Pray For Us in Our Church Search

Dear Fellow Seminarians,

After reading Student Loan Chutzpah on the Wall Street Journal's website, I found myself feeling ever more grateful that out school does not cooperate with the nationally subsidized program.

We lost our native speaker preacher at the church we were attending at the end of February. That was Joong Moon Baptist Church. They had a special "English only" Sunday School taught by Patricia Rocks (from California), the preacher's wife. Now we are bereft of a teacher for my children. Also, the church has not yet hired a pastor, and when they do, my wife predicts it will be a South Korean who studied in the U.S. at seminary. She says there is an abundance of such young men, who need a job.

However, my children cannot understand what South Korean adults say when they speak English, even in normal conversation. It takes a special linguistic skill, one that I have practiced much. Learning Korean helps you to fill in the gaps and reorder their sentences to get a good fit in English and approximate their intended meaning via guesswork.

We will hence be looking for another church. It may be that we will end up going back to one of our old churches way across town, and go back to paying an arm and a leg for taxi transportation. We do not have a car. My wife is very sensitive to pecuniary matters, believing "a penny saved is a penny earned." And you can't easily blame her, as she was raised in a poor family, with a taxi-driver as a father of three. Too, she has five children of her own, who demand all the time we have.

I will post more later. Please pray for us now, as we are in a bind. I aim to find out the meeting times of the university church on the campus where I work in my new job, teaching English in the biotechnology department of Hannam University.

I am pretty sure that they do not have an English worship service, but would be happy to preach for them, if they were interested. I would need no income. To do that, I would merely need some church members to promise to look after my little ones while I preached. People have done that in the past, quite willingly.

Love, Nathaniel