06. Language of the dispatch and mission field!

[말레이]

06. Language of the dispatch and mission field!

However, up until this point, I thought that something had happened as I had intended or planned in faith, but later I realized that it had turned out in a completely different direction than I had thought. God had suddenly sent me and my family to the ‘Klum Korean United Church’ in the capital of ‘Molliyshya’ as an assistant pastor. God had thrown me, a country bumpkin who had no confidence in language skills, into the mission field, which was at the forefront of language.

After finishing my theological studies, on December 22, 1995! I held a pastoral ordination and missionary dispatch service at Cheongpa Central Church in Cheongpa-dong behind Seoul Station. I was the only one to be ordained and dispatched that day through the temporary presbytery of the Seoul Presbytery. Despite the cold weather, many people came to visit, and many pastors from the ordination committee and the presbytery came to congratulate and encourage me during the ordination and dispatch ceremony.

I couldn’t express my joy because it was the day when all the preparations I had made during my candidacy came to fruition. Although I was going to be the pastor of the Korean Church in the capital of ‘Molisha,’ I felt a sense of mission because this was a great opportunity to learn about the culture of ‘Molisha’ and the language. Finally, I was able to set foot on ‘Molisha’ after receiving the missionary dispatch letter along with the ordination as a pastor.

I had borrowed 10 million won, which was the minimum deposit at the time, but I paid back 2 million won that I had borrowed from a friend to pay for my graduate school admission fee, and after getting my teeth treated and having them covered, I had only 3 million won left. When I exchanged my money for ‘Molisha’ money at Gimpo Airport, the amount of money I had was reduced to one-tenth of what it actually was. At that time, the exchange rate for the Korean won to the Molisha money was about 300 to 1, and moreover, there was a banknote in Molisha worth 300,000 won in Korean won, so in order to exchange it for Molisha money, I received a bundle of 100 thick 10,000 won bills, which were equivalent to 300,000 won in local currency, so naturally I felt empty because of the reduced amount of banknotes. In this state of lack in many ways, I was called to be a pastor at the Korean United Church in the capital of Molisha, but I would receive a small amount of compensation as a pastor, and since I was going suddenly, I had no place to receive support or prepare to receive it, so I had no choice but to go without any support as a missionary and live off the small compensation. And while taking on the role of the administrative center of the church, handling big and small tasks, and experiencing various things among people, I grew little by little, albeit late. In addition, my long experience as a choir director with a background in church music was a great help in organizing a general choir for Korean housewives and founding a housewives’ choir and holding performances.

In the meantime, I saw ‘Molisha’ again. After about two years, I prayed while looking at the new vision that God gave me,

“God!

If you give me the opportunity to do solo ministry,

I will take on that ministry!”

I prayed. When I was confident in something and tried to do it on my own, God waited, but when it ended in vain or was burdensome because it was too little, God worked right away and did everything at the right time. And the issue of solo ministry was the same, and God answered that prayer right away and sent me to ‘Tau’, a distant region of ‘Molisha’. After spending two years in the capital, I was reassigned to Tau in the Molisha region while receiving support for the living expenses of the assistant pastor from that church. There, I began my own ministry. For three years, I was assigned to pastor a small Korean church and teach church music at a local seminary, even though I had not yet mastered the language. In the process, I gradually learned the local language and grew. I experienced many things there, and through that, I received training and a platform, and finally grew enough to be able to handle any task in life and ministry. Then, I was assigned to move to Koki, the capital of Soro, so that I could look over the entire Soro state and carry out the role that was entrusted to me for this country. However, the most important thing was the financial support that allowed me to carry out my ministry. The pastoral ministry of the ‘Soro Korean Church’, which rented a part of the local church’s space to hold services, moved from the ‘Tau Korean Church’ to ‘Koki’ and held services, was fortunate enough to maintain the church itself, and although the living expenses for living locally were not enough, I just endured and endured year after year. However, when the ‘Korean United Church’, which had sent me back, had internal problems and issues, I received a call from the church’s missionary director saying that they could no longer send me the expenses for sending me, and that I should come up with a plan. As the only church that had sent me back, I could not help but feel a sense of despair, as if the sky was falling down. On the other hand, seeing the irresponsible reality of sending me back, I could not help but ask myself what was different about the church from the world. In such despair, the only thing I could do was pray to God. While I was urgently contacting the General Assembly Mission Department about this situation and asking them to come up with a solution, the Mission Department only kept telling me to wait.

