The Church Copy Machine

This might sound strange, but it just might be the copy machine that grew the Korean immigrant church.

As a Pastor's Kid, I spent many-a-nights watching my dad make the "jubo" (Sunday worship bulletin) in his office on the copy machine. It was a serious process that required serious skill or Sunday worship (and probably all of Christianity and Korean culture) could have been ruined.

What he had to do was, first, print out what he wanted on the jubo. Then, he had to cut those things out in rectangles and then lay them out on another piece of 8.5" x 11" paper - affixing them with clear tape. After that, he had to use the copy machine for just one copy of that which would produce a flat sheet of paper. If everything looked right, he made like 50 or 100 or whatever copies of those.

Those get put aside.

Now, he had to do the same for the other side of the "jubo," except that, instead of making 50 to 100 copies of those, he had to get the stack of the copies that were put aside, put that into the paper holder (or whatever it's called) so that the "other side" would print on the other side of the first page copies.

You get me?

If anything went wrong with this process, it would be frustrating. There were multiple points of failure. For example, it could be that there was a typo somewhere. Or, it could be that the tape started to show in the copies. Or, it could be that the "other side" was printed upside down so that when it folded and you opened it, it would be upside down. It could even be the copy machine itself - like the inside - where a sheet or two got stuck when the machine got too hot and such.

Or, maybe it ran out of "toner" - my God, those toners.

Now, let's say that the copy machine broke - guess who my dad would call to fix it? He would call a Korean immigrant copy machine fixing person. And, let's say that the church needed a new machine - guess who my dad would buy from? He would buy from a Korean immigrant copy machine selling person. It's not that he was trying to exclude anyone else - those were the people with whom he could communicate and who he found in the Korean "yellow pages." This thing was growing the Korean immigrant economy just by being inside of my dad's office.

The copy machine also grew the church. It made jubos, flyers, and posters - everything that you needed for evangelism and revival meetings. And, every once in a while, my dad would say something like, "We used to make like 50 jubos. But, now we make like 150 a week. The church is growing."

Looking back now, I can see how formative the copy machine was for me in terms of both my ethnic culture as well as faith journey.

First, I believe that these two (faith and ethnicity) often overlap and I think we need to be more honest and up front about that. Secondly, I quickly concluded that ministry meant being proficient in more than things like "the Bible," or the worship service, or what might be considered "church things." And, finally, while the Church needed to make copies of things, it could not and should not make copies of disciples. There were plenty of Korean immigrant church people who used copy machines - no two of them were exactly the same. And, as both our people and our churches grow, so will our diversity grow - perhaps that is exactly the way that it should be.