From Abandonment to Abundance : God-Experiences and the Emergence of Salim Pastoral Theology among Former Residents of Korean Residential Child Care Institutions

This paper draws on qualitative research exploring God-experiences among Protestant adults who were raised in Korean residential child care institutions. Participants’ childhoods were marked by abandonment, violence, and structural marginalization, situating them in what I term borderland spaces—lived realities close to death, on the periphery of society, and in positions of powerlessness. Yet their testimonies of survival and the ways in which God-experiences functioned within these conditions—both death-dealing and life-giving—reveal theological wisdom for sustaining the present and envisioning futures from within trauma. The analysis demonstrates that coerced religious experiences became life-giving when four conditions interacted: the exercise of agency, coming to be situated within a safe space, corrective embodied experience, and the naming of these experiences as God’s presence. By listening to their lived experiences, this project proposes a pastoral theology of Salim that recognizes children and young adults as theological agents, articulating grace as it emerges in borderland spaces.