Hanna Kim: I Believe in the Church

As part of Day1's Young Leaders of the Church Series, Hanna Kim offers this commentary on the future of the church:

I am someone who genuinely believes in the church.

For me, church has been a place where I have felt the most loved and the most advocated for. I have known church to be a place where the gospel message of God's radical love in Jesus Christ is embodied and lived out in a community of people that actively love and care for one another. 

I believe the church does this and is at its best when it understands itself and lives into its identity as the living body of Christ--a body that cares for each part, or each member, as it would its own life. I am interested in working in the life of congregations to be part of renewing this identity and help bring to life the body of Christ.

To understand the how and why for our need of the body of Christ, I think, is to first understand more deeply our inter-connectedness as people and our need for one another. As the dominant culture promotes self-sufficiency and lifts up individualistic success, I believe the Church is called to model a new way of life that is deeply informed of being mutually dependent on one another, through a relational and communal way of being and then minister out of that being.

To engage in this work I believe requires us to enter more fully, more honestly, and more vulnerably in committal relationships with one another as Christian sisters and brothers--finding and vocalizing what unites us more than what divides us. I believe the sustainability of churches lie within the unity of churches. I envision this unity in diversity. A unity that is not sameness or conformity, but a unity that genuinely lifts up our particular gifts and diverse backgrounds that unite us by one Lord and one Church. 

I'm Hanna Kim.