Our speaker today, Pastor Choi, will be joining our church as an Assistant Pastor in January. He will take over some of Pastor Sookwan Lee’s current responsibilities when he becomes Senior Pastor. Pastor Choi will also be involved in the singles’ ministry and will eventually take it over from Pastor Lee.
Since the position of assistant pastor involves working for our future senior pastor, I let Pastor Lee decide who to hire. I believe he made an excellent choice.
When I choose coworkers, I look for three qualities: First, are they successful in what they do? Second, do they have good relationship skills? Third, are they faithful in ministry? Pastor Choi passed these three tests with flying colors.
Pastor Choi pastors a Korean church in Statesborough, Georgia, a small city of 60,000 people. When he first moved there, there were 35 Koreans living in the area. Soon, 27 of them came to the church. Some time later a chicken processing factory was built and many Koreans came to work there. Additionally, Koreans started to come to nearby Georgia Southern University as faculty members and students. The Korean population increased to about 250. Currently, 170 of them attend his church, 79% of the city’s entire Korean population. He’s clearly been successful in what he’s doing.
About 10 years ago, he came to Houston to study and became our church member. During the year and a half that he was with us, he made many friends and not a single enemy; I haven’t met anyone who speaks ill of him. He’s clearly skilled in human relationships.
His church meets at a 128-year-old American church, whose Sunday worship attendance is about 1,200. The hosting church accepted Pastor Choi as their own staff member, which is unusual. The reason for this was that he earned their respect. At first they thought he might have marital problems because they saw him at church early in the morning and late at night. When they learned that he was there in the morning to pray and at night to teach Bible classes, they were so impressed that they invited him to their regular staff meetings, feeling that he had something for them to learn from. His faithfulness in ministry is obvious.
He received his BA from Daejeon Baptist University in Korea, and his MDiv from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He was in charge of administration and the children’s department at a church in North Carolina for three years before he was invited to his current church three and a half years ago.
God has blessed our church with good staff members. It seems that God has added another blessing to our church.
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