Private Passion

By Andrew Schwartz

Andrew Schwartz is a United Methodist Local Pastor in Chesapeake, VA. He is the father of 3 kids who keep life "circus-esque" and fun. He is married to Allison, a Chiropractor. They are finding spiritual and physical healing to be quite a powerful journey and calling in life.

Jang-Mi Min was a person of private passion. Reserved to most, she was said by those closest to her to have an electric current of desire, for a few things, pulsing through her. Jang-Mi would be overlooked by most professional headhunters, bosses, and playground popular kids. And this would be a huge mistake.

Getting to know Jang-Mi is the equivalent of finding an unexpected hobby that gives continuous joy; something you can’t wait to get off work to immerse your mind in and allow your anxieties to melt. I first met Jang-Mi while we were both studying Philosophy at New York University, a place neither of us ever expected to be, in a program we both loved but knew we would have a hard time proving the value of to our parents.

She was there on scholarship, leaving Seol a few months after high school, with loose plans of entering Pastoral ministry down the road. I wasn't religious before meeting her. I came from a Liberal family who smugly looked down on the fascism and anesthetization that religion seemed to produce—trust me, my father could find plenty of evidence he was proud to point out. After growing close to Jang-Mi, I became what I call a closet religious practitioner. I have yet to “come out” to my dad, which would give him another aneurysm and shorten his life by at least three years. But this was of course, all before the crash.

Thanks to her, I have had a growing, unexplainable fascination with spiritual practice. She never planned on infecting me with this, or maybe she did, but either way I don’t care now.

Jang-Mi encountered spiritual community through a series of profound spiritual experiences in a Korean United Methodist faith community in what she describes as a “movement” in Seol. After Jang-Mi, myself, and a few of our friends become pretty close, closer than I have ever been to a group of people, we began to experiment with different forms of prayer, based off of Jang-Mi’s Korean prayer practices back home. This was how I began to understand Jang-Mi more fully. There was passion, there were tears, there was lots of silence; elongated periods of focused waiting. At first it freaked me the hell out, and she warned me as much. But I trusted her, and I wanted to experience what she had, the immovable peace that always accompanied her. My dad would be more comfortable with me playing Ouija Board and communing with my Confederate fighting relatives of years gone by, than practicing and experiencing prayer this way.

As our prayer and community gradually deepened in our little band of random friends, I felt things unlock inside of me that I had only known partially how much I was imprisoned by. My insecurity slowly morphed into a deep rest. My desire for isolation and privacy slowly churned into a desire for more of this kind of community and connection. Jang-Mi and our small group of non-conformists expressed similar experiences. It became almost magnetic. It is like you were brought to a place of unexplainable peace and hope again and again and this brought an awareness and a joy to our living that I never had before. And no, there were no psychedelics or mushrooms involved. Whatever pulled us in (Jang-Mi says “wooed,” but that sounds nuts) as cautiously curious, rather selfish twenty somethings, gradually formed us into what felt like whole persons, committed to becoming aware of the ways our lives and our world’s systems had been tools of oppression and apathy.

After a long, formational, sometimes frustrating process (her words, not mine), Jang-Mi became a United Methodist Pastor in 2012 in a small community of faith in Brooklyn, NY. She had a hell of a time in her first few years. After years of us leaning on her at NYU, it was refreshing to allow her to lean on us during her first years leading a church. Apparently Korean young women are in high demand in the church, because she had offer after offer to serve at various kinds of large churches in various cities around the country and even back home in Seoul. She turned them all down and stayed with the forty-five people in that gentrifying neighborhood for the next seventeen years. It grew very slowly, but never really exploded. I went mostly regularly, and it was never much like the church a few blocks away with lots of lights and sound systems and websites with tithing options and paid musicians and reserved “guest” parking. Really the only thing Jang-Mi did at that church was the same thing she did with us back at NYU, the same thing she had always done: teach them to pray, teach them to be. I know, I know, that sounds so silly and oversimplified. But I was there and witnessed what happened over those seventeen years and what happened after.

The 2030 economic collapse, which led to our current 32% unemployment rate in the US, and our dependence on the newly formed Asian Coalition, led our country into the worst economic depression we have ever experienced. Skyrocketing rage towards the sick system that propagated this disaster created tinder for a social explosion and an all-out riot-fueled environment in most American cities. A debilitating anxiety held a death grip on the country.

But by the time of the collapse, an alternative reality had taken root in our little faith community with Jang-Mi as our Shepherd: depth of community, vulnerability, and trust amidst this anxiety saturated culture. Creativity and hope formed out of trust and grace. Her faithfulness over those seventeen years with a little, forgotten United Methodist community of faith in Brooklyn, NY, had created a fertile blossoming when it mattered most.

However at this point, to use the antiquated term “United Methodist Church” was like saying a “Macintosh Computer” back at the turn of the century.

That institution was laid to rest years ago in 2020, resources were sold off, pensions were given to anyone over 55, and all property was either sold to each congregation at 35% above market value, making it impossible for most communities to purchase, or sold to NASA for what came to be called a “Space-ous Exit.” NASA used the valuable church buildings for “Biological Orbital Onyx Mission” or “BOOM”, attempting to form beta groups that would inhabit other planets, the first of which was sent to the moon’s Lunar Commune in 2025. In an attempt to continue the history and institution of the United Methodist Church, a few Bishops and leaders of that former institution litigated a deal to be on that first BOOM team, or what they required to be called BOOM committee, and established the first and only Lunar religious institution, aptly named Lunar Memorial United Methodist Church. However, the BOOM became bogged down in bureaucracy and the first mission was a bust. The second BOOM is scheduled to launch to Mars in the next four months, but requires a two thirds vote before launch can happen.

Back on earth, Jang-Mi and our little spiritual community was forced to move out of our Brooklyn church building. As we continued meeting in any place we could, we learned that NASA was only using one or two rooms at former UMC buildings for BOOM beta-experiments.

Thanks to an individual who had joined the spiritual community years before and had the ear of a decision maker at NASA, we began to ponder, and, of course, pray about rethinking and renewing what was once church space. Somehow, eventually we were granted permission to come back into our little old Methodist church in Brooklyn. What happened in the months and years after is nothing short of miraculous.

The rehabitation of church buildings spread until all but two UMC buildings in the NYC area had “spiritual families” living together. In these former buildings, groups of folks who had no work and could no longer afford the financial and emotional cost of city life, began living with folks who came from the opposite end: folks who gave up their property and lifestyle to live in a new way that could create a new reality and depth of relationships both groups were starving for.

Each group, or “spiritual family,” took on their own identity: artist communes, trade schools, day cares, preschools and education centers, alternative and experimental financial and micro-loan institutions, end of life care, automobile repair shops, soup kitchens, recovery homes, communities for the disabled, fair trade and locally made markets, locally sourced grocery markets, the list goes on and on.

This began to spread to Chicago, then Baltimore, then Atlanta, then Mexico City, then parts of Africa and London and Eastern Europe.

Ironically, every “spiritual family” now in existence continues to have at its core this weekly gathering of passionate prayer practice, life-formation, vulnerability and trust which fuels an innovative and creative expression, meeting needs and pulsating this same electrical current of desire, peace, and hope that first drew me to Jang-Mi Min.

She talks about how funny it is that this whole Methodist thing started with something similar so long ago, but I don’t know much about that.