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The call to become a pastor came to Jinwoo Chun at around six years old— an age when most of his peers would have been preoccupied with the newest toy or cartoon. Chun had watched his father lead and minister to Methodist congregations of thousands across South Korea. His father’s lifestyle, one he characterized in Korean as “sharing and caring,” was most attractive—a lifestyle Chun’s father learned from his father, also a Methodist pastor.
“I can say if my father was a police officer, I probably would have dreamed of becoming a police officer at the time,” says Chun (STH’01). “If I became a pastor, probably I would be able to live like him. But I knew nothing about the pastor’s life at the time.”
More than four decades after that first call to ministry—romanticized as it may have been—Chun has pastored churches from Boston to Coventry, R.I., to Belfast, Maine, to Acton, Mass., where he now serves St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church as its lead pastor. It’s a congregation he says is developing a reputation for hospitality to those from all walks of life, including refugee families, individuals reentering society after incarceration, those who are LGBTQ+, and those suffering from food insecurity. His role, he says, is to help parishioners—many of whom work in academia and skew white and wealthy—exit their comfort zones and build relationships with neighbors who are hurting or marginalized.
Sometimes I got looks from my own congregation: ‘Why is our pastor hanging out with the guys with tattoos who are swearing all the time?’ But that’s kind of normal to Jesus’s life. That became my second home.
“The church started with a passion to do something,” he says. “My role is to transform it into something relational, so it’s not about just fulfilling needs: ‘this is something I have, and this is something you don’t have.’ [These acts of mercy are] based on Jesus Christ’s greatest commandments: loving God and loving others.”
Out of the Greenhouse
There’s a Korean word for a child being raised in a sheltered, overprotective environment that translates to “greenhouse” in English. Chun characterizes his younger years as a greenhouse, untouched by the harsher realities of the world. As a preacher’s kid, he attended megachurches his father led in mostly affluent communities in Seoul. But once he began to pursue a life of ministry and mission, “God didn’t leave me alone to continue living in the greenhouse,” Chun says. He attended Methodist Theological Seminary in Seoul, and after briefly considering a move to India to become a missionary, Chun entered the MDiv program at BU.
One of his earliest memories of stepping out of the greenhouse came during an internship at the historic Church of All Nations in Boston’s South End, where Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) once trained while studying at BU. One day, Chun was volunteering with the congregation’s feeding ministry and sat to eat with one of the guests—who was unhoused—only to become physically ill at the unshowered man’s stench. He left sick and in tears, ashamed of his reaction to a fellow human who God loves. His perspective expanded further when he met a young woman working through the trauma of being trafficked to a drug dealer by her father, and encountered a mother and her young son running away from an abusive father who was addicted to drugs. “Is this real?” he remembers thinking. “I thought that was only in extreme, violent movies.”
These experiences, along with gentle nudging from his mentor, Rev. Gary Shaw (STH’78), led Chun to consider staying in New England after graduating from BU to pursue a ministry appointment here. In 2009, he was ordained into the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church. Coming from Christianity in South Korea, where some churches had hundreds of thousands of members, Chun didn’t know if he’d mesh with New England’s smaller congregations. In the end, he says, “God really touched my heart.”
St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church in Acton, Mass. Photo courtesy of Jinwoo Chun
His transformation didn’t end there. Chun was appointed pastor and elder at Belfast United Methodist Church in Belfast, Maine, in 2010, where, in addition to traditional preaching and counseling duties, he began attending a Narcotics Anonymous group that met in the basement of the church building. Not being an addict himself, Chun felt like an imposter at times. Still, he continued to show up, week after week, to sit with, and learn from, neighbors who were on their own journeys from brokenness to healing.
“I saw myself as broken,” he says. “But being broken, I had the faith and hope that they would have a different ending in their story, either on the earth or in the life beyond this life.” He never tried to get his new friends to attend services upstairs; if anything, he worked to make the congregation’s worship services more reflective of the authenticity he experienced at the NA meetings. Over five years, members of the NA community became his friends, and Chun would spend time with them outside of meetings. “Sometimes I got looks from my own congregation: ‘Why is our pastor hanging out with the guys with tattoos who are swearing all the time?’” he recalls. “But that’s kind of normal to Jesus’s life. That became my second home.”
A Home for the Marginalized
In July 2020, Chun was appointed lead pastor at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church. Leaving the friends he’d met at NA was one of the hardest aspects of the move, he says. Every now and again, someone on his NA group chat will suddenly stop responding, and Chun knows they have succumbed to the disease they fought so bravely.
Moving to a new congregation in the middle of a pandemic presented other challenges and opportunities—beyond the implications of uprooting his family. (Chun’s wife, Hyeweon, works as an organic chemist, and his son, Joshua, studies biochemistry at Northeastern University.) The first services Chun presided over were remote because of the COVID-19 pandemic, making group worship and congregational cohesiveness difficult. At the same time, Chun scheduled one-on-one and small group sessions with each member, where he focused on spiritual formation and relationship-building. “I think that’s one of the reasons God chose me for St.Matthew’s,” Chun says. “We had a lot of different outreach programs because they have passion for justice, and I’ve been trying to do my best to help people understand how your faith works in that process—why we are doing what we’re doing.”
God chose me for St. Matthew’s…to do my best to help people understand how your faith works in that process—why we are doing what we’re doing.
Rev. Jinwoo Chun
And under Chun’s leadership and inspiration, the congregation is doing a lot. Despite the relative affluence of Acton—and many of the parishioners at St. Matthew’s—the area still has plenty of opportunities for social justice work. St. Matthew’s members minister to individuals being released from prison through their WELCOMEBACK pack program, which provides bags full of everyday necessities to those who are reentering community life. As he went from room to room in the church building, putting items like toiletries, notebooks, and books in the 48 backpacks the congregation gave away in 2022, Chun says, he was reminded of the metaphorical journey incarcerated neighbors have taken to and away from prison. “I was praying for them, and I was able to participate in their hurt, their journey,” he says. Chun says he would like to now help lead the church’s new mission, outreach, and advocacy to expand beyond meeting material needs to making more relational connections, like traveling to prisons to visit inmates.
The congregation’s commitment to refugees and migrants is also near to Chun’s own heart, in part because it’s his story. Chun preaches regularly what he sees as a clear scriptural directive to welcome “strangers” and “aliens” in a foreign land and reminds parishioners that even Jesus was an immigrant. In early 2022, the congregation adopted two Afghan families who the International Institute of New England helped resettle in nearby towns. Members, including Chun, would drop by to say hello, take them out for ice cream, and generally ensure they had what they needed as they settled into their new lives in the United States. A few parishioners who work in higher education are helping an older teenager in one of the families plan for life after high school, whether that’s college or something else.
The outreach has made an impact. Last summer, after Chun dropped off an air conditioner for one of the families as temperatures soared in Massachusetts, the father sent him a text asking how old the pastor is. When they realized Chun was a year older than the Afghan father, the man started calling Chun “big brother.”
“My big brother,” Chun recalls the father writing, in broken English, “we cannot thank you enough. It’s more than just one air conditioner, it’s our heart.”