Associate Pastor Rev. Young Sun Lee
Greetings!
May the peace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you!
I would like to introduce myself and my family to you and let you know how I have been called to the ministry as the second and last career of my life.
I have been married to my husband, Young Jin Kim, for thirty three years, who is my best friend and supporter for my call to the ministry. He was working as a director of soap opera for Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) in Seoul, Korea and is now teaching film-directing at several colleges in Korea after he retired last year. We have three children, who are all God’s blessings for us and now grown up to be adults. The first one is a thirty-year-old daughter, Jennifer Junghyun Kim. She got married to my son-in-law, Vince Joosang Song, three years ago and now lives in San Francisco working for Facebook. The second ones are twenty-four-year-old twins, one boy and one girl. My twin son, John Jungmin Kim, was studying Nursing at the Master program of Rush University in Chicago after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now is doing his military duty in South Korea. My twin daughter, Sophie Suemin Kim, is working for a media company in New York after graduating from New York University two years ago.
I first recognized my call to the ministry when I finished my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the fall 2015, eleven years after I started it in the fall 2004. While I was studying at UIUC, I was serving as a lay servant at Korean Jesus-Love UMC at Urbana, IL, which was a campus ministry for Korean students there. With my children raised by God through the love of Jesus Christ we shared living in the loving community of Korean Jesus-Love, I was inspired by the constant presence and power of the Holy Spirit caring and guiding us into the peace and love of Jesus Christ in the midst of difficulties that I confronted with in daily life. Thus, I entered Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Evanston, IL, in the fall, 2016, to discern and follow my call to the ministry with my family’s loving support. Four years of spiritual journey at Garrett with the academic learning and field education practice (as chaplain intern at Presbyterian Homes in Evanston, IL, and Advocate Lutheran General Hospital at Parkridge, IL) for pastoral ministry provided me with a gracious opportunity to discern my spiritual gifts and call to the ordained ministry.
Thus, I started the ordination process for elder in 2018 to follow my call to the ordained ministry. However, I needed to experience pastoral ministry at an American local church for the ministry that I would serve after graduation of Garrett-Evangelical. So, I started volunteering at Central UMC at Skokie, IL, in the summer, 2019, and have been experiencing the loving power of the Holy Spirit through the love and hospitality of the people serving for the church as the body of Christ. In the meantime, I became a certified candidate of elder in the ordination process in the fall, 2019 and continue to follow the call to the ordained ministry as elder preparing the interviews for the next step of ordination process as elder.