News and Views

Pentecost is a day for celebrating the birth of the Church. But when the Rev. Dae Sung Park met with four lay people and a retired pastor on Pentecost Sunday, May 26, 2013, he had only hopes and prayers of where God would lead them.

Six years later, on Jan. 20, 2019, he stood before a congregation of 100 people, in a beautiful church building, leading a chartering service to celebrate the creation of Bethany Korean United Methodist Church.

It was, he confesses, a journey of the Spirit — with unexpected high times and lows — that was grounded in the certainty that “this was God’s plan."

The church started as a new faith community of the Baltimore-Washington Conference, which paid Park’s salary and a few other expenses. Bethany UMC in Ellicott City welcomed the group and arranged for them to use the chapel across the parking lot.

The Rev. JW Park, superintendent of the Central Maryland District, who saw the need for a Korean worshipping community in the Ellicott City area, remembers that seven other new faith communities began that year. He sees Bethany Korean as an affirmation of the church learning about and responding to the needs of the community.

Dae Sung Park is humbled that Bethany Korean has grown as it has. In 2012, he passed the provisional Elders exam, but was waiting for his visa status to resolve before he could be appointed to a church.

He knew there were no openings in the BWC’s three existing Korean congregations, and was waiting for an appointment to a small Anglo church, when JW Park, the superintendent, called him with the opportunity to form this new faith community.

Park, the pastor, dove into the challenge, but sometimes found himself wrestling about why God would call him to this new venture. After much prayer, Park said, God responded simply: “Because I need you.”

He re-devoted himself to the ministry.

Along the way, Park was honored by the Korean Methodist Church for his foundational contributions to creating the new Appenzeller Museum in Seocheon, Korea. He personally donated or arranged for loans for 800 of the museum’s 1,000 artifacts.

That year, he was also awarded the Harry Denman Award for Evangelism by the Baltimore-Washington Conference for his efforts in producing a glimpse into history that shows how one person’s faith can transform lives and cultures, and for the work he was doing as a pastor of the new faith community, which had grown to about 35 worshippers.

But an even more important event in the church’s growth occurred at Bethany UMC Vacation Bible School when his daughter became friends with a girl she met there. Park met the girl’s family and invited them to church. “They are a very talented family,” Park said. They began participating in worship and attracted others to the church. People started coming. The church grew.

“Another engine for growing the church is prayer,” said Park.

In the Korean culture, prayer is a guiding principle of discipleship, said Park, and a traditional avenue for that prayer is the early morning prayer service.

Every morning, Park held an early morning prayer service at
5 a.m., complete with a short sermon. In the early years, only one or two people attended.

A few conference leaders shared with him how inefficient that was. But he persisted.

Today, the church meets each morning to pray at 6 a.m. About 10 people gather during the week, and between 20 and 30 meet to pray on Saturdays.

The church grew. “Everything is God’s answer to us,” Park said.

One of these answers surprised even him.

Within the past two years, they had between 70 and 80 people attending worship and the chapel at Bethany was beginning to feel crowded.

Rockland UMC in Ellicott City, three miles from Bethany, was experiencing challenges and Superintendent Park saw an opportunity for the two faith communities to join in ministry together and share the building.

But the Rockland UMC continued to decline. The congregation, which was down to about five in worship, voted to close.

The Conference Board of Trustees made arrangements, which are expected to be finalized at the May session of Annual Conference, for Bethany Korean to take over ownership of the building.

Superintendent Park sees this as a cycle of church life, with “one church dying and another being born.” He views it as an opportunity for Rockland UMC to “create a legacy of on-going ministry” in Ellicott City.

Currently, there are two worship services, and there is consideration being given to starting a third worship service for English speakers.

The congregation is active in missions — creating hot Korean meals for seniors in the area through the Meals on Wheels program, providing Bibles and hygiene items to women in prison, and hosting Gamblers Anonymous meetings. Park also leads worship each week at a nearby nursing home.

The congregation is beginning to think about hiring a youth pastor. And, there is conversation about perhaps opening the building to another ethnic congregation, maybe of Spanish speakers.

“An immigrant church is my vision. … Immigrants rely on their church and their pastor in special ways,” said Park, who himself immigrated from Korea in 2006.

Most of the members of Bethany Korean are first-generation immigrants, coming to this region because of the outstanding schools in Howard and Montgomery Counties, Park said. He is actively working to care for these parishoners, while broadening the church’s reach to address the needs of the second and third generations.

There are about 200 Korean churches in this region, most with fewer than 50 people. How Bethany Korean UMC grows, now that it is a chartered United Methodist Church, remains to be seen.

But Park is a pastor with a church born on Pentecost, and he’s trusting in the Holy Spirit. “I want to open our church to all the community,” he said.