이주민에 대한 한국교회의 대응: 다문화교회의 형성 사례 연구

초록

Korean society has become more and more multiracial and multicultural in the global age as the number of foreign immigrants has steadily increased in Korea. Religious organizations are thus confronted with multi-cultural issues since they have played leading roles with regard to social integration in Korea. A variety of religions are committed to evangelizing immigrants or supporting their human rights or overall well-being. As a result, multicultural churches have emerged. However, there has been little research up to this point on the process of constructing a multicultural church. This research explores how one individual church has adopted certain “cultural strategies” (Swidler 1986) in order to embrace immigrants, and how it has become a multicultural church. We conducted fieldwork at a progressive Protestant multicultural church from March to August in 2010. Our qualitative data analyses reveal the following findings: Initially, the utilitarian logic of religious markets is appropriate to explain how the church began to confront immigrants as potential new members. However, the humanitarian attitude of the church played a more significant role than a solely evangelical approach; for ministers and members of their congregation viewed immigrants as the Lord to be served, not as mere objects to be baptized. In addition, the church utilized both symbolic and institutional frames as cultural strategies. In terms of the symbolic frames, the church changed its mission statement to enlarge the church’s collective identity; and the ministers adopted multicultural identities through proactive discourses such as their sermons. Institutional frames were also important for establishing a multicultural community in such areas as supporting ethnic communities, shifting decision-making processes to include representatives of ethnic communities, administrating various religious rituals within ethnic communities or beyond national boundaries, and providing social services for immigrants’ well-being. Despite these efforts, as in cases of multicultural churches in the United States, the dominant (Korean) ethnicity-centered culture and power structure calls for further reflection on the journey to truly become a multi cultural church.

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