On May 17, four days before residential staff would discover Azia Kim’s eight month ruse of posing as a Stanford student, Kim posted a message on her newly-created Xanga account. “I get too caught up in looking forward to summer and going home,” she wrote, “that I forget to be thankful for the beautiful people God has placed into my life. I love Stanford.” Stanford Daily, May 25, 2007
What is interesting for me about the recent news of young, infamous Korean-Americans is their encounters with the church. If you’re Korean-American, it’s almost assumed (for good reason) that you’ve experienced church at least a few times in your early childhood. For good and for bad, there’s no getting away from church in Korean-American culture. You can get out of the church, but you can never really get the church out of you (as Cho Seung-hui’s Christ-imbued rant recently showed). Like the problem of Christendom in general, this can greatly hinder one’s witness as a Christian or of Christians. Case in point: the 18 year old, church-going Azia Kim’s posing as a Stanford student. This appears to be a textbook case of academic idolatry. I’m struck though by how easy it is especially for Korean-American Christians to accommodate their idols along with their apparently sincere love for God. When Christianity so becomes integrated into the culture, such that one becomes a “Christian” by virtue of being born into a specific cultural context, it becomes that much harder to discern where true faith ends and culturally-derived idolatry begins. Those who consider Koreans to be God’s chosen people, uniquely blessed with special zeal, talents, and characteristics to carry out His mission on earth, should reconsider just what they are sowing in the minds and hearts of young Korean-Americans. In this light, the current “silent exodus” may in fact be as biblical as it sounds, and thus a hopeful phenomenon.
Your points are well taken, but I take exception to your conclusion that the “silent exodus” may be a hopeful phenomenon. For all their faults, the first generation KAs have done remarkable things for God’s kingdom. And it is truly a tragedy that the second generation has lost much of their ancestors’ commitment to the church. If anything, Azia Kim is a testimony of how watered-down the 2d generation ministries have become.
Academic idolatry is definitely something that 1st or 2d gen KA ministries do not touch lest they incur the wrath of their adult congregations who have extremely high aspirations for their children to get justified by Stanford, Harvard, and other KA gods of the 21st century.
1.5gen, yes, great things have been done through the 1st gen KAs. But it was not because of anything innate to their culture, but solely by God’s grace. Otherwise, the values of one’s culture become confusedly intermixed with those of the Bible. Even more importantly, the entire notion of grace would become lost. To some extent, 2d gen ministries have become watered down (e.g., daily early morning service has been lost). But it has still been tainted by some of the unbiblical cultural values of 1st gen ministries (e.g., obsession with socially based hierarchical status).
Apparently there’s more to this now. http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/29/aziaUsedStanfordToGetRotcSpot
She also posed as a cadet for Santa Clara University ROTC. I think it’s more like the movie “Catch me if you can” than anything else.
I think the main point of concern is all the “thank God” talk that Azia wrote and that is being quoted by all the major news outlets . . . what a tragic witness.
Let’s give this young sister in Christ a break. She’s in need of our prayers more than any condemnation on our part. I can’t even begin to imagine the humiliation her family must be experiencing now, especially in such a tight knit korean community as Fullerton.
But the fact remains: Today 11 of the world’s 12 largest churches are located in Seoul. Behind the U.S., South Korea is the second largest missionary sending country. It can’t be just by coincidence that this is happening to and through one country in particular.
This has not been a good year for KAs.