A Ministry With and By Youth: Reclaiming Youth Agency in the Korean Canadian Church Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout history, there have been numerous cases in which young people were at the forefront of significant social, political, and environmental changes as prophets and revolutionaries. However, in many Korean North American church contexts, youth ministry has been practiced as a program conducted to and for youth and it is uncommon to see youth representation outside of youth ministry, and sometimes even within youth ministry. This research asks what cultural values have marginalized youth from ministry, and what values and theological concepts need to be addressed in order to construe youth as agents and allow space for young people to co-lead. One of the reasons for the neglect of youth in Korean Canadian churches is the neglect of youth agency and the tendency to understand youth as “still growing” and as “delinquent,” and thus in need of adult guidance to become mature Christians. Thus, the research argues for a better representation of youth and a ministry informed by an understanding of youth as agents within the context of the Korean Canadian church. First, this research introduces a discussion on how the current notion of “adolescence” emerged, the position of youth in the larger North American context, and how the understanding of adolescents has influenced youth ministry. Then it critically assesses the social location of Korean Canadian youth in the Canadian multiculturality and in the abled-adult-centric church culture, which is married with authoritarian Confucianism and ageism. Next, while highlighting the importance of how structure confines and cultivates agency, the research examines the Korean Canadian youth’s unique position of betwixt-and-between, which offers them a vantage point to exercise a “transformative agency from within.” A conversation with Asian American theology on the concepts of liminality, hybridity, and heung (a uniquely Korean concept of joy despite marginalization) as sources of agency helps in developing a ministry with and by youth. Last, the research envisions a ministry founded on interdependence in which young people’s counter-narrative is welcomed and their agency is celebrated. A ministry co-led with youth affords churches a chance to witness a living God within youth and allows them to be provoked and enlightened by the voices of youth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".