Dr. Charlene Jin Lee

Dr. Charlene Jin Lee

A Note from the APNC

Eleven months ago, you entrusted this Associate Pastor Nominating Committee (APNC) with the responsibility of hiring an Associate Pastor for Practice and Formation, someone who would help lead and care for our congregation. You have prayed and waited faithfully…and waited some more! We, in turn, have been meeting, praying, discussing, discerning, and waiting as well. We have felt your support throughout this journey, and we thank you for it.

Now it is with great joy that we introduce to you Dr. Charlene Jin Lee, our Associate Pastor for Practice and Formation nominee.

Charlene is an experienced teacher and pastor whose ministerial career path began in 1998 in the field of Education. During the next several years, while obtaining her Master of Education and Ph.D. in Christian Education degrees, Charlene served as a children and family Pastor and a Director of Christian Education. For the past ten years, Dr. Lee has served on the Advanced Pastoral Studies Faculty at the Graduate School of Theology at University of Redlands, California. Her colleagues and the APNC members describe her as faithful, compassionate, strong, and hopeful.

Charlene’s Story

For Charlene, practice and theology always remain in dialogue with one another. This is clear in a story from her time serving as a hospital chaplain in the early, terrifying days of Covid. She wrote of her experience on Ash Wednesday that year, “On the floors…that day, I had begun sensing the holy mystery of rituals as I marked those waiting for healing and those accompanying the sick with dust of our common mortality.”

Charlene blends her educational intelligence with a strong faith and gift of compassion, a firm foundation for her role as our associate pastor. We cannot wait for you to meet Charlene, her husband James, and her children Harold, Frances, and Kate, and to join with them in God’s work.

Faithfully,

Regina Hunt, Chair

Carol Ferguson

Becky Gruchalla

Reuben Herriage

Frances Knipp

Peter Sehnert

Jim Welch

Dr. Charlene Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and spent her early years in Hong Kong, where she attended British schools. Eventually, her family moved to New York and from there to California. Educational and work opportunities took her, her husband James, and their three children to the East Coast and then in 2007 back to California, where they currently reside.

In 2007, Charlene was called to be the Director of Christian Education at San Marino Community Church. While serving in this role, she finished her doctoral work and was eventually called to serve as Assistant Professor of Christian Education and Director of Student Formation at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California. She has been teaching in seminary and undergraduate programs for the past ten years.

Her faith has been a motivating and animating factor throughout her career, so much so that she found herself saying “yes” to an unexpected invitation to take an associate pastor role at a church in California. It was there that Charlene discovered her passion for ministry and congregational life. The experience was profoundly transformative, allowing her to explore and nurture her aptitudes for pastoral care and leadership, and to recognize within herself the call to seek ordination.

Like Charlene, James is a seminary scholar, and their shared vocation has taken them all over the world. James, whose area of expertise is the Old Testament, is the president of International Theological Seminary in Los Angeles. The school, its mission, and community are close to the Lee family’s hearts, and they consider it to be an extension of their family.

Although they have lived most recently in California, the Lees are no strangers to Texas. James went to high school in Dallas and college at the University of Texas at Austin. Though they will be putting down new roots here, international travel and time at the beach are passions the family shares. Charlene is also an avid kickboxer and considers herself a novice carpenter.

Dr. Lee and the Path to Spiritual Formation

Dr. Lee’s professional path has been characterized by a congruence of head and heart, intellect and faith.

As both an educator and pastor, Charlene holds space for the important questions, the ones that allow us to grow and shape our personal relationship to faith. Spiritual formation, as an evolving process, engages the whole person, the seen and the unseen. What could be, how we can seek to deepen, widen, and revise our approach to connect more profoundly, are of primary importance to Dr. Lee.

As a thinker, teacher, and relational leader with a heart for the place of the church in community, her move from education to ministry is a natural progression and expression of her faith. As she assumes her new role as Associate Pastor for Practice and Formation, she is particularly interested in how FPC Dallas, an urban church, participates in and serves the community in which it is rooted. “Is this practice shaping us in ways we intend?” “Are our actions congruent with our theology?” These are the kinds of questions that can allow us to better discern how to act collectively and define our ministry.

For Dr. Lee, spiritual formation means “Gazing upon God who gazes upon me. Thinking about and feeling that God is looking for me, thinking about me, and inviting others to join. God is always waiting for us to look up. It changes how we see the world and God.”

Dr. Lee’s Statement of Faith

I place my life and trust in the one triune God who exists eternally as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. God created the world and breathed life into humankind, imparting in every person a reflection of the divine. God extended relationship with the world through these creative acts and delighted in creation, calling it “very good.” Humanity’s relationship to God was broken by sin, by our will to live according to what is right in our eyes. Though we have turned away, God extends mercy and desires our return.