In such a situation, I had time to think about the direction of the ministry, wondering what kind of ministry I should do in ‘Molisha.’ As I prayed and thought about it, I realized that the core ministry of ‘Molisha’ would be the education ministry, which would be the most effective and best. However, the problem was that my life was also in crisis, and the education ministry that required a huge amount of money was like a dream. However, if there was one thing I gained, it was that I had the same direction and clear vision for the ministry, which was a positive situation.

While I was praying and trying to overcome the given situation, I received a call from the presbytery I belonged to. The pastor who was in charge of the mission department at the presbytery wrote a thesis at the missionary graduate school that most missionaries are having difficulties in their ministry due to the lack of ministry expenses, and that it would be good for all churches in the presbytery to nominate a missionary to support within the capacity of each church among the missionaries sent by the presbytery, regardless of the amount of support expenses, and to organize a support group for that missionary and provide steady support every month in the future. He proposed that the content be submitted to the presbytery and that this be implemented starting from the Seoul Presbytery. The members of the presbytery actively agreed to this, and it was passed. They contacted the missionaries about this and asked them to attend this presbytery and form a support group. So they told me about this and asked for my opinion, saying that they would do it according to the missionary’s wishes. However, this could not have been anything other than God’s answer to my prayers. With great expectations, I returned to Korea as requested by the presbytery and attended the presbytery. However, as it turned out, the situation was completely different. In 1987, I entered the theological seminary and studied for one semester before enlisting in the military and being discharged in February 1991. I worked as a salesman at a pharmaceutical company to earn some money for tuition until I returned to the theological seminary in the second semester. I resumed my studies in the second semester, so I was already forgotten by my classmates, and the new classmates I met were still strangers to me due to the short time I had spent there. Furthermore, I was sent out as a missionary right after graduation, so I could not meet them often. When the presbytery asked me to nominate missionaries to support the missionaries, most of the pastors had already nominated other missionaries they knew well, and the one who nominated me was a pastor who remembered me and a pastor from a pioneer church who did not know much about missionaries. Fortunately, I was the only missionary who accepted the presbytery’s request and asked to form a support group and participated in the presbytery. When that happened, the pastors who were the executives of the presbytery explained this situation to the presbytery members and advised the pastors who had designated other missionaries to support them, saying that this was a more urgent situation and that they should support them. They arranged for about ten pastors to support them, and they gathered together to form an emergency support group, and thankfully, a support group was formed that provided 600,000 won per month as a first step. This was only about half of the amount of support that one church used to provide, but I still feel relieved and thankful when I think about it because it was a blessing that I was able to continue the ministry. As I was able to continue the ministry, I thought about actually putting into practice the values ​​and fruitful direction of the ministry in ‘Molisha’ that I had eval‎uated, but I was still stuck in a situation where I couldn’t move at all, so I couldn’t see any opportunity or method for that. So all I could do was pastor a Korean church of about ten people and go to a local seminary to teach church music.

