Jeney Park-Hearn is a full-time PhD student at Claremont School of Theology studying Practical Theology – Pastoral Care & Counseling.  She is also part-time staff at the Community Church at Holliston as pastor of community life, as well as a wife and a mom.  Jeney graduated with an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and a master’s of theological studies from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.  Her interests include Korean American fiction, and she loves hiking and the outdoors.

What are your ministry passions? 

I have a passion for wholeness and well-being, particularly for people of color of Asian descent in America – it’s the context I know best.  I continue to learn about the significance of immigration and what that has meant for our community of people, whether in the church context or not. Issues related to immigration and how these play out in subsequent generations are pressing, especially in this global time.

I also have a passion to see church and ministry stay within the realm of lived experience and to engage it authentically. We all have numerous ways of denying, escaping, and running away from reality and the angst of lived experience.  My interest is to examine why we do this, and there are some obvious reasons:  It’s difficult and painful to think of things that make us anxious, sad, mad, etc. but we can’t afford to separate our experience of faith and God from the stuff of everyday life.  To do so is to deny the very incarnational nature of the Christian faith.  So when faith and spirituality finds itself moving and gravitating further from the lived reality of people, we get into trouble.  I want to find ways that ministry can attend to the lived reality of people in and outside the church, and I’ve chosen to enter this work through the disciplines of counseling and psychology.  How do we help our churches and help people in our churches live faithful lives that emerge out of authentic and real grappling with life?

What has been the greatest challenge in your faith journey thus far?

I grew up in a very particular type and flavor of Christian faith, and there was a part of me that constantly denied aspects of myself because I needed to fit into this mold of Christianity.  If it didn’t fit, then I had to throw it away.  But there’s something to be said for living entirely into who I was created to be, and at the same time, living fully into my community.  I believe this is a vital aspect of faithful living.

For instance, the God I knew so well in college—while that God might have been what I needed at the time — is not the God I know today.  The challenge has been to be ok with that journey and those transitions.  I know it sounds strange, but it’s about allowing God to be who God is.  We have a tendency to say, “Gosh darn it, God, this is who You’re supposed to be, and if you stray too much, I can’t handle it.”  It sounds funny but in some sense the challenge lies in us “giving” God the freedom to be who God is, no matter how threatening or scary that may be.

Another personal challenge has been trying to be faithful in knowing God on an academic and on a personal level.  I gained in seminary the gift of critical thinking and how to grapple with Christianity with honest questions and curiosity – the hermeneutic of suspicion.  This has developed in me the challenge to journey with God who is beyond any human effort to systematize, codify, and exhaustively understand and who is actively interested in my personal life.

Interviewed by Joy Wong