Mi-Weon Yang began to teach at Knox in 2020 as an adjunct lecturer and joined the faculty in 2021. She is a Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO), an Approved Supervisor (AAMFT), and a Provisional Supervisor-Educator (CASC).
Mi-Weon was born and raised in South Korea and immigrated to Canada in 1997 and started her education in Knox (MDiv and ThM) and earned PhD (St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto). She was certified in 2007 by AAMFT and CASC, and actively practiced pastoral care and counselling and marriage and family therapy.
Shortly after moving to Canada, she and her husband planted the East Faith Korean Presbyterian Church in Mississauga, ON. She feels it is a blessing for her to serve the church still. In the church, she has created and executed diverse programs, including pastoral care and counselling, Family Ministry, Senior Adults Ministry, church education, and missionary work with Indigenous Peoples in Canada, as well as diverse countries abroad, including Honduras, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.
With her robust experiences as a pastor and psychotherapist, she brings her expertise to teaching at Knox. Her classes are consistently dynamic and provide a practical, hands-on learning experience and theologically deepening. She often finds the joy of rewarding experiences when students benefit from her unique clinically based pedagogy in class. Teaching with pastoral and therapeutic expertise creates synergies and enhances each other to equip students for their vocational goals in a congregation and diverse institutional and communal sectors.
She is particularly interested in spiritual care and practice in an intercultural context. In her PhD dissertation, she theologically explored Salim as an approach to pastoral care and counselling for Korean immigrant women in North America. While the dissertation’s focus group was Korean immigrant women, the methodological framework used can be applied across any intercultural context. She feels people from diverse cultures have often found her to be a resource for their lives as they could easily identify themselves with her. With her personal and professional experiences, she pursues publishable research to contribute to pastoral theology in an intercultural context.
