Serving the Church in the land of early morning prayer

During a recent visit to the World Service Center, Dr Young-Jin Min, General Secretary of the Korean Bible Society, described how a deep love for the Bible by Christians in both North and South Korea has united them despite the political, social and economic chasm dividing the two countries. He also spoke about the fascinating story behind the publication of a Bible by North Korean Christians in 1984, and the ‘mega-church’ phenomenon in South Korea, where thousands of people queue up every day to attend early morning prayer meetings.

SOUTH KOREA — Although only about one quarter of South Koreans are Christians, if you were to drive through downtown Seoul, you would think it was a predominantly Christian country because there are so many churches. And if you were to go into a church on a Sunday you would find it absolutely full of worshippers. The Korean Church is growing.

Thousands of people attend the early morning prayer sessions at Myung Sung Church – one of Seoul's mega-churches. South Korea. Photo: KBS (KOR04DJ-4.JPG)

Koreans by nature are very religious people – almost 10 million of us are Christians, and we love to pray and read the Bible. In fact, the Korean Church is very famous for its early morning prayer meetings, which are held at every local church and are very well attended. About 30,000 people go to one of Seoul’s biggest churches to pray every morning in two sessions: the first from 4am till 5am, the second from 5am till 6am.

This is one of our ‘mega-churches’, for which South Korea is well known. In fact, the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul has 750,000 members and is thought to be the world’s largest church. These churches tend to be quite young and active, and that is where the main growth is taking place. There are, of course, conservative churches in South Korea, but some of them are stagnating because they are not attracting young people.

Reaching young people with the Christian story is vital for the life of the Church, and at the Bible Society we are very aware of this. In South Korea, young people are heavily influenced by high-tech, global culture and are not inclined to open and read a book. So we have produced a CD-Rom Bible, which has had some success, but we realise that we need to do more. We are in contact with the American Bible Society for some ideas about how to engage more actively with youth culture.

Global culture

Our translation work is also key to making sure that the Bible is accessible to young people. We only have one language but it evolves so rapidly because of the influence of global culture. I find it very difficult to understand young people’s conversations – they have a different vocabulary, accent and intonation to someone of my age. And they, in turn, find it almost impossible to understand the older forms of the language. So we revise the Korean Bible every 30 years to keep up with these changes. Our most recent revision was the New Korean Revised Bible, which we are busy distributing now.

The Centre for Bible Education and Culture has also been a good tool in helping us reach the younger generation. It was built as a venue for hosting groups of primary schoolchildren to use our video and audio material to learn about the Bible. This has been successful but the Centre has also become an important place for students of the theological seminary.

Crowds of people arrive at Myung Sung Church, one of Seoul's mega-churches, for early morning prayers. South Korea. Photo: KBS (KOR04DJ-2.JPG)

The seminary does not offer courses for Aramaic biblical literature, or literature in other ancient languages, such as Sumerian, Akkadian and Ugaritic, so we invite scholars from all over the world for one semester to teach these subjects at the Centre. We are happy that we can offer this academic resource to future church leaders and Bible scholars.

Our main activity continues to be publishing. Each year we publish nearly 1.5 million Bibles for our 10 million Christians, and most Christians have more than one copy of the Bible in different formats or editions. Last year, for instance, we published over one million copies of a Bible and hymnbook together, presented in a very slim volume. This was very popular.

South Korea is a relatively wealthy country and many people are able to afford several copies of the Bible. But there are a significant number of people who are disadvantaged in some way, and cannot get their own Bible. So we allocate about 10 per cent of our annual budget of US$600,000 to providing free Bibles for distribution among the poor, soldiers, policemen, drivers, hospital workers and patients, and prisoners. (WR 387/13 - 8/9.04)