Then one day, a support group that had been formed recently came to visit the site and suggested that rather than doing ministry work in a place that would be equivalent to Seogwipo in Jeju Island in terms of the topography of Korea, it would be better to move to Jeju City and do ministry while looking over the entire Jeju Island. I agreed with that and decided to do so. This was because the place where I was doing ministry work was in ‘East Molisha’, which is located to the east of ‘Molisha’, just like Jeju Island in Korea, and there were many restrictions on ministry work. Also, since ‘Tau’ is like Seogwipo in Jeju Island, the support group suggested that it would be good to change the ministry work to ‘Koki’ City, which is like Jeju City. I wanted to do that, but it was not easy due to various circumstances, so I hesitated and suddenly moved to ‘Koki’ City. I was able to receive support for the necessary expenses through the support group, so it was truly fortunate for the ministry. So we moved to ‘Koki’ city, but we still had to rent the local Baptist church’s worship space for free to hold Korean worship services, so there was a limitation that we had to hold the service at 12:30. So after about two years, we tried to secure an independent space, but it was difficult to do it on our own, so we asked the Korean church for support. The pastor who asked for support was an elder of a church who was old, but who had studied at the research center with us, and who had studied theology late in life, and whose church had grown well, and who also led the denomination’s missionary work while running a prayer center. When we explained the local situation, he said that he would support us for two years and that we should become independent, so we gratefully accepted the support, rented a commercial building in the city, and finally adjusted the worship time to 10:00 AM on Sundays, so we could hold the service independently. However, God’s training that I had received through various events since I was born on this earth did not end here. It was only 4-5 years later that I learned that this was the main course of training. Here, as a pastor, a missionary, and a branch manager of an NGO, there were various practical training and field experiences. Ironically, one of them was the culmination of the training and training through small competitions and conflicts with other ministers doing similar work. Although the field was a little different, I had already experienced the importance of education while studying education at a graduate school of education. Seeing the reality that Korean children born in this country or students who have lived here for a long time could not speak Korean properly, I also felt a deep regret about Korean when I came here when my two children were two and four months old, and from that day until now, I have only used Korean in my home. So, I thought, “Would other families do more?” and started a Korean language school here with a pitiful heart for my children. Overcoming various difficult situations while running that Korean language school was the result of persistence and patience, but many teachers who could not endure this or had different opinions left while this work continued. But without that persistence and patience, the school would not have been able to survive until now. The environment overseas is such a difficult and tough condition and situation. However, since it is the fruit of the hard work and sweat of many teachers and volunteers, I am grateful to all the teachers who participated in this work, and I only have a regretful feeling in a corner of my heart that I wish I had been more patient and together. And then, to educate locals in Korean and Koreans in Malay, I created the ‘Korean Cultural Center’ and have been teaching Korean to the locals regardless of the number of people. On the other hand, in order to fulfill my original mission, I received training from a Korean NGO organization in this place where ministry was difficult in many ways, and I hoped that this organization would come to the site, but this organization only goes to areas in need of emergency relief or areas or countries that are extremely difficult in many ways, and I was in despair when I heard that it would not go to countries with a certain level of economic scale, such as Molisha. However, God gave me wisdom, and the Korean organization moved to establish an NGO organization in Molisha so that we could help other countries together, and they allowed a branch in Molisha. However, at first, the branch was only in name, and in terms of the actual situation of the organization, there was no support at all. So the person in charge asked me to visit the site and eval‎uate it. Then, I received a call around October of that year saying that they would visit, but because the person in charge was busy, the plan to visit the site did not come to fruition until the end of the year. No matter how much I asked, the situation on the site and the situation at headquarters were different. Still, I had no choice but to strongly request a visit, so with that regret and sorrowful feeling of that time, I wrote the following poem with my poor poetry skills that I had learned in school long ago, and sent it to the headquarters, praying earnestly that my intention would be conveyed.

Do you know?

Do you know?

This thirst of thirst

Do you know?

This heart tired of waiting

Do you know?

Their longing

Do you know?

Their resentment

Do you know?

I love them

Do you come?

When will you come?

The secretary in charge who received this poem by email emphasized that it was essential to go to ‘Molisha’ this time, and as a result, the person in charge ended up coming to the site and, while visiting the site and inspecting it, saw that many children of illegal immigrants were not able to study, and felt sorry for them and felt the need to build a school. He raised funds to build the school himself, and based on that, the ministry of the organization was able to blossom in ‘Molisha’.

The first ministry that was carried out was the Hope School Construction Project. I found out that the chairman, who was the representative, sent the construction cost because his older brother was a deacon from the same church. He had served in the military as a general, and a few months after being discharged, he was diagnosed with cancer for three months at the hospital. At that time, he organized his assets and donated a portion of it to the ‘Building a Heavenly Legacy’ movement to build the Hope School in ‘Molisha’ as a construction fund. And on the day of the donation, Deacon Ansu received God’s calling.

So, when I wanted to design a building with the 30 million won in construction funds that I had received, a local designer kindly offered to design it for free and donated his talent. So, when I asked several construction companies to build it with the design drawings I received and asked about the cost, most of them gave me estimates that it would cost between 100 million and 150 million won. I only had 30 million won in cash, so it was impossible to do something that would cost 3 to 5 times that much. So, I asked a local church member who was a co-worker of the pastor to do it for me for this purpose, and he gave me an estimate of 80 million won, which was a huge reduction in his profit. However, even with this amount, which was two to three times the secured construction funds, I still couldn’t build it. So, I had no choice but to hire carpenters, buy materials, and build the school myself. And there were many things to do during the process of starting construction and completing the school. However, the most difficult thing was the lack of construction funds. Thinking back, 30 million won was the highest amount of cash I had ever touched in my life. So I felt proud and confident, and I thought I could do anything, even big or difficult, with that amount. However, when I thought about it carefully, I realized that I had to save every penny by purchasing and supplying construction materials directly with the money that was not enough for construction. So I sent an official letter to a Korean business in Tau, where I used to live, who was making plywood and had a problem making plywood, and asked them to supply the plywood at a low price because it could not be exported. They provided me with all the necessary amount free of charge, which was a great help. Then I went around to material stores myself and found a material store that promised to supply the materials at a low price. At first, I paid cash to the material store that made that promise for the materials I ordered. Then, when I was busy with construction work and could not go to the construction site to purchase the materials myself, I ordered a small amount and said that I would send an employee and pay the cost the next day if they sent the materials. Then, as promised, I went the next day and paid the cost. The Chinese material dealers never gave us anything unless we received cash, but as they gradually built up their trust, they later ordered materials and asked us to send them construction materials, saying that they would pay for them later, and they started to use them on credit.

