It is hard to imagine someone better suited than Kim for this complex role. “Evangelicalism really needs to embrace the reality that we are in a pluralistic society, and we’re going to need to figure out what it means to be an influence for good as a participant-as a member of the choir-and not as the conductor.” “If evangelicals seek to be the kind of Good News people of Jesus Christ, there should be a capaciousness, a curiosity, a willingness to engage for the common good,” he said during an April panel discussion on “Faltering Faith in Institutions” at Princeton Theological Seminary. While attempting to build bridges all around, he and other NAE leaders are also shepherding a new kind of evangelicalism: one that is perhaps more intellectually inclined, less political-and, based on shifting demographics, not nearly as white. “Evangelicalism really needs to embrace the reality that we are in a pluralistic society.” Characterizing those with whom we disagree is a national sport. Labeled too extreme by the right, ultraright, and the left, “somehow, I am simultaneously this and that,” he says. At the same time, he’s been asked to help explain and sometimes defend a movement viewed by many in the secular world as a monolith of Trumpist zealots. Kim has spent the last three years amplifying core religious tenets-trying to heal, unify, and revitalize a community splintered by politicization. It now represents millions of people across 40 denominations-Pentecostal, Wesleyan, and Presbyterian among them-along with scores of ministries and institutions, including The Salvation Army. The umbrella organization was founded in 1942 as a “third way” neo-evangelical solution to the acrid debate between fundamentalist and modernist Protestant strains. It has been challenging, he modestly notes. But he could not have foreseen that his adolescent commitment to Christ would land him, in 2020, as president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and in the maelstrom of American partisan politics. That “born-again” conversion, a pillar of evangelical faith, led him to campus ministries and to study the ancient world at Harvard, and then on to become pastor of Boston’s historic Park Street Church. And literally, there in the parking lot, I prayed to embrace Christ in my life as my savior.” “And that of course led to a conversation about the sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of humanity and the forgiveness of sins. “‘Did Obi-Wan Kenobi die so that everyone else would be able to escape the Death Star? Did that remind you of anyone?’” Kim recalls, smiling. At the end of the season, the man took the kids to see Star Wars, sparking discussion afterward. It was Kim alone, then, the summer before high school, who felt drawn to a youth program led by a Baptist pastor. Religious institutions played benevolent roles-his father trained at a Catholic medical school in South Korea, and missionaries were among those who helped the couple reach and resettle in the United States in 1966-but they were not believers. The pair ultimately immigrated to New York City, where Walter was born and spent his first eight years within a vibrant Korean American community before the family moved to western Pennsylvania. He got to Seoul, where he met and married a young woman. After the Korean War, his father escaped communist southern China by crossing the Taedong River hidden inside a barrel. ’07, tells the short version of his parents’ migration.
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