Narrative Pedagogy and Self-Agency of Korean Christian Women

In this paper, I explore the claim that narratives or stories, taken up by Korean Christian Women active in the Korean Protestant Church, can empower their self-agency in ways that are consistent with the feminist theology lens. I also present how women can bring positive transformation to congregations that are unwilling to accept some gendered practices and directives. This paper aims to highlight the idea that narrative theology can be an appropriate way as well as an excellent method to empower the self-agency of women in churches. I chose narrative inquiry, one of the qualitative research methodologies, as a research method and in-depth interviewing as a data-collecting method for capturing and analyzing the life experiences and lived voices of Korean Christian women. I recruited eleven Korean Christian women active in congregational life to gain generative themes for the interview process. Moreover, this paper will not subject women to further under-representation and exclusion in their religious communities. The goal is to help Christian religious educators understand the needs of women in their congregations and thus find a better way to work with them. The eleven women are homogeneous in regards to educational background and class. It could be beneficial to Christian leaders who want to know about the specific needs of women in this subset, and results would have been less helpful if research subjects with various backgrounds were recruited.