Rev. YoungHak Lee is the pastor of Paoli UMC and one of EPA&GNJ’s representatives to the upcoming Council of Bishops Leadership Gathering. At Greater New Jersey’s 2026 Annual Conference, he and young adult leader Zachary Holder gave a presentation about the gathering, including its purpose and denomination-wide conversations leading up to it. Here, Rev. Lee shares a personal reflection relating his own story to the work of the gathering and the future of The United Methodist Church:
For our Annual Conference presentation, Zachary and I emphasized that the Leadership Gathering is not simply another denominational meeting. It is an invitation to move beyond institutional survival and participate in Spirit-filled, Christ-centered imagination.
One image that especially resonated with me was the call to become “good ancestors.” Psalm 78 calls one generation to tell the next about God’s faithfulness. We are heirs of the faith, but we are also ancestors in the making. The next generation is watching how we handle conflict, whether we tell the truth about our failures, whether we repair the harm we have caused, and whether we make room for new voices.
That question has become especially personal since my wife and I welcomed our son, Liebe, this year. I find myself asking what kind of family, church, and world he—and all our children—will inherit from us.
Our invitation to Annual Conference was to pray, hope, and engage. Pray for the gathering; dare to hope that God is not finished with The United Methodist Church; and begin conversations now about the church God is calling us to become.
My Story
My journey toward pastoral ministry began long before I knew where it would lead. I was raised in a Christian family in South Korea. My father bought Bible comic books for me, my mother prayed with me before I went to sleep, and my grandmother sang her favorite hymns while I played the piano. When I was about ten, I wrote in my elementary school yearbook that my dream was to become a pastor.
Those memories are true, but they are not the whole story. I do not want to romanticize my family or suggest that faith was handed down to me within a secure and ideal Christian home. My family was where I first experienced faith and love, but it was also where I first experienced a deep wound.
When I was in eighth grade, my mother and I immigrated to the United States. My father was supposed to join us later. Instead, divorce papers arrived for my mother to sign. I was already struggling to understand a new language and culture in the Philadelphia suburbs, and suddenly the family that had taught me to trust God was breaking apart. I felt abandoned and deeply hurt. I wondered where I belonged and whether I could trust either family or God.
At school, I also experienced the pain of being treated as someone who did not belong. One classmate shouted at me, “If you don’t speak English, go back to China.” About a year later, he apologized. I was still carrying so much anger that I insulted him in return. My mother reminded me that because God loves and forgives me, I have a reason to love and forgive another person. Eventually, I apologized too, and we became friends.
That experience taught me something important, although it took years for me to understand it fully. Forgiveness cannot mean pretending that nothing happened. It begins by telling the truth about a wound. It also cannot be forced upon the person who was hurt. But forgiveness can free us from allowing anger and injury to define every possible future.
My parents’ divorce affected me more deeply than I knew how to express at the time. My disappointment with my family became disappointment with God, and I decided to distance myself from both. In ninth grade, I went to school in India partly because I wanted to be away from my parents. When I turned eighteen, I moved to South Korea and tried to build a life on my own.
In Seoul, without financial support from my parents, I rented a room barely large enough for a desk and chair. It was at the end of a dark hallway, with only a little light coming through the gaps around the other rooms. Some people lived there while studying for national exams, but many were there simply because they could not afford anything else.
One day, a friend and I went to a labor market looking for part-time work. I saw a man with injured legs who could barely walk asking for a job. When no one would hire him, he knelt and begged. Until then, I had experienced Seoul mainly as an exciting city. Suddenly, I saw suffering that my own ignorance had allowed me to overlook. Jesus’ command to love my neighbor was no longer an abstract religious idea.
My prayers began to change. Instead of asking, “What if my family had never moved?” or “What if my parents had never divorced?” I began asking, “God, what can I do for you? There is so much pain in the world. What can I do?”
So, I went back to church. I entered a worship service where the congregation sang “Amazing Grace,” my grandmother’s favorite hymn. In my memory, I could hear her weak but steady voice. I began to cry. I experienced God not as the one who had abandoned me, but as the one who had remained near even while I was walking away. I later learned that the Wesleyan tradition calls this prevenient grace: God’s grace already at work before we recognize or respond to it.
While serving with the U.S. Army in Korea as a chaplain assistant, I met soldiers who were spiritually hungry but uncertain where they belonged. With the chaplains, I helped begin a 5 a.m. prayer gathering and a Thursday Bible study. Some participants were baptized, and some later became pastors. Many of us still pray for one another. That community helped awaken my pastoral calling again.
