Worship Arts team heads for Korea in May 2008
April 3, 2008
A team of Worship Arts students is preparing to travel to South Korea at the invitation of a Baptist church located south of Seoul. Accompanying them will be Dan Shuholm, Director of Bands and Worship Arts, and Junggi Hong, who served as an assistant professor in human performance during 2006 and 2007. The team will leave May 8 and return on May 19.
 Members of the Korea team gather at the home of Dan Shuholm, Director of Bands and Worship Arts, to prepare for their upcoming trip. Pictured are (back) Josh Clarke, Shuholm; and (on couch) Ben King, Joel Cruz, Megan Brannen, Justine Sowers, and Junggi Hong, former Corban faculty member. Team member Caleb Paden is not shown. |
Students going on the trip are Justine Sowers, Megan Brannen, Joshua Clarke, Joel Cruz, Ben King and Caleb Paden. They were chosen for the team in December and have been meeting each month since January to prepare for the trip. According to Shuholm, “We’re preparing our hearts and learning Korean phrases. In getting our tour repertoire ready, we’d like to do Korean praise songs, and we plan to do hymns and North American songs in Korean, also.”
The team’s destination is Chunbook, Choongnam, Korea where they’ll be serving the Chunbook Sinheung Church. The team plans to work with the church musicians to help them grow in their worship leading skills. They may also offer their help to a Christian school and seminary in the community. During the trip, members will stay with families of the church they’re serving and develop relationships.
“They’ve asked us to help them in their worship ministry,” said Shuholm. “The church would like to add contemporary elements to their worship service and learn about worship from a North American perspective. Our desire is to learn more about Korean worship and be servants to them while we’re there.”
Hong, a native of South Korea, said, “The students will see how God has blessed Korean churches and Christianity in that culture, as well as some of the struggles that Korean churches have been dealing with, especially with various styles of worship.”
Currently the worship leader at First Baptist Church in Corvallis, Hong looks forward to leading worship on tour in his homeland. He added, “The trip is not performance-based, but truly trying to seek God’s will in this worship ministry.”
Shuholm said it has been a priority of his since he joined the faculty in 2003 to take a Corban worship team to another culture. He and his wife, Karla, have previous experience from their three trips to Brazil. This is the first time such a team has gone from Corban.
“We tend to limit God because of our own understanding,” he said. “Worshipping in a different culture brings us another sense of awareness--that He can interact with other cultures without any sense of confusion. There’s something very powerful about that. It shows us how expansive God is and what He is doing today outside our own culture. It broadens our idea of who God is and shows how small we are.”
According to Hong, “This trip will help both the church and our students better understand what worship really means and how we can be the worshippers God is looking for in this generation.”
