Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCA)

New World Missions Director joins staff

By Stephanie Byrd

Published November 11, 2006 in This Week

When Corey Young was a student at Duke Divinity School in 2002, a member of his church asked him what he was going to do that summer. When he said he didn’t know, she told him to go to East Asia.

So Corey, along with an architect, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, and some scientists, went on a two-week cultural exchange trip to a large university. He describes this trip as one of the things in his life that encouraged a “gradual, subtle leaning” towards missions.

Corey’s church in his hometown, Wichita Falls, had emphasized world missions, and he had a few missions-minded influences while he studied at Wheaton College, notably the college pastor at College Church. “Every Sunday evening he would invite people over to their house,” Corey says. “A lot of times there would be a missionary, and that was big. It just made it a lot more tangible.”

After earning his Master of Theological Studies degree in 2003, Corey went to Asia to teach English to university students. This cross-cultural experience was one of the many things in his life that have equipped him to serve as PCPC’s new Director of World Missions.

Corey claims that life at the university, on a mountain near the downtown of 13 million, had a “small-town feel.” The statement betrays both a Texan sense of proportions (one of his proudest accomplishments is founding the Lone Star Club at Wheaton) and an apparently laid-back personality. He was once persuaded to play “Peaceful Easy Feeling” on the guitar for a crowd of 600 freshmen. Of the various outlandish delicacies he’s tried—blood tofu, duck tongue, and turtle shell, for example—Corey’s favorite is goose foot.

After a year of teaching students with English names like Piggy, Snail, Flying Beyond, and Devil, Corey took a position as his teaching organization’s regional personnel advisor. He spent a month and a half every semester traveling to five cities, serving as a liaison between the organization and the schools, supervising teachers, and caring for the teams.

“It’s always fascinating to find out how to serve people and, in a sense, be diplomatic,” Corey said. “I felt peace in that position.”

After three years in Asia, Corey says, “I just felt led to come back to the ministry stateside.” He was interested in the pastoral internship program at PCPC, because his childhood friend Blake Altman, who completed his internship this year, had liked it so much. Then Corey found out about the Director of World Missions position.

“The job description really resonated,” Corey says. As he read the list of responsibilities, he kept thinking, “That’s something I like to do or I have experience in.”

Curt Dobbs, Director of Missions and Outreach, also considers Corey’s experiences to match the job description perfectly. Curt values Corey’s Bible/Theology major at Wheaton and his theological training at Duke. His experience in coordinating more than 30 teachers at eight Asian universities gives him “a unique perspective of what God is doing on the field,” Curt says.

Before he applied for this position, Corey had already made Curt’s acquaintance in 2002 through mutual friends and had volunteered to accompany the PCPC youth group’s cultural exchange team to Asia this summer. Curt was struck not only by Corey’s fashion choices—“He wears bowties”—but also by his personality and his compatible philosophy of missions. “He’s a quiet guy, but he’s a good thinker,” Curt says. “I think he’s going to be a good strategist.”

Corey’s also excited about what he’s going to be doing here. “I like the idea of serving by providing the logistics in the short-term trips,” he says. “I also like the idea of engaging people to think outside of the box cross-culturally.”

Looking forward, Corey says his goals are the same ones he had starting out in Asia: not to create an international incident and not to kill anybody. “I met my goals,” he boasts.

Seriously, he’d like to encourage people to think and pray more, not just about world missions, but about how God is working through them now. He wants “to wrestle alongside people, to equip and encourage them.”

“It’s just cool to see God using people’s lives,” Corey says.