About

Welcome to the blog of Jin S. Kim, along with the other pastors, interns and friends of Church of All Nations!  We are a local congregation committed to the ministry of reconciliation in our current North American and global context.  How we “do church” faithfully in this particular time and place is an ongoing discussion among our staff, interns and church members.  In a post-modern, post-ideological, post-denominational, multicultural age often marked by uprootedness and loss of meaning, how do we live and worship together in a way that testifies to the reconciling gospel of Jesus Christ?  In an individualistic culture that tends toward alienation and isolation, how do we lead God’s people to confess who they are, to experience healing in intimate community, and to be a witness to the liberating power of the Spirit?

Of particular importance to our congregation is pastoral formation and leadership development.  To that end, we have created an innovative residential training program for recent seminary graduates, equipping them to become “high risk, low anxiety” leaders (an oft-quoted mantra within our congregation).  This blog will serve as a clearinghouse for information related to our internship program, including their testimonies en via, ongoing reflections, and updates on their conferences and travels.  Journey with them as they share what they are learning in this diverse yet intimate congregation.

The story of South Africa’s journey from apartheid to a multicultural democracy has informed the spirit and ethos of Church of All Nations from our foundation, and continues to inform our struggle to be Christ’s beloved community.  As a congregation rooted in the Reformed tradition, we cannot ignore the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in creating apartheid South Africa, nor the light it shines on our own country’s racist history and the apartheid that continues to exist within the American church.  Because of this, the story of South Africa and the effort to adopt the Belhar Confession into the PCUSA’s Book of Confessions (which would be the first non-Western confession in PCUSA history) will figure prominently in the posts that follow.

Our focus on leadership development and our commitment to serve as a teaching congregation for young and emerging leaders is rooted in our diagnosis of the twenty-first century church: the fundamental problem is not a lack of models, management methods or techniques, but a lack of pastoral leadership that is daring, imaginative, prophetic, countercultural, yet peace-full — leaders who embody the character of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul’s “fruits of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22-26).  With this in mind, could it be that the decentering presently experienced by our historic mainline churches finding themselves on the brink is actually a gift and an opportunity for transformation?  How might we now, after the decline of the institutional church rooted in Christendom, learn to lead our congregations into an embodiment of both radical diversity and deep intimacy that counters the homogenizing and commoditizing impulses of empire?  What lessons can we learn from the past and from other cultures that will help us navigate our emerging post-colonial, post-Western reality?

One of our aims in constructing a congregation of many nations, cultures, languages, generations and denominational backgrounds, and then reflecting together theologically from within it, is to discover just that — a New Church Rising from the ruins of European colonialism, empire and white supremacy.  We invite you to join us on our search – so please, feel free to comment and dialogue with us in our posts!