After finishing construction, there was about 20 million won left on credit. The school was finished, but if we didn’t pay off the credit quickly, that would be a problem, and we could easily end up being called a fraudster. However, there seemed to be no place that would compensate for the insufficient construction costs. So we had to solve this problem ourselves.

So when we solved this problem and started the Korean headquarters, we received funds from the Japanese headquarters and started the fundraising business by creating a headquarters for ‘Molisha’, so we needed to open a recycling household and show a model to the locals, so we asked permission to open a local branch of the recycling household. However, the headquarters repeatedly refused, saying that it was not an easy task, but I insisted that it was absolutely necessary for the local community, and after repeatedly requesting, I finally obtained permission from the headquarters. Then, I received an empty store for free from a local coworker and businessman, an elder, and prepared to open a ‘Happy Sharing’ store.

Finally, the first container arrived. A famous Korean toy company donated a 40-foot container by clearing out inventory piled up in their warehouse. However, the problem was the customs duty. The local customs office said that they could not exempt us from taxes because we were not an NGO of our country. Then, how could we help our country? After emphasizing that it would be difficult to help by bringing in goods and paying taxes on top of them, we persuaded them and heard that if we received a letter from the Korean embassy stating that this organization was an official Korean NGO, they would allow us to clear the goods without any duties. So we contacted the consul in charge at the Korean embassy and asked him to issue the corresponding letter. However, the problem arose here. The consul in charge at the time could not write the letter. The reason for this was that if a problem occurred after writing the letter and bringing in the goods or if you used the goods for personal use and caused a problem, you would be held responsible and could be fired from your position, so you could not do something that you could be responsible for. Of course, it was part of it, but it was the reality of the actual work attitude of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs employee working at the Korean embassy in ‘Molisha’ at the time, who should have taken care of the Korean residents, helped Korean businesses that had advanced into the local area, and solved the problems of the Korean residents there. When I experienced something like that, I was really frustrated and upset. And I really wanted to protest to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and highlight the seriousness of the problem so that they would recall the consul to Korea. However, even if I hadn’t gone that far, I went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website and posted a message with that content and requested that they correct it, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t respond to that message either. Now, I had no choice but to go back to the local customs office and protest that receiving a letter from the Korean embassy was a complicated matter and that they would be more helpful if they lifted the tariff. As a result, the person in charge made inquiries here and there and eventually helped me clear customs without any duties. After receiving customs clearance, I got a warehouse and started to store my goods and then distributed them to children in remote jungles and remote areas for free and sold them at a very cheap price in urban areas.

People brought in used goods that they didn’t use at home and donated them, and bought the goods they needed at a low price, following the spirit of this store. And even when the purchased goods stopped being used after a certain period of time, they donated them again. Among them, toys were more popular than actual daily necessities such as clothing. This is because there were so many cheap daily necessities from China that you could buy them cheaply, use them, throw them away when they didn’t work, and buy them again. However, toys were different. They were popular because good Korean products were sold so cheaply. So the toy company that didn’t export to this country was heavily promoted to the local people, and this had an indirect effect of making the company’s products good.

In this way, the small amount of money collected every day was deposited into the local corporation’s bank account by the employees, and with that money, the construction cost of the school was covered, and the headquarters was transparently operated through reports on income and expenditure. And from then on, the recycling store was operated for about 6 years, providing the local staff’s salaries and necessary school supplies to the school students, which was a great help in running the school. However, as time went by, the store became more and more difficult. This is because, unlike regular stores, the products needed for sale were not purchased in the necessary sizes and in the necessary quantities, but rather the items were donated, so the necessary sizes were small and many of them were too big or too small. So, later on, it became difficult to even pay the salaries of the recycling store employees, so they closed the recycling store and gave all the items to those in need for free. Looking back, I can’t tell you how grateful I am to the people and organizations who helped me with the construction cost and the operation of the school, and to the people and organizations who showed interest and effort.

And there were many other large-scale projects that were successfully carried out through the organization. However, this does not mean that these things were carried out simply. Sometimes, due to differences in perspectives and viewpoints between the headquarters and the local area, or due to practical difficulties in carrying out the work, there were times when things were difficult to handle with the headquarters, and especially, there was a lot of stress from being careful because everything had to be done thoroughly from the planning stage to the progress stage and the results. However, looking back, it was really something that everyone was grateful for because it allowed us to do all of that. As the work of the Somang School was carried out successfully, many people visited the local area and showed interest in various things and did not spare support.