Anne Rhee (not her real name) recalled when she began to kiss a male friend from church. Min Joshua Chung founded Covenant Fellowship Church in 1990 as an outreach effort to local college students. AsAmNews is a community of users interested in reading, learning and commenting on news, events, people & issues in the Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities. Attorney Laura Dunn, a contracted institutional response specialist with GRACE, said many of the people with whom she spoke struggled to get through their interviews, some of which took three to four hours. In addition to the alleged sexual assault, the report lists several other allegations against Chung. People close to the woman said she didnt wish to speak to TRR. .mytheme-mejs-container .mejs-embed, .mytheme-mejs-container .mejs-controls .mejs-time-rail .mejs-time-loaded { Charles Zimmerman has been a speaker at One In Love, which Chung founded, and theyve both been main speakers at Global Kingdom Young Adult Missions Festival, where Chung was a board member. .mytheme-mejs-container .mejs-controls .mejs-time-rail .mejs-time-total { Developing Patience for the Slow Work of Justice They gave a couple of examples [of bias], which were tenuous at best, Singer said. Now, former members and others familiar with the church say CFC is quietly reversing course. font-size: 11px; /* Progress and audio bars */ Last summer, hundreds of accounts surfaced online criticizing Covenant Fellowship Church for mishandling alleged incidents of sexual abuse committed by church members. If Chung wished to return to ministry, he would be allowed according to the KCP's ruling. Hi. /* Player controls */ Follow her on Twitter @estheryjkang. transform: translateY(445%); Mark 5:20-34 "Healing Touch" (Pastor Min Chung) Through the Presbyterian Church in America's ruling body, Korean Central Presbytery (KCP), Min Joshua Chung, the founder of the Covenant Fellowship Church (CFC) in Champaign-Urbana, was restored to his post as a minister in April this year. So they think that they can have some level of control of the process some access to information before they get to the final product, Singer said. Chung didnt respond when The Roys Report tried to reach him for comment. Chung reportedly abused a number of congregants at CFC. LeCroy said the procedures and laws of the PCAs Book of Church Order by which churches, presbyteries and pastors abide dictates that the lower court, [the presbyterys] decision is to be respected, and that the SJC often does decide things along procedural grounds, and not the merits of the original case. A judge sentenced 57-year-old Daryl Vandyke on Wednesday after the Champaign man admitted that he used an ax or other sharp-edged garden tool to kill Steven Butler III, in July 2021. He also referred WBEZ to Tim LeCroy, a pastor who chaired the PCAs committee that wrote the domestic and sexual abuse report. He said in a statement to WBEZ that the presbytery is currently working with CFC and is discussing whether to receive the congregation into our jurisdiction. Dr. Min J. Chung is the founding and lead pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church, an interdenominational, multi-ethnic ministry located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. into silence those who knew of the incident, the report states. height: 90px; We lost our church family and community, she said. Photo: Illustration by Andjela Padejski, Photo by Manuel Martinez/WBEZ News, Move over, Bruce Willis: NASA crashed into an asteroid to test planetary defense, Students protest University of Illinois investments related to fossil fuels. While this was happening, the report states, Chung was exercising nearly Godlike authority to pressure his victim and various others whod learned about the incident to stay silent. Sources, including Singer, told WBEZ that CFC was concerned the information-gathering process was biased and that it dug too much into Chungs case, which the church deemed outside the scope of the assessment. Rev. Christie Clinic Race Weekend: Race results and next years preparations. Another promised change was to bring the church under a regional body within the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), to seek more oversight and accountability for its leaders and members. I really did not see this coming, she said. Chung turned over leadership of the church he founded in 2019 to a team of associate pastors, according to Ministry Watch. .mytheme-mejs-container .mejs-time-loaded, Get Your Domain Names Here! A Presbyterian oversight group refused to defrock a Korean American minister following allegations of sexual misconduct, reports Ministry Watch. Min Chung is the founding and senior pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church. "MC (Min Chung) is anointed by God, God only exists at CFC and there is no other place like CFC. Charles Stanley, Atlanta Pastor Who Preached to the World, Dies Pete Singer, GRACEs executive director, called the cancellation very rare, adding he is aware of just one other organization that has done the same. WILL and the Illinois Newsroom are committed to bringing you in-depth, relevant coverage that keeps you informed and engages you with our community and state. For Janet Park and other members of the group that filed the initial allegations against Chung and the CFC pastors, the GRACE termination felt like a particularly painful blow. We remind him to abide by the BCO (Book of Church Order), and we believe that he should return to ministry.. A sexual assault victim who wished to remain anonymous, but whose identity TRR confirmed, said that CFCs culture discouraged reporting sexual assault to police. height: 90px; We see this is the third article this month youve found worth reading. I personally do it for the survivors. The Roys Report Last August, shortly after the WBEZ report was published, the same group of pastors from the KCP appealed the case, which went to the PCAs Standing Judicial