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Dear Ones-
Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
We pray this finds you well. Praise God for the Wonder of His Incarnation! As we reflect on His great love for us, may we learn more each day what it means, in the words of St. Paul, "to become all things to all people" (I Cor 9:22).
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It's been a busy and beautiful fall. And though we've felt the days getting shorter, the weather here has continued to be mild for the most part. Sometimes it feels it's not "beginning to look [much] like Christmas," but as we engage in the journey, we've continued to grow in our excitement through this Advent season.
October brought our annual fall picnic. We had Americans, Greeks, and Romanians in addition to our Korean faithful, and it was a wonderful opportunity to fellowship.
As important as it is to rest together, we've had plenty of opportunities to work together too! In the past few months, we've re-organized our storage space, had a cleaning to prepare for Nativity, decorated for Christmas, and held a prayer walk in our community.
As you remember our community in prayer, please continue to pray for unity. Everyone loves having a beautiful, multi-ethnic parish, but it's a lot of work keeping everyone on the same page and crossing cultures in so many ways!
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As usual, there's no more photogenic ministry than Sunday school. We've really enjoyed reflecting with our parish children on God's provision through studying the Exodus story. We learned how God protected Moses from infancy and called him in the desert, how He gave him strength to lead His people and always provided a way. Even when things didn't look hopeful, God had a plan and good things in store for his people. We concluded the series with a family movie event during which we watched The Prince of Egypt.
Below: Kids made their own "burning bushes"
The Advent season has also been a time to reflect on some other saints, and who they call us to be in Christ. We marked St. Andrew's Day in November, St. Nicholas Day in December, and St. Dionysios (our parish patron saint) Day in December.
Above: Our students learned and performed the hymn about the life of St. Dionysios for our parish Feast Day in December.
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Here are a few pictures from our Christmas Liturgy and party today!
  
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It's hard to believe we've been here for almost a year!
We get to share with you so many of the joys, and alongside the joys there are certainly challenges. We long to be able to communicate more fully with people and yet we still stumble around, feeling like we can hardly say anything. Completing what would be simple tasks back in the U.S. often proves to be tedious, time consuming, and sometimes even fruitless. We are so thankful that people are willing to be so gracious to us and offer big amounts of their time; and that helps us also to be gracious in return.
We have our own set of pastoral challenges as well, and it's been very good to have a bishop who responds promptly to communication and helps talk through difficult situations. It's also been wonderful to have some trusted advisers back home who both encourage and push us.
At the end of September we said goodbye to our senior priest, Fr Antonios, who was faithfully coming down to our parish every weekend. On his last Sunday we offered our thanks and appreciation for his love for our community over the one and a half plus years. As of October 1st, Fr Chris has been the only priest of the parish. Since then the responsibilities have bumped up quite a bit and it's been a big learning curve not just for us but also for the community. We hope now that we've almost completed a full church year cycle, the rhythm, expectations, and preparation should be a bit more manageable and anticipated.
In January we will have our all-parish meeting followed by a national meeting. So it's time to make ministry and budget plans for 2020. We as Americans might have many ideas, but our desire is to dream together with the parish council about how God wants to use us and work through us in 2020. Please pray the Holy Spirit would guide our discussions.
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Goals and hopes for 2020 & Beyond
Some of our 2020 Goals
- Invest deeply into language learning. We're reminded over and over again from many different places and people how important this really is.
- Be able to say all the written prayers of the services in Korean.
- Build into parish a sense of calling for outreach and mission locally, nationally, and internationally.
- Strengthen connections between Korean and expat communities in our parish.
- Work to deepen the beauty of our services by:
- developing our choir,
- arranging more hymns in Korean that we only have text for and not notes,
- helping our people think about how they want to decorate our building and participate in the celebrations throughout the church year.
- Plan a parish-wide retreat weekend.
- Find a way to begin intentional adult education despite language barrier.
- Strengthen our youth education and connect more with middle and high school age children.
- Finish our parish website and go live.
- Make Korean-English parallel service books for all our services.
- Connect with different people in different spheres outside our parish
- Invest in family time and continue weekly family days. Plan family vacations.
Beyond 2020: Goals, Dreams
- Help establish new parishes:
- Daegu, the 4th largest city in the country with a population of almost 2.5 million and no Orthodox Church.
- Establish another parish somewhere in southeast Korea
- Identify Koreans who can become future leaders for the church here and help them get proper training.
- Help establish a pan-Orthodox international theological/catechetical school in Seoul that can be a training center for Orthodox Christians of Asia.
- Encourage the Orthodox Church of Korea to be missional to its surrounding countries.
- Develop a pan-Orthodox missions conference for Asia and perhaps beyond that encourages practical discussions on mission and enculturation.
- Be ready expand missionary activity into the North should the opportunity ever open up.
- Assist with translation of more Orthodox hymns through use of AGES / Orthodox Liturgical Workbench tools.
- Identify more people who would like to serve as long-term missionaries for this work in South Korea.
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We are grateful for you. May we all lean in to this Incarnational work wherever we are, learning to become a little poorer, to give a little more freely of ourselves, to take on a bit more of our neighbors in love, and in so doing, to reflect a bit more of His Divine Light into the dark.
Through His Great Mercy,
Fr Chris & Jen, Andrew, and Gideon
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