A Pastor’s Formation and On-going Journey

Growing up in a pastor’s family, I was called to ministry in several stages, but “the call” was definitive, loud and clear, during my junior year in college. I accepted – cries, tears, not good enough, the whole nine yards – and went directly to seminary without a detour. 

As I now reflect on three decades, I want to share the six formative stages in my ministry experience.  First, from 1990 to 1994, under my first mentor pastor, I learned the “art of sermon preparation.” Second, from 1994 to 2001, I learned how to lead congregation meetings, especially if there were any moments of tension. The pastor would laugh and say, let’s pray about this until we reach unity. Third, from 2001-2003/4, I learned to persevere through difficult times. I learned to foster suffering. Fourth, from 2003/4 to 2005, at the fourth largest Korean American Presbyterian church in New York, I learned the art of “losing.”  That is, in ministry, losing is winning. Egos have no place. In my fifth and most formative stage, from 2005 to 2015, the longest stretch, I learned to cultivate agape (love). As I was starting out as a third time senior pastor (an SBC church in Austin, Texas), I met a retiring priest of 40 years who said, “Pastor, love your sheep.” That was indeed my ethos and praxis. Recently the sixth stage, from 2015 to 2023, I have been practicing “self-emptying.” These six stages across three decades have been the building blocks of my autobiography as a pastor:

• Preparation is everything

• Laughter and prayer

• Enduring hardship

• Losing is winning

• Loving each person

• Self-emptying

Here, at Bethany EM Church, I am adding a seventh: “servanthood.” I want to explore and develop deeply, Jesus’s servanthood, the very act of washing his disciples’ feet, when in fact, he was God.