Jesus is the incarnation of God’s mercy. I believe in Jesus Christ, God in human form, who was born into the world to reconcile humanity to God. Dwelling among people, Jesus proclaimed the kin-dom of God: preaching good news to the poor and release to the captive, forgiving sinners, healing the sick and raising the dead. Yet, the world did not recognize him and condemned him for blasphemy. Jesus was crucified on the cross, and he gave his sinless life for the sins of the world. Jesus rose from the dead, breaking the power of sin and death. Through Jesus Christ we are welcomed into a new covenant of grace. We no longer need to strive toward God fearfully obeying the demands of the law. God has come toward us, loving us first, while we were still sinners.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, who gives the gift of faith to respond to God’s mercy with thanksgiving and sanctifies us to live as God’s people. The Holy Spirit gives us courage to pray, joy in worship, and gifts for service. The Holy Spirit dwells in me, sustaining me with comfort and counsel in this life and with hope for life eternal.

The Holy Spirit equips the Church to participate in Christ’s ongoing life and work. As the body of Christ, the Church is sent to bear witness to the good news of God’s reconciling love, offering to all the grace of God at font and table, inviting all people to discipleship in Christ, devoting to peacemaking and justice-seeking work.

I believe the Church is universal, and it exists where the Word is faithfully proclaimed, and the sacraments rightly administered. I believe that Scripture is the inspired divine written revelation of God’s nature and will. I trust in the authority of Scripture and seek to make meaning of my life with Scripture’s guidance. In reading and hearing of the scriptures, the Church relies on the Holy Spirit to illumine our hearts to encounter Jesus Christ, the Living Word.

I believe that the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are visible signs of God’s grace. Baptism seals our identity as God’s beloved, and we are called to a new way of life as Christ’s disciples. The Lord’s Supper is a gift extended to believers for the strengthening of our faith. When we receive the bread and wine, we are united with Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit. With great thanksgiving, we join the communion of saints at this joyful feast.

Trusting in God’s grace, with the help of the Spirit, I will follow Christ to love all people.

Dr. Lee and the Call

I believe I am being called to come alongside a community of people responding to God’s invitation to see and hear, expect with hope, and courageously join the new work God is doing to restore God’s world. A community tending with great care and creativity to worship that is at once reverent and joyful. A community that prays together and discerns our authentic expressions of thoughtful faith and faithful action. A community eager to find our place along Jesus’ ministry, following his steps towards the hurting and fearful, towards situations where injustice and oppression prevail. I believe a vibrant faith community is marked by these rhythms of gathering and sending. I hope to inspire and lead these faithful rhythms of the church’s worship and mission. I will love and care for the community.

I am praying for a ministry setting where I can fully and freely utilize my gifts of compassion and leadership. A place where I can nurture the church in articulating the Christian faith grounded in Scripture and confessed through our lives. Together, we will practice hospitality and gentleness, mercy, and forbearance—with one another, in and for the world. I am praying for a community that will encourage and value my commitment to public ministry. Together, we will respond to the Gospel’s call to works of reconciliation and justice.

I hope that the community I serve with will also value and engage my contemplative life, where theology and the human experience, religion and poetry remain in dialogue.

Dear First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, I am filled with hope as I compose this first letter to greet you—“a church in Texas” I had come to know and quickly admire, now a congregation for whom I am praying daily.

Since the first phone call with your APNC Chair several months ago, curious, creative, and courageous conversations have drawn me in to listen for hope. Precious people across the Zoom screen became companions on my call journey. The bold and hope-filled witness of a church whose heart beats for the city would capture my imagination.

When James and I came to worship with you one December morning, we sensed the hope of the Advent season dwelling and rising in your midst. Your worship is reverent and thoughtful, your welcome is wide, your words and deeds proclaim Christ’s ministry of restoration and mercy. Not only are these the distinct glimpses of FPC Dallas I caught during my visit, but they are also the attributes of a congregation I had described I wanted to belong to, care for, and serve with, as pastor.

It was an extra gift to resonate with your APNC, pastors, and professional staff who represented the FPC Dallas family with warmth, honesty, joy, and compassion—all the ways I hope to express my discipleship in Jesus Christ. I knew that the Spirit was abiding with us as we waited together for clarity and confidence through a prayerful process of discernment. So, it is with awe and gratitude for the divine gifts that have dotted my path to this unexpected call, that I come before you as the candidate for Associate Pastor for Practice and Formation. As a

practical theologian, my teaching and scholarship have sought to nurture the church in articulating the Christian faith rooted in Scripture and confessed through our lives. Occasionally, our articulations will be succinct and prophetic. Mostly, they will be awkward and beautiful expressions of our believing again and again in the kin-dom of God. It is in the very parts where we come short that the Holy Spirit fills and forms us with faith, hope, and love beyond our own to send us as co-creators of God’s beloved community. My vocation finds deepest meaning in extending such invitations to spiritual formation.

It will be my joy to lead and accompany you as we learn to bask in God’s love and direct Love’s light brightly towards Dallas and beyond. It will be my privilege to join you in cultivating the legacy of justice-seeking commitments First Presbyterian Church of Dallas has long stewarded. As Associate Pastor for Practice and Formation, I will encourage us to live generously and graciously towards others the way God lives towards us. May we grow in the practices of radical welcome, brave public witness, and joyful spirituality.

James and I look forward to meeting all of you. Our three children Kate, Frances, and Harold may not be ready for Texas summer, but we will prepare them to receive your Texas-sized love!

Grace and peace,