No Weapon Formed Against Us
KALI National Gathering and a Tribute to Our Childhood JDSNs
the go-to retreat site for every Korean church in San Jose
By Daniel Jung
10. No weapons, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or other drug/gang paraphernalia will be allowed at the retreat. If you are caught with any of the above in your possession, your retreat attendance will be terminated and your parents will be contacted to pick you up immediately. No exceptions.
Thank you for taking part in SJNLMC’s summer retreat, we pray you’ll be blessed!
When I was a high schooler in the mid-1990s, my youth pastor would print retreat pamphlets for our annual summer retreat. Pastor Kim (or just “Chan” as everyone would call him) would always dedicate the inside cover of the booklet to something he called, “The Retreat Ten Commandments.” Bring your bibles and a pen to all activities. Keep your hands to yourself. Treat everyone with mutual dignity and respect. Follow the rules of the campground… And no weapons or drugs.
You know, pretty standard stuff.
I never gave any of these commandments a second thought. Decades later, while I was pastoring an EM youth group in Honolulu, I printed a retreat pamphlet with these same Ten Commandments. My youth kids thought it was hilarious. “PD, why would you say ‘no drugs or weapons?’ Who would bring drugs or weapons to a youth retreat?”
1990s Korean American second-generation immigrant kids, that’s who.
Before Netflix and YouTube, before organized youth sports, before tiger moms and helicopter dads, healthy recreational options for Generation-X kids were non-existent. When you coupled this with confused Korean American teenagers who were unable to communicate with their parents, who were often ridiculed in their schools, who were grasping onto any form of self-confidence, then you had an entire generation of kids whose identity-longings translated into rebellion, promiscuity, drug use experimentation, and outright rebellion. And since the Korean Church was still the centerpiece of our immigrant universe, all these kids went to church. Retreats, revivals, praise nights. Everyone showed up and showed out.
At one particular praise night, word spread throughout our youth group that one of our peers, we’ll call him “Terry”, was bringing a gun. The details of the original skirmish are hazy, but the gun was real. Terry—who had loose affiliations with an Asian gang in San Jose—had previous confrontations with some boys from another Korean church who were also loosely affiliated with a rival gang. Terry received word that these other boys were going to start a fight with him at the next praise night. Worried for his safety, Terry brought his friends from school. He also brought a gun. They all gathered in the parking lot of the host church and planned how they were going to approach their rivals should a confrontation break out. A handful of boys from our church and I stood outside with them (as I’m writing this, I still can’t believe this happened).
When our youth pastor had heard Terry brought a gun, he confronted him in the church parking lot.
“Did you bring a gun?” he asked Terry, who was visibly upset.
By this time half our youth group was in the parking lot to see what was going on.
Terry pulled out a small black revolver from the pocket of his bomber jacket.
“What are you gonna do with that?”
No answer.
“Terry! What are you going to do with that?”
“Step off, Chan! This ain’t even about you.”
“I’m making it about me. Now tell me, what are you gonna do with that?!”
“Imma blast these fools if they step to me!”
Without hesitation, Chan grabbed the gun while it was still in Terry’s hand and pressed the muzzle to his own chest.
“No you’re not. If you’re gonna shoot someone, shoot me!”
Terry, along with everyone in the crowd, was stunned. For all his tough talk, all his bravado, he was still a kid. He just received his driver’s license two months earlier.
“C’mon. Do it. You wanna be a badass? Pull the trigger. Shoot me. SHOOT ME!”
Terry put the gun back into his pocket and got into his white Integra and sped out of the church parking lot. We all stood there, motionless. I could hear the praise band’s muffled rendition of Brian Doerksen’s “Faithful Father” faintly playing from the sanctuary. Chan looked at all of us and went back inside the church without saying a word. We all followed. I may or may not have accepted Jesus (again) that night amid the backdrop of a Vineyard praise song. Crisis averted and we all went home. Just another Saturday night at a 90s Korean Church event in the Bay.
I regularly think about this night. As a sixteen-year-old boy, this was part and parcel of my church experience. It was also my first exposure to a pastor as a Warrior-Shepherd. Chan was probably in his late-twenties at the time. Hardly an experienced leader. He was still a JDSN finishing his undergraduate studies and hoping to complete his MDiv in the future. But what he lacked in learned training, he majored in courageous devotion to his calling as a pastor. Like David defending his sheep from the lion’s attack, Chan was a leader who literally stood in the gap for us. Everyone who witnessed his fierce loyalty that night was left with an indelible imprint of what it means to willingly put yourself in harm’s way for the sake of the people in your ministry.
I believe we have all been indelibly shaped by our childhood JDSNs, albeit with or without the dramatics. These childhood JDSNs have been vital to our faith, often in spite of all their perceived shortcomings. They were young men and women whose only hiring prerequisites was that they spoke English and loved Jesus—guitar capabilities optional. They were lucky if the church paid them anything but worked to the bone. They helped us fill out job applications and bought us countless bowls of pho. They weren’t able to debate the merits of substitutionary atonement but modeled it with their lives nonetheless. Above all, they were kids themselves, leading kids, while learning how to process the magnitude of their calling in real time. Some of them have gone on to launch huge church plants or sit at the head of international missions agencies. But most have probably left the ministry. Unheralded servants of God who gave their youth and their sanity for the sake of our lost generation.
“Preach the gospel. Die, and be forgotten.” Zinzendorf’s motto is oft-quoted in Reformed circles but for our communities, our stories need to be told. Our childhood JDSNs need to be remembered.
They weren’t able to debate the merits of substitutionary atonement but modeled it with their lives nonetheless.
Armed with their narratives, this is what we carry to spaces like the KALI National Gathering in St. Louis next month. While our experiences may contain anecdotal differences, we’ve all been shaped by a Chan from our youth. Whether California, New Jersey, Philadelphia and everywhere in between, we’ve witnessed the uncelebrated sacrifices of countless leaders and JDSNs who have shaped the way we pastor our churches, serve our congregations, and lead our families. Many of us wouldn’t be ministers of the Word and Sacrament were it not for their lived-embodiment of the sacrifices of Christ. They were our surrogate parents, stand-in older brothers and sisters, and our biggest cheerleaders. We are the living, breathing legacies of our childhood JDSNs and every time we meet as KALI brethren, I am reminded of their sacrifices with every shared ministry experience.
Reverend Chan Kim passed away unexpectedly nearly ten years ago and I can’t help but think how affinity group events like our National Gathering would have benefitted him and all our Korean American pastors from the 90s. At the conclusion of our first National Gathering in 2023, I told my wife, “Chan would have loved this. He would have loved KALI so much.” So it is on behalf of his memory, and to honor all the leaders from our youth, that we will meet in St. Louis in November with the following commandments in mind:
Preach the gospel. Tell our stories. Don’t let our JDSNs be forgotten.
Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Korean Northwest Presbytery. He lives in Northern California, where he serves as an associate pastor at Home of Christ in Cupertino. In his spare time, Daniel loves the 49ers, good coffee, and writing about the intersection between faith and pop-culture. You can find more of his work here.
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