoreanWar orphans came to the United States.The third and largest wave of immigrants occurred after the passage of the 1965 immigration reform act, which removed restrictive and discriminatory measures that had been...