Another formative moment came in 2014, following the Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea (304 people died, including 250 high school students who were on a field trip). At a prayer gathering, I met a father who was still waiting for his daughter’s body to be recovered. He told me, “God probably knows my pain because God also lost God’s son.” His words changed my understanding of pastoral ministry. People who are suffering do not always need an explanation for God. Sometimes they need someone who will remain with them long enough for them to encounter the God who is already grieving beside them.
Over the past fifteen years, I have served through campus ministry, youth and children’s ministry, Korean immigrant ministry, Army religious support, hospice chaplaincy, and local church ministry. I currently serve as the lead pastor of Paoli United Methodist Church, where I have been appointed since July 2023, while pursuing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Drew University.
The UMC became a home for me not because it is perfect, but because its theology gave language to what I had experienced: grace that comes before us, grace that meets us in our brokenness, and holiness that is both personal and social. Its connectional life reminds me that the body of Christ is larger than one family, congregation, culture, nation, or generation.
My Korean name, given to me by my grandfather, means “to study forever.” I take that as a spiritual calling. Even as an ordained elder, I understand myself as a pastor in the making—still learning how to listen, love, repent, and serve.
My Hopes for the Leadership Gathering
I often speak of the church as a family, but my own story has taught me not to use that language carelessly. Family can be a source of faith, love, and belonging. Family can also be a source of conflict, absence, disappointment, and deep wounds. Sometimes it is all of those things at once. The same is true of the church.
I hope the Leadership Gathering will make room for both gratitude and grief. We should celebrate the ways the UMC has carried the gospel, formed disciples, pursued justice, and connected people across the world. We must also listen honestly to people who have been ignored, harmed, or made to feel that they did not belong.
In one congregation I served, I heard a longtime member say, “We’re just existing.” She was grieving friends who had died, people who had left, and a church she no longer recognized. In that same congregation, a newcomer said the church had given her “a second chance to live a different life in God’s love.” Both statements were true.
The future of the church cannot be built by dismissing people’s grief, but neither can grief become a reason to prevent new life. I hope the gathering helps us honor what has been entrusted to us while releasing what no longer serves God’s mission.
Because the gathering is consultative rather than legislative, we can worship together, build relationships, tell the truth about our challenges, and imagine possibilities that may not emerge through our usual institutional processes. I hope we can identify some of the root problems facing the church, articulate a compelling and Spirit-breathed vision, and propose bold experiments that can be tested over the next several years.
Most of all, I hope younger generations and global voices will not be treated as additions to a conversation whose direction has already been determined. They must be among the very first voices shaping it.
Living into Our Vision: “Love boldly, serve joyfully, lead courageously”
Through the Leadership Gathering, we will discern together how to live into the renewed United Methodist vision: “The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.”
As I reflect on my own story and the future of The United Methodist Church, this is how I understand that vision:
To love boldly is not to sentimentalize our relationships or pretend that love erases every wound. My own family taught me that people can give us genuine love and still hurt us deeply. Bold love tells the whole truth. It seeks accountability and repair without reducing a person to the worst thing they have done. In the church, it means listening seriously to people who have been harmed and refusing to rush them into easy forgiveness simply because honesty makes us uncomfortable.
To serve joyfully is to participate in God’s mission out of gratitude rather than institutional anxiety. I have encountered that joy in soldiers gathering to pray before sunrise, in hospice rooms where presence mattered more than explanations, and in immigrant families building community across language and generational differences. We do not serve merely to preserve a church. We serve because God’s grace has already met us, and loving our neighbors is part of who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ.
To lead courageously is to choose faith over fear. As an immigrant pastor, I know the temptation to remain quiet, adapt, and be grateful simply to have a place at the table. Courageous leadership sometimes means speaking from that in-between place, naming realities others would rather avoid, sharing power with emerging leaders, and trying faithful experiments without knowing whether they will succeed. It also means recognizing that representation is not the same as authority: inviting people into the room matters only if their voices can influence what happens there.
Good Ancestors
I keep returning to the image of becoming good ancestors. My parents gave me real gifts of faith, and their divorce left me with a real wound. I do not need to deny either truth. My story has taught me that faithful inheritance is rarely simple. We receive love and brokenness together, and then we must decide what we will carry forward, what needs healing, and what we must not pass on unchanged.
Now that I am a husband and father, I am not trying to create the image of a perfect family. I want my son to know that when something is broken, we tell the truth about it. We apologize when we cause harm. We seek help. We remain present. We trust that love can survive honesty.
Perhaps the same is true for the church. Good ancestors are not flawless people who leave behind a spotless institution. They are people who face the truth about what they inherited, take responsibility for what has happened in their time, repair what they can, and plant seeds for a future they may never see.
My hope is that future generations will be able to say that, in a difficult and uncertain season, we chose faith over fear. We listened for the Holy Spirit, made room for one another, and trusted that grace was still capable of creating something new among us.