Meet Scholarship Recipient: Seunghwan Roh

The Multiracial Student Scholarship Fund is one of the strategies employed by the Office of Race Relations (ORR) to develop multiracial congregational leadership in the CRCNA. Recipients attend one of the higher learning institutions affiliated with the denomination—Calvin University, Dordt University, The King’s University, Redeemer University, Kuyper College, Trinity Christian College, and Calvin Theological Seminary. They have also expressed a strong desire to train for and to engage in the ministry of racial reconciliation in church and/or in community.

Through bountiful gifts given last year, the ORR was able to award scholarships to ten students for the 2021/22 school year. It’s our privilege to introduce you to Seunghwan Roh, one of these ten recipients. Read his brief biography below and some of his thoughts on the importance of social justice.

My name is Seunghwan Roh, but I go by David as a nickname. I came from one of the Presbyterian denominations in South Korea. I just started my second semester of the Th.M. program at Calvin Theological Seminary. Due to the pandemic, I postponed a semester and started at Calvin in February 2021. I have been married for nine years to Bokyung Jeong who was a minister for child and women ministry. We are blessed with a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. After 12 years of serving several churches in South Korea as a minister [Cheon-an Presbyterian Church - located in Cheon-an, Cheon-an Sungeun Church, and Yullin Church - located in Anyang, 13 miles south of Seoul], I could figure out the actual hope of my whole-life ministry. My call is to become a teacher who can deliver the beauty and prosperous legacy of Reformed theology to future ministers.

I can remember a memorable scene in my experience of several outreach trips in Korea. The aging Korean society has gradually increased the influx of foreign people. When I went to a village to preach the gospel, I found that more than half of the village consisted of people from southeastern Asia. At that time, racial hatred and barriers in the village were preventing the spread of the gospel.

Korea, one of the most homogeneous nations worldwide, is also a country with strong exclusivity towards other races. I believe that the spirit of Reformed theology is to love the weak and to love all races as God’s images. In the early twentieth century, there was already a precedent in our history of liberating slaves by receiving the teachings of missionaries of the Reformed tradition. If I can have an opportunity to teach Reformed theology in Korea, I hope that it will be used to spread.

If you feel led to support this valuable scholarship fund and students like David, please give online at this link. Your gift today will bless future students as they train for and prepare to engage in the ministry of racial reconciliation in church and in society. 

For those who wish to be considered for a scholarship from the Office of Race Relations, here is the information and an application.