Rev. Keiwan Kevin Ryoo on Asian American Methodist Ministry

As American society has become increasingly racially diverse, the membership of the American portion of the United Methodist Church has remained stubbornly about 90 percent white non-Hispanic. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with being white. But for either the orthodox Global Methodist Church or the liberalized post-separation United Methodist Church (psUMC) to thrive in a demographically changing United States, the denomination will need to better reflect the society’s growing ethnic diversity.

In 2020, I launched “Conversations about Race,” lending my platform to theologically traditionalist black United Methodist leaders. 

In the United States, we have just concluded Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. Asian Americans are now the fastest-growing racial group in the United States. According to the latest statistics from the UMC’s General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA), Asian Americans are the largest single non-white constituency among American United Methodists. And nearly half of Asian-American United Methodists are Korean Americans. 

I recently had the privilege of interviewing the Rev. Keiwan Kevin Ryoo, a member of the Global Methodist Church’s Transitional Leadership Council and a longtime national leader in Korean American ministry within the United Methodist Church

Ryoo is currently the Executive Secretary of the Korean Association of the United Methodist Church, a national caucus of Korean-American United Methodists. He is a board member of our denomination’s main Asian-American caucus, NFAAUM (New Federation of Asian American United Methodists) and of the Asian American Language Ministry (AALM) initiative of the UMC’s General Board of Global Ministries. He is also an advisor to several other caucus groups: the Association of Korean Churches in The United Methodist Church, the Korean United Methodist Church Laity Network, and the Korean Orthodox Pastors Association (KOPA).  Previously, he has served as director of United Methodist Communications’ Korean News Desk, (2005-2007), a GBGM missionary with the Korean Ministry Plan (2017-2021), and executive editor of To the Pleasant Hill, a quarterly magazine Korean/English readers (2008-2011, 2017-2022). An elder in the UMC’s Dakotas Annual Conference, Ryoo has ten years of experience in Korean-speaking congregation ministry and ten years of experience in English-speaking congregational ministry. 

In this wide-ranging interview, Rev. Ryoo shares about such topics as:

• the current state of Asian-American ministries and caucus groups within the United Methodist Church
• the range of histories and relative sizes of different nationalities of Asian-American United Methodists
• the unusually high (by American United Methodist standards) worship-attendance-to-membership ration seen among Korean-American United Methodists
• present challenges in Asian American ministry,
• how American Christians of non-Asian descent can be better allies in combatting anti-Asian racism
• the future of Korean American Methodism as the United Methodist Church splits. 

What he has to say should be of interest to those looking to the future of either the post-separation United Methodist Church (psUMC) or the Global Methodist Church.