Dogwood Prairie United Methodist Church
Oblong IL

San Young Lee  

Pastor  

 

 

(618) 592-3678  

 

Click here to contact San Young Lee  

I was born in a mountain at a retreat center for prayers in Korea, on May 31st of 1963.

I grew up in a very religious environment, and I naturally became religious. We lived in a parsonage as I was growing up, which usually located closely by the church. As an early bird I was then as I am now, I would wake up early to the prayer noises(?) people, including my parents, make. I used to get goosebumps whenever I thought of someone who is out there listening to the people pouring their hearts out, the outcries of the desperate out of absolute helplessness (people’s intense prayers made me think that they were really desperate trying to get someone else’s attention like that). That ‘someone out there’ always followed me wherever I went. I also could feel that ‘someone out there’ in the nature: the sky, clouds, winds and breezes, Spring and Autumn rains, changing leaves, trees, flowers, sun and moon and stars…. It was an extra blessing to listen to rains pelting down the ground early in the crack of dawn. What cleansing rituals that had been for me!! I felt so clean by listening to the rain which made me feel washing away all my impurities and wrongdoings from my heart. I was a happy child, and felt that everyone loved me.

My father was a Nazarene minister for 31 years and died when he was 57 years old. He was generous, meek, humble and was very dedicated to his ministry. My father’s ministry was one of a kind in terms of it being a communal one. Church gathered for prayers morning and night, not to mention Sunday and night worship services, Wednesday night worship service and Friday night gathering for all night prayer meeting. During week days and nights, after night prayer meeting, people would come in our parsonage for refreshment. Whenever they come our parsonage to share meals, they would check out things that might be lacking in our parsonage and they would supply them, be that woods for warming the parsonage in the winter, or rice or potatoes or ??. Whenever church members have new produces in their garden or crops in their field, they would first bring them to their pastor. If church members were nearby our parsonage and feel hungry, then, they would come in and eat anything they could find even if there was no one at the parsonage. Church members were more like a surrogate family replacing my relatives and my grandparents who lived far away from us. My mother was a legendary prayer warrior in my father’s circle in Korea. God has endowed her with charismatic gifts such as gift of healing, prophecy at times, dreams, of course gift of tongues, and she even had a gift of seeing through people, what they were thinking, etc., though it might sound unbelievable to many.

I am greatly influenced by both of my parents who had taught us, five sisters and three brothers, to please God above all else. I dedicated my life to God in my early age: “Here I am Lord, send me wherever you want me to be.” I have obeyed when God called me to serve in a mission field right after I finished my graduate studies at Vanderbilt. I had no one there, no family, no friends, in the Philippines. I live there like a lonely warrior teaching and doing administrative work at a seminary in Manila. It had not been an easy task to be obedient and faithful to God’s calling, but I have to confess that it had been God who had enabled me to obey. “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Today God has called me to be a pastor at Dogwood Prairie and Seed Chapel, and I wonder what God wants to fulfill at these churches through me. “I do not know about tomorrow”, all I know is that I will trust God every step of the way in my ministry at Dogwood Prairie and Seed Chapel. My foremost desire is to be a pleasing sacrifice to God, and daily I am praying to be “pure and holy” to be a bride to Christ my savior who is the meaning and purpose of my life.  

 

 

 

 

(618) 592-3678  

 

Click here to contact the church