Drew University Library : University Archives : Theses and Dissertations
    
author Heekyung Kim
title Global Citizen Education through Expanding Church's Publicity: A Case Study of Healing Church
abstract The Korean church is in need of renewal amidst major and small crises. If the reason for the crisis is completely from the outside, it may not be a big problem, but if it comes from the damage to the complete gospel from within, proper introspection, inspection and recovery of the mistakes made are required.

The role of the public sphere has been shown to be missing among the elements that the Korean church should essentially pursue. This is evidenced by the decline in trust in Christianity that has continued for over 10 years from the perspective of society and their image as exclusive and duplicitous. And the results are now coming back to us as a direct answer to the question of what is actually missing and requested: a public role.

Where should we start and how should we approach this public role? Contributing to publicness and participating in public roles requires more than simply the church doing something good outside the church. This is because there has been no social participation or social service by the church in the meantime. According to the world's perception, Protestantism was never perceived as having less social service than other religions. However, it is important that the volunteer work did not serve as an improvement in trustworthiness as a factor in looking at Protestantism and the Korean church in a positive light. When I looked into why this was the case, I found out that the Korean church's volunteer work was seen as a narrow-minded service that they prepared, carried out, and finished on their own without the purpose of missionary work or communication with the world. Therefore, the church's public participation must include openness, which is an important part of the elements of publicness. It is not important what you do, but the process of doing something must include a process of communicating and reaching agreement with the world and asking them what the region and society need in order to be a good deed toward a world that truly functions publicly. Because there is.

In this process, the framework for public participation that is required of the times and is consistent with the essence of biblical gospel spreading and neighborly love is establishing global citizenship. Global citizenship aims for a character that pursues global and universal values, including concerns about problems that the world must solve together in keeping with the era of globalization.

In this context, this paper emphasizes the need for public sector participation in the recovery of the Korean church and emphasizes the suitability of Christian global citizenship education in its practical methods. An analysis of how the themes and values of global citizenship education meet the needs of the times will explain that this practical framework can be a good tool and model for the church to fulfill its public role. Furthermore, in the context of Korean churches where there are not many existing cases of global citizenship education conducted within churches, the results of the experience, evaluation, and participants' impressions of the practice of Christian global citizenship education conducted at Healing Church in Hwagok-dong show the public nature of the church through these tools. We hope that it will serve as an outlook on what positive meaning this approach can have.

school The Theological School, Drew University
degree D.Min. (2024)
advisor Byungho Zho
Leonard Sweet
committee Yonglae Kim
full textHKim.pdf