Seeing and being Jesus in the world
PC(USA) pastor Mihee Kim-Kort discusses her new book on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’
LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Dr. Mihee Kim-Kort, a PC(USA) pastor who wrote “Seeing and Being Jesus in the World: How to Live God’s Radical Welcome as a Family,” published last month by Westminster John Knox Press, was a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.”
Listen to her nearly hour-long conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here. The hosts posed this question: Amidst the busyness, how can parents find the time to engage their children about justice issues in ways that are age appropriate but also empowering?
Kim-Kort and her husband, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Kort, are co-pastors of First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis, Maryland. They have three children — twins who are 15 and a 13-year-old, as well as a boxer and two cats. “It’s a lot of creatures and a lot of bodies in the house right now, with a lot of different ways of being a parent,” Kim-Kort told the hosts.
“For us, what works is being in the middle of the life we’re already living,” whether it’s discussions in the car or at the dinner table “when we all happened to be there together in the evening.” It’s also “those random questions kids love to ask at 11 o’clock when we’re ready for bed, and showing up and slowing down and noticing what’s happening in school, with their friends, on their teams or whatever they are picking up on social media — what feels fair and what doesn’t, and noticing who’s being left out.”
“There are openings and opportunities for care,” she said. They represent “practicing in little ways as much as we can without overdoing it and turning it into a lesson. Our kids can smell that a mile away. When they suggest it themselves, you know that something has been planted. Something is landing with them.”
Children and youth today are “a lot more sophisticated than when I was a child,” she said. “A lot of what’s going on in the world I would not have been aware of at their age.” According to someone Kim-Kort follows on social media, what children need the most is “the assurance that your presence is there, less so than you telling them what to do or how to do it.”
“I thought that was encouraging and helpful,” she said.
A theme of Kim-Kort’s book is framed “around parenting and family and justice. It’s this basic idea of creating a culture where we show up for one another.” In a church, “that might not be something you can program,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be big and dramatic. It’s simply showing up — dropping a meal off or visiting someone who is sick or stopping to talk to a neighbor.”
“All of this is exemplified in the person of Jesus” who was “someone who showed up in the normal, regular, everyday lives” where people congregated, she said. Today that would be in coffeehouses, restaurants, schools, gyms and playgrounds — “showing up to be present for one another,” she said, not “in an evangelistic sense” but “as a posture of being Christ’s hands and feet in the world and as followers of Christ.”
When a new family with children shows up to worship at your church, “it can be a struggle not to pounce and try to get them involved in so many things,” she said. “There’s a need for families to soft land and not hit the ground running. The church can offer them a chance to breathe.” In fact, church “is one of the few places we can experience an hour not totally focused on ourselves, where we’re not the center of the universe. The preaching, the praying, the singing together — that really is a unique thing in the world right now.”
“There’s something grounding and humanizing about being part of a church community,” Kim-Kort said.
She said she wrote her book with the PC(USA)’s Matthew 25 movement in mind. Along with it original pillars of building congregational vitality, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty are intersectional priorities around climate change, gender justice and militarism.
“It seems like a wide-ranging and scattered mix of social and political concerns. But the more I delved into it, the more I felt they were connected by a deeper thread,” she told the hosts. “Thinking as a parent, it was a chance to think about how to live faithfully in the world. We are interdependent and entangled with one another. I was drawn to that framework.”
One day, Kim-Kort and her husband received a message from one of their children’s science teacher. A new student had arrived who didn’t have English as his first language. Their son “jumped in to help him,” using an online app to help translate.
She had previously shared with her children her own stories of her family emigrating from South Korea when she was young. “I’d told them stories about the struggles of an immigrant family trying to be part of the community and experiencing prejudice and sometimes outright racism,” she said. “You never know what kids are absorbing and how they will convert that into their behavior and into the decisions they will make.”
“That’s why I’m dependent on and grateful to the Holy Spirit. I think the Spirit fills in gaps where we have no idea how things will be planted and what they’ll produce,” she said. “We do our best, and we trust and hope our kids will make healthy decisions in their relationships and in the communities they’re part of every day.”
New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous installments here.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
