Our involvement with Hope Brooklyn occurred, like most events in our life, by what some may call coincidence and what we prefer to name as God’s hand. It started when Drew Hyun, who officiated our son Kevin’s wedding, suddenly called us one day and asked if he could drop by for a cup of tea.
When I opened the door, Drew was standing there with a young, tall pastor. His name was Russell Joyce, and he belonged to a denomination called Foursquare. Drew shared he was in search of a new location in Brooklyn where Hope Church NYC, the congregation he started, could branch out. We were impressed by the fact that Foursquare was supporting the new Hope Church Brooklyn branch despite it being a different denomination. They didn’t seem to care as long as the Gospel was spreading.
This meeting came at just the right time. We had been looking for a church to belong to ever since we moved to Brooklyn. Although we previously attended Korean-speaking congregations, we wanted to find a multicultural church so our kids could be involved. We had never been involved in church planting, so I asked them out of curiosity how it was done. They said it usually starts in someone’s dining room, sharing meals, as the first churches did in the New Testament. Almost automatically, I raised my hand and said, “I can host!”
So it began.
We started hosting monthly dinner gatherings at South Oxford. I lent my home and cooked a simple dinner, and Pastor Russell Joyce led the fellowship and introduced what Hope Brooklyn was about. Our group soon outgrew my home, and we rented the basement of RHOW (Recovery House of Worship). The congregation grew further to almost 300 within 3-4 years, and we ended up renting the auditorium of PS 261 in Boerum Hill.
Russell was only 27 years old, and the average age of the congregation was barely 30. We could easily have been peers with most of the members’ parents. One time, we spotted newcomers our age, and they turned out to be the parents of the associate pastor. Despite this age gap, we hosted newcomers’ dinners every 4-6 weeks and were able to connect with most of the new people attending Hope Brooklyn.
There were 10-15 new people attending the dinners regularly, so sometimes we didn’t remember everyone’s names; but the guests at our table certainly remembered us later. In some cases, our service with the church led to deeper relationships.
One example is Grace. We instantly connected with her over our shared Korean heritage, and her husband Jonathan’s friendly and attentive personality made it easy to become close. They only lived a few blocks from us in Fort Greene, and were also in charge of a “table” in our neighborhood.
Hope Brooklyn has a system called “tables,” where members from the same neighborhood gather once a week during weekdays for fellowship. We were impressed by this young couple’s devotion to hosting people in their home despite their busy schedules.
When we had them over for dinner, we had such a fun time talking that I almost forgot they were our children’s age. In our culture, you don’t typically call people who are much younger than you “friends.” These days, we visit each other’s homes, taking turns having each other over just as friends do.
What’s interesting is that if we had to communicate in Korean, where there is a distinct difference between honorific and colloquial speech, we wouldn’t feel this close, like friends. Thanks to Grace’s limited Korean, English is our common language. Communicating in English doesn’t make us feel as old as we are—and that is a blessing. Just goes to show, you never know the doors that can be opened by a simple willingness to say “yes.”
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