Officers Serving Overseas – Captains Star Conliffe and Charlie Jung
- simoneworthing
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The Australia Territory has more than 30 Aussie officers serving overseas. In an ongoing series, Global Focus is featuring many of these officers – who they are, where they’re serving, the joys and challenges they face and what life looks like for them in their unique corners of The Salvation Army world. This week, CAPTAIN STAR CONLIFFE shares the beginning of her family’s new journey in South Korea
Two months ago, our family arrived in South Korea for a three-year international appointment.
We are the Assistant Corps Officers at Daejeon Central Corps, a church of about 300 people in a large city in the centre of Korea. At the corps, I have primary responsibility for children’s ministry (ages 0-13), and my husband Charlie (Jung) looks after youth and young adults ministry.
Charlie was born in South Korea , and I lived there 20 years ago as an exchange student, so we both speak the language, and the location makes perfect sense. But while this move to Korea is, in some sense, a homecoming.
Changing places
In many ways, Charlie and I have swapped places because I am now a foreigner in an unfamiliar culture. And I have learned that life as a migrant is tenuous.
My place in Korean society feels insecure, even though I have a permanent visa. There are so many unspoken rules or ‘common sense’ expectations that can take a migrant by surprise.
Even though I understand Korean culture better than most foreigners (after being married to a Korean for 17 years), I often need to ask Charlie to interpret people’s behaviour. And a few times, I’ve broken unspoken rules simply out of ignorance – this has been a learning experience for both for me and my colleagues!
Thankfully, the corps has been understanding towards us both as we settle into a very different way of doing ministry. Most local corps do not have any welfare services on site – no food relief, case management or programs for local families in need. The Salvation Army in Korea, therefore, has a smaller social work footprint than in Australia, but it does run women’s shelters, aged care services and orphanages in most cities.
As a whole, The Salvation Army is not well-known in Korea, despite their important work with vulnerable people. For us, this means that instead of juggling welfare and corps activities, our weekly routine centres around preparing for all the church services we have each week (usually about five) and doing administration and pastoral care.
Focus on youth
Our focus is on programs for young people in the church and it’s a special joy to work with the volunteer ministry leaders who are so dedicated to caring for the corps’ children. Many of these leaders are young adults who give a few hours of their time each week.
That’s one of the biggest cultural differences I’ve seen so far – in Korea, all congregation members happily volunteer to run church programs, and most young adults continue to attend church, sometimes even staying at church all day Sunday. In Australia, we lose so many of our teens and young adults from the congregation. And it’s easier to get people to volunteer for welfare programs (like the soup van, for example), which don’t even exist here.
However, we’ve recently been having some exciting conversations with young people in our congregation who want to do more to help those in need in Daejeon (for example, for people experiencing homelessness), but they just don’t know where to start.
I know ministry will be an ongoing challenge, given all the cultural differences that we need to navigate, but I’m optimistic about all the possibilities for loving and serving others that we’re going to discover together over the next three years.
