My Armenian family owes an enormous debt of gratitude to American Presbyterian mission workers – a debt that goes back to the mid-19th century. My great-great grandparents, Avedis and Antaram Minassian, lived in Sivas, Turkey, when the missionaries came bearing gifts: schools and hospitals and an evangelical expression of their Christian faith. Avedis and Antaram welcomed the mission workers with open arms, and because of the missionaries‘ efforts, girls were educated along with boys – a radical shift in the Armenian culture.
Half a century later, missionaries were the first to get word to President Wilson about the genocide that would claim 1.5 million Armenian lives. Thanks to the missionaries, orphanages were built so children could be saved. It is no wonder that when my grandmother, Esther Kirishian, was given in an arranged marriage to an Apostolic man, she put her 16-year-old foot down and insisted that their children be raised in the Protestant church. My grandfather and father (both dentists), my brother (a physician) and my twin sister and I (both Presbyterian pastors) are all products of the missionaries‘ legacy.
Now, my family owes a new debt of gratitude – not to American mission workers, but to Korean Presbyterians who ministered to our daughter, Anna Shustitzky Sohn. In 2011, when she had just turned 20 years old, Anna joined the Young Adult Volunteer program of the PC(USA). Right out of college, she moved to Daejeon, South Korea, where she spent a year teaching English to elementary school students in an after-school center (not unlike a local, grassroots Boys & Girls Club in the U.S.). She also worked at a soup kitchen and led an ESL (English as a Second Language) conversation group at a local library as well as helping with a youth group at her church.
But it wasn‘t what she gave that changed her. It‘s the gifts she received from the Korean Presbyterians. She learned what it felt like to be the stranger, and to be welcomed in a Korean church – where belonging didn‘t have to depend on the language she spoke. She learned what it meant to have family that is unrelated by blood – “aunts“ and “uncles“ took her under their wing from tutoring her to speak and read in Korean, to teaching her how to love kimchi and bibimbap, to coaching her to a black belt in Taekwondo. She learned how another country deals with poverty and access to resources. She says, “I was inspired by the work I saw at my Korean children‘s center and the local library, where children and families could get quality services without a prohibitively high price tag.“
Anna carries with her still the gifts she received in Korea. When she returned home, she worked at a Boys & Girls Club and volunteered at a library, then returned to school to get her Master’s in Library Science (youth services and community infomatics) to, in her words, “gain an understanding of the social justice issues within the field.“ She‘s a children‘s librarian now, working near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is still learning how to make a difference. And she‘s still a Presbyterian, in no small part to the welcome she received in Korea.
The church she joined? In God‘s Providence, one of her YAV housemates and fellow Korean church members, Thomas Loyd, lives in Albuquerque – and welcomed her into his church, where she finds herself at home again.
