Koreans in NZ

Stuart Vogel gives us some updated information on Koreans in New Zealand.  
 
70% of Koreans in New Zealand identify as Christians, while roughly another 20% claim to follow no religion. Buddhists number only about 5%. One Christian newspaper estimates that 35-40% of all Koreans are "active Christians" who regularly attend worship services, mostly at one of New Zealand's 100 Korean churches. Another recent study has shown that around 90 per cent of the study's participants attended Church regularly.

A weekly Christian newspaper published in the Korean language claims to have a circulation of 3,500 and discusses religious issues as well as issues of common interest to immigrants, such as migration law and property ownership. 20 years ago we had no Korean congregations within the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa-New Zealand.  Now we have 11 such congregations or groups.  We have Korean ministers graduating from our theological training and serving in a wide variety of positions. We have numerous congregations and ministers wanting to join the PCANZ. We welcome the interest without any hesitation.

Research has shown that Korean Christian churches provide much needed opportunities for support, fellowship and business networking as well as information and general assistance. This includes conversational English classes. One participant in the study said: "I had help from the Korean church in New Zealand. They gave me information about the business. It was hard to get the right information except through the local Korean church. As an immigrant with limited English language, I felt isolated and was not able to get proper information to start up the business."

And some other more general information: 

Almost 70% of New Zealand’s Koreans live in the Auckland area (2001 stats).
16% are in Christchurch with the rest scattered throughout the country, mostly in the larger towns and cities.
The majority of Korean immigrants have tertiary qualifications and are in their thirties and forties, meeting the immigration criteria.
Some chain migration has occurred as arrivals send home favourable reports to friends and relations – including elderly parents – who then came to join them.
Upon arrival most Korean families have sufficient funds to buy homes in relatively affluent suburbs like Auckland’s North Shore which.
By 2001, in North Shore City, Korean was the second most common language after English (4.1% in the 2006 Census).

Koreans attend a variety of NZ churches: the Korean Christian Churches in NZ site  lists Full Gospel, Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and various Pentecostal groups. 

Mission is Messy

In an article entitled Why we must shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’ by Clay Shirky, he notes that when Guttenberg invented the printing press, the results were initially chaotic...
“Only in retrospect were experiments undertaken during the wrenching transition to print revealed to be turning points.....That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent in the moment; big changes stall, small changes spread. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can be neither mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify…
“And so it is today. When people demand to know how we are going to replace [all kinds of things- add your favourite institution here] .. they are demanding to be told that the old systems will not break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
“There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.....The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.”

Why have I headed this post 'Mission is Messy?' Because what Shirky discusses is very similar to the way mission works, the way the 'emerging' church works (and you can think of 'emerging' in any way you like), and even the way a person converted from the old life into a Christ-life 'works'. Though the article focuses on the on-going crisis seen in the newspaper industry, it has resonances far beyond that.

Thanks to Len Hjalmarson for bringing this to our attention.

Moving on

Television watching is on the decline, newspapers are folding (if you'll excuse the pun) around the world, and magazines come and go at the drop of a hat (not helped by the fact that many magazine owners think the reading public merely wants wads of glossy advertising when they buy a magazine).
The culprit (but not the only culprit) is the Internet. News is free and much more widespread; opinion is available from one extreme to the other; television programmes are watchable when you want to see them, and so are movies.
The Christian News website notes:
What does all this mean for the Christian community here in NZ and around the world? Rather than the gloom of failing newspapers, the internet has been a boon for Christian ministries. Finally we can get our content into the marketplace of ideas and compete fairly in cyberspace, something that has not been possible in newspapers or TV previously. Christians now have access to everything from written articles to MP3 seminary lecture courses to full video sermons, lectures, debates, and numerous fascinating other cutting edge materials, and all by the finest scholars in the world. We now have a playing field with the secular world that is more level than anything for a long time.
The times are certainly changing (and not just The Times of London). But is the Internet still basically the toy of wealthier nations? How many third world countries have real access to it?

Apropos of the above, I've just come across the Alltop site again. It was something that popped up sometime ago (I've written about it on one of my blogs at some time in history) but I'd forgotten about it. There are innumerable versions of it, but for those on this blog the interesting ones might be the All the Top Christianity News, or the News for pastors, ministers and church staff (which goes under the basic heading of 'Church').
Alltop provides a work-in-progress type list of blogs, sites and other sundry Internet paraphenalia that are 'hot' at the moment. The aforesaid blogs etc may well drop off in time, depending on their level of interest. While they're on Alltop, they show up as separate sections within the page, and, by running your mouse over the top of a line, you can see what the post is about.
It's totally time-consuming, but informative. Don't do it when you're supposed to be doing something more important.