Photo by Vancouver Film School

By Eun Joo Angela Ryo

I recently attended a seminar for the parents at a Korean immigrant church I was visiting last month.  The title of the seminar was “God and Grades.”  As a mother of a teenager and a preteen, I thought it would be helpful to check it out.  The seminar, as it turned out, should have been more accurately titled “Church Vs. School” rather than “God and Grades.”

The speaker of the seminar started out by listing all the things colleges were requiring of high school seniors these days — good grades, high test scores, extracurricular activities, community services, etc. The premise of the seminar was that high school students are forced to choose between church and getting good grades.  If our children are not firmly rooted in their identity as Christians, the speaker emphatically said, they will choose to stay home from church on Fridays and Sundays to focus more on their studies.  Therefore, he insisted that parents must remind them that they are Christians before they are students so that they won’t leave the church.

Despite my visitor status at that church, I could not help but to interject.  I asked the questions, “Why must church compete with school?  Is there any way church and school can go hand-in-hand?”  Our children learn, process, and digest so much sophisticated information at school, and schools are intent on teaching critical and creative thinking, reading, and writing skills that will prepare them for the real world.  What about the Church?  If churches only ask that students learn simple piety without biblical literacy and fail to relevantly weave our Christian faith into the material they are learning in school such as evolution, history, classism, racism, etc., wouldn’t the Church lose out?

If churches do not create an environment that is conducive to asking the hard questions or welcome them into the life of the congregation, why should the Church win?  What real value do our churches offer to our youth?  As long as churches present themselves as a mere escape for our stressed-out youth, there is no competition.  As long as churches see their role as sheltering our youth from the outside world and pressuring them to make black-and-white decisions rather than discussing messy and complicated real life situations where we are faced with many shades of grey, the Church will not only lose but SHOULD lose.

But when our churches finally begin to recognize that our youth are hungry for real, relevant, and deep spiritual experiences rather than cheap, fun, and entertainment-laden thrills or emotional spirituality, the Church won’t have to compete to keep its youth within its walls; they’d want to stay with strong conviction because they would be equipped with tools to think critically about the world around them and intelligently interpret their own faith stories within the larger context of their life journeys.

Looking back on my life, I am forever grateful to my local church for developing in me the leadership skills I never knew I had and excavating the talents I never thought I had possessed.  I owe my success in the real world to my Korean immigrant youth group that allowed me to doubt and in that uncomfortable place of doubt, encounter Christ deeper than I would ever had in the comfort of certitude.  I left the seminar wishing wholeheartedly that such youth groups would continue to spring up all around us so that we do not have to worry about keeping the youth within the four walls of our church but focus on triumphantly sending them out into the real world to claim the victory they have already won.

Eun Joo Angela Ryo immigrated to America from Korea when she was nine. Having graduated with an MDiv from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, she currently works as a full-time certified ESL teacher for undocumented unaccompanied minors at a non-profit organization under the auspices of the Office of Refuge and Resettlement.  Angela has completed the pastoral ordination process in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and is currently seeking her first call for ordination.