Author: Eugene Cho

As I’m writing this, I’m on an airplane en route to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It’s a long flight starting from Seattle and making stops in Chicago and Fort Lauderdale before arriving in Haiti early Friday morning. I’ll write about the purpose of the trip to Haiti in my next entry.

But I wanted to share a bit with my blog community about the ongoing tension of balance, priorities, schedules, focus, goals, joy, etc.

Minhee and I have started three organization in the past 9 years – Quest, Q Cafe, and One Day’s Wages. Not small things but ventures that have required a great amount of time, commitment, sacrifice, energy, funds, courage, stupidity, prayers, and collaboration.

On top of that, my marriage and my family are very important to me. Not just important on paper or for the sake of sermons but important for my heart and soul. Having said that, I don’t want to hold marriage or family as idolatries in my life. Or in other words, my desire to serve God certainly includes my identities as husband and father but is not encompassed by only these two things.

Marriage is not my God. Family is not my God. They are Continue reading “maybe it’s not supposed to feel right”

This is a follow up to the post from last month where I asked you to define “success” as a pastor and leader.

Here are some of my thoughts:

We regularly hold this in tension, don’t we? The Scriptures in themselves don’t define success for pastors…very successfully. It shares to some extent what leaders ought to be doing and how but to my reading, it doesn’t elaborate on the metrics by which we “assess” ourselves and yet, we all live in a culture – including the church culture – where we have both codified and mostly un-codified metrics that determine what “successful” pastors look like.

And thus, we live in this constant tension.  Having said that, I try to live out my faith and calling through these questions and categories: Continue reading “defining success as a pastor and leader”

One of the most painful things I have encountered in my 18 years thus far as a pastor are the stories of sexual abuse amongst the people I love and am learning to love and serve.

As a pastor, I am to listen, learn, shepherd, teach, protect, empower, and [insert other words here].  But the stories of sexual abuse – most often in the hands of people that were supposed to love, nurture, and protect them – anger me beyond words. Honestly, there are times, I can’t contain that anger…

I really wish that there were only a handful of stories but the sad truth is that there have been numerous – including a few that were sexually abused at the hands of their pastors or spiritual leaders.  And these are just the folks that have felt comfortable sharing their pain. I suspect that there are many more. In fact, Continue reading “the painful stories of sexual abuse”