Missionaries from New York Plainview United Methodist Church minister to abandoned children in Sri Lanka.
New York Plainview United Methodist Church has been recognized as one of the churches that are most involved in overseas missions in the Korean immigrant church community. Plainview UMC recently started "continental missions" as a result of an enormous participation in mission trips by its congregation, and this new program has started a transformation in how the Korean immigrant church could approach going on overseas missions.
"Continental missions" started after Reverend Won Keun Kang took on the position as a senior pastor at Plainview UMC. He felt that it would be effective to choose one specific country that is particularly destitute for each continent, and to focus on those countries by supporting them with missionaries, physical needs, and financial support. The congregation has been at the center of the process of selecting those areas and being sent to those areas as missionaries as well.
Some of the countries to which the church has been sending missionaries include Peru for the continent of South America; Sri Lanka for Asia; and Russia for Europe, among others. Ethiopia is being considered among two to three other countries for the continent of Africa. Aside from continental missions, Plainview Church has also been participating in missional work in North Korea and in the United States.
The church has also been heavily involved in mission work at Paraguay thus far, investing $200,000 in Paraguay missions each year. Such a grand scale of mission work is rarely found in the many churches in the larger New York and New Jersey region, and the church has been seeing much fruit from their mission work in Paraguay.
The recently launched continental missions program is not intended for an expansion in the area that the church covers for its mission work, but rather to be more effective in the mission work that the church and the missionaries carry out. With enthusiastic participation from the church congregation, the continental missions program has been successfully established.
At the start of the continental missions program, the Plainview UMC congregation first created committees in charge of each continent, which then carried out thorough research of their respective areas. The committees then sent out visitors to each continent to see the mission field firsthand, and to decide which specific areas need the most help.
Although the program has only recently been launched, enthusiastic participation from the church members has been bearing much fruit. In Peru, the church has been doing mission work in a desert area in which there is no electricity, and has been doing ministry in tents. The church has already sent tens of thousands of dollars in offering to the area, and has started building a church there.
In Sri Lanka, the church has been ministering to abandoned children. Plainview UMC's missionaries met a missionary who had been ministering to the blind and drug addicts in Sri Lanka, and the Plainview UMC missionary in the country has committed to serve there full time.
At the launch of continental missions, Reverend Kang said, "Missions was our Lord's last command, so every person in the church must take ownership and participate."
"In order to carry this purpose out, we didn't want to force our congregation to participate in missions. Instead, we wanted to create a missional environment in which everyone would feel a desire and excitement to participate in missions," he added. "We felt that it would appeal to the congregation to have them choose for themselves which areas in each continent has the most need." Indeed, allowing the congregation to choose the regions did result in an increase in participation and interest in missions in general.
Plainview UMC had been holding annual mission conferences since 2012, at which Korean missionaries who had been doing ministry all over the world had attended. These missionaries, as well as missionaries from Plainview UMC, would share powerful and tearful testimonies of how God had been moving in their respective mission fields. These conferences had been influential in widening the perspective of the congregation of Plainview UMC towards world missions.
Among many reasons for which these missionaries were able to get connected with the mission conferences is that Reverend Kang, while he had been a student at Yale University, had developed a relationship with Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC), of which Reverend Kang had developed a personal relationship with Dr. Jonathan Bonk, the Executive Director Emeritus at OMSC.
Plainview UMC stated that their purpose is world missions, and has confirmed that they would be able to continue in expanding their mission work as their ministry in five continents had become established.
