Church Planting in Patronage Cultures: Aid Dependency Issues and Missional Implications from Korea to Cambodia

By Robert Oh

Patronage governs most relationships in Global South cultures. However, regrettably, missionaries rarely recognise this prominent cultural reality. Moreover, misunderstanding patronage creates problems not only for missionaries but also for national pastors. This book shows that when a patron plays a role as a father, he plays a significant role in developing national pastors as church planters and offers an alternative reading of aid dependency as a relational concept rather than an economic one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913363352

Robert Oh

Robert Oh is the founder of Vision to Reality Foundation (V2R) in America and a mission mobilizer for Cambodia. He is the author of Nehemiah Leadership, Early Morning Prayer, and Book on Tithing.

Book preview

Introduction

Patronage governs most relationships in Global South cultures. However, regrettably, missionaries rarely recognise this as a distinct cultural reality. Misunderstanding patronage creates problems not only for missionaries but also for national pastors. This mini book is a condensation of my PhD research study in Cambodia from 2009 to 2018. It endeavours to demonstrate that when a patron plays a role as a father figure, he plays a significant role in developing national pastors as church planters and it offers an alternative reading of aid dependency as a relational concept, rather than an economic one. It also sets out to understand why Cambodian churches planted by Korean missionaries are not self-sustaining.

At the Phnom Penh Symposium in 2010, Jinsup Song, a mission superintendent of the Korean Methodist Churches of Cambodia, stated that by 2011, after more than 15 years of mission work in Cambodia, the financial support needed for 150 Cambodia churches planted by Korean Methodist missionaries had reached $16,000 per month, and none of these churches was financially self-sustaining. This amount of money was unsustainable and, as a result, the future Korean church-planting projects were placed on hold.

In 2011 an American director of an established Bible college in Cambodia was hosting an annual meeting of 300 Cambodian pastors. During that meeting, the Cambodian pastors were asked to share some of the difficulties they faced in their ministries. The majority of them testified that the biggest problem they faced was engaging with Korean missionaries. As a Korean American I was surprised to hear such news and it changed the course of my research.

I was born in South Korea but was raised and educated in Los Angeles after my family emigrated to the USA when I was 12 years old. I have lived in the USA for more than 40 years, in a multi-cultural setting. As a bi-cultural and bi-lingual person, I thought I could help to understand the conflict between Korean missionaries and Cambodian pastors.

Although there is evidence to show that patron-client networks and co-operation among small informal groups are prevalent in Cambodia, their role is not clear because they have not been sufficiently explored within the context of Korean missionaries working with Cambodians.

In this book, the patron-client relationship between ‘Ted Kim’, the patron and founder of the Cambodia Bible College, and the pastors of that college is examined. All names have been changed for anonymity.

This book portrays the different stages of Ted as father, supporter, and partner, through protection, provision, and equality respectively, and offers a new interpretation of aid dependency in the context of Korean missionaries and Cambodian church planters.

The Patron-Client Relationship

The terms ‘patron’ and ‘client’ originated when the common people of ancient Rome, plebeians (clientem), were dependent upon the ruling class, patricians (patron), for their welfare. At that time, ‘clientela’ was a group of people who had the ‘patronus’ speaking for them in public, and a client was a person who had a lawyer speaking for him or her in in court, a meaning which stands to this day.

Western European feudal societies have revolved around patron-client relationships, and there are examples in South America, Africa, and Europe, especially in agricultural societies, although the patron-client relationship was first studied and published in the field of sociology by Shmuel Eisenstadt in 1956 in an article entitled ‘Ritualized Personal Relations’.

The patron-client relationship can be defined as a social relationship between two persons where the patron controls specific resources such as money, goods, access to jobs, and services, and these are available to the client under certain conditions of work or other resources. The patron is always superior and the client inferior. Sometimes in the middle stands the first order broker who acts as patron to the client, and a client to another patron who supplies the resources, which the broker distributes to the client. Sometimes there is a chain of intermediate brokers.

In the context of Korean missionaries and Cambodian Christians, the sending mission agency of