Student Story
January 19, 2022
Min Soo Choi, a student in our Doctor of Ministry in Semiotics, Church, and Culture program, takes time to join us for a Q&A on his doctoral experience and to share with us about his dissertation project, The Inevitable Church, a YouTube-based conversation on the condition and future of the church.
Min comes to Portland Seminary with a genuine love for filmmaking, video games, and street photography. He is Korean American and has built a life with his wife and three extraordinary kiddos. By trade, Min works in the video production and digital media world.
Min, thank you for taking the time to share The Inevitable Church with us today. Let's start with this question: Why did you start The Inevitable Church channel?
The Inevitable Church is my project dissertation that I have designed over the last few years. It is a response to the modern-day church's complex relationship to culture and technology. I started The Inevitable Church to help train and equip fellow followers of Jesus for an A.I., blockchain, metaverse driven context. We need to consider what God is doing through digital, and ultimately, pass on the Gospel to the future church.
As you have been working on this project, what has been the best thing for you?
The best thing about this project is the amount of freedom and affirmation I've experienced in designing it from the ground up. This project acts like a precise mirror that reflects what I'm passionate about when it comes to the church and ministry. It draws from who I am and how I am wired as an individual and a semiotician. It converges theology, artistry, creativity, history and technology in a way that acknowledges and honors the world and the story that God is telling us at this point in history.
In semiotics, you are looking at the signs and shifts in culture to understand what is next for the church. What takeaways can you share with us?
I've come to strongly believe that semiotics is more needed than ever in such a visually bombarded culture. We are fractured, confused, overwhelmed and burned out with countless signs and images, but there's hope in all of this, in learning how to make sense of it and then perhaps pioneering and paving those crucial paths toward Christ. This will be the bread and butter of the future church – navigating the signs and converging toward the Gospel story.
As we wrap up our time together, what is your hope for The Inevitable Church channel as you finish up your last year at Portland Seminary?
One piece of advice that has served me well was thinking about a project that would be much bigger in scope than a three-year program. The Inevitable Church is something that I hope to continually build over time, not just by myself but with a community of practicing semioticians. My research and the raw, experimental ideas that I play around with and upload here, I hope, will lead to projects, collaborations, church plants and more.