Commission (SJC), a quasi-judicial body of sorts, according to several sources. kept the alleged sexual assault from church leaders and his wife, The commission ruled the KCP had made procedural errors during its initial look at the allegations against Chung, according to Brian Park, one of the pastors in that presbytery who filed the complaint to the SJC. Webmastro's downtown los angeles opening date. The motion to rescind the KCP decision needed a two-thirds vote in favor. Chungs church reckoned him to have an especially high place of anointing, making him untouchable when he does wrong, said Dan Lee, another whistleblower in the report. She is convinced she would have been raped if he could. Diane Langberg, a prominent psychologist and leading voice on abuse within church communities, said CFCs termination of the GRACE assessment is yet another move to silence the individuals the church has hurt. Moreover, for the sake of god, Min Chung had carried out various beneficial things for the duration of his life. Pastor Chung was claimed and accused in the scandal for certain genuine wrongdoings of sexual and obnoxious attack. In addition, his embarrassment was examined and discovered by numerous people on Reddit. He also spoke at youth and college-aged events, counseled university students, and preached in several countries. } Chung discouraged her from reporting the incident to police. Langberg helped an ad interim committee of the PCA write a new report on domestic and sexual abuse in churches. In one instance, Chung assaulted a woman in the back seat of a car in 2001, the report alleges. At least 90 have been discovered so far. WebHe is a bi-vocational pastor and has been in the animation industry for over 10 years. Rhee told WBEZ she reported the incident to Pastor Chung. There were also claims of pastors making sexual comments to teen attendees, officials brushing off sexual assault claims, and a general setting where women were seemingly less valued than men. font-size: 13px .mytheme-mejs-container .mejs-controls .mejs-horizontal-volume-slider .mejs-horizontal-volume-current, It was just like, Why, why did we do this all in vain? Park said. what happened to pastor min chung .mytheme-mejs-container .mejs-time-float-current, .mytheme-mejs-container.mejs-container, Nothing was put in place, to my knowledge, to keep me safe from him. Do share this story to encourage others to pray too. I am probably going to get myself in trouble making this next statement but the context was always a sense of Hyper-Complimentarianism or some hybrid form of it because the Denomination that I refereed of believed in women Pastors but the culture was steeped with this type of theological thinking. For investigators at GRACE, CFCs decision to terminate the assessment is a highly unusual move. All rights reserved.Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. [Churches and presbyteries] are not trained to look into [abuse], Langberg said. Covenant Fellowship Church - IL - Our History font-size: 10px Why do you think youre staying for so long? . My experience is that more gets done for the perpetrator versus the victim. The decision came before an investigation by WBEZ of Pastor Min Joshua Chung of the Covenant Fellowship Church on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. Kim, who is currently the churchs senior pastor, previously said Chung had admitted to touching a female over the clothing for a brief moment about 20 years ago but had immediately stopped when she asked him to. Victims of abuse who express their grievances on social media, who protest, who take their stories to the media theyre like that woman in that parable, LeCroy said. In our previous meetings, they had acknowledged that [Chungs case was] within the scope, so Im not certain why that changed.. In 2019, Chung told two associate pastors in a vague and minimized confession that he had sexually touched a woman from his congregation, the whistleblower report states. Go to our Twitter feed and Facebook page for more content. A final assessment was set to be published by this summer. Later, the victim called a friend and told her what Chung had done. Serving with a denomination as a District Leader I saw leaders shuffled to different churches who were related to significant people in the denomination who continued to act our inappropiately on women and it was imply ignored or excused. Last summer, amid the outcry that resulted from the revelations by an Instagram account called @letters_from_rahab, CFC said it would cut financial ties to the pastor and hire a third-party group to do a full investigation. It contracted with an organization called Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE) to assess the church and its response to allegations of abuse. Several survivors would ask theKorean Central Presbytery(KCP), a denominational oversight group, to investigate Chung's inappropriate touching incident before WBEZ's reporting. But theres, of course, a lot under the surface as well, he added. Founded by investigative journalist Julie Roys, The Roys Report began as a personal blog where Julie published her commentaries and occasional investigative pieces while In this case, Id say this is the logical result of Korean Cultures Confucian-infused hierarchy: father-son, king-subject, husband-wife, elder-younger, friend-friend (where one is above the other in rank). In April, the Korean Central Presbytery received an eight-page report summarizing its investigative teams findings and recommendations. A church in Urbana-Champaign reverses on promises to address Give a gift of $30 or more to The Roys Report this month, and you will receive a copy of Jesus v. Evangelicals: A Biblical Critique of a Wayward Movement by Constantine Campbell. Sources at GRACE told WBEZ that the group had conducted interviews with more than 40 former and present CFC members, many of whom spent hours talking about their experiences. Prominent Korean-American Pastor Back In Pulpit