Just a Little Bit Bigger Than St. James

On Sunday morning I got up and headed into Seoul with our friends Kevin and Brenda (Meg wasn’t feeling well so she stayed at home) to attend Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest church in the world. The church claims over 830,000 members. The services are held in a monstrous building and the church seems to own a couple of city blocks around it. (I’m pretty sure the Sunday school classes had an office tower to themselves).

We arrived a little late for the eleven o’clock service. I think we got there around 11:20 – so right on time for me (though we did leave at 9:30 from Yongin). Since we look lost and the church excels at welcoming newcomers, we were greeted and taken inside within about a minute of our arrival. The usher spoke English pretty well and asked us many questions as he guided us up the walkway. Instead of stairs the church has ramps than reminded me a lot of Skydome (though not as wide). We were taken to the foreigner area. Which sounds funny, but is actually practical since in this area they give foreigners headsets that translate the service into numerous languages (English, Japanese, Spanish, etc..). Here we were handed over to the Foreigner Guide who recommended that we wait for the one o’clock service since the worship had already started. We told him we couldn’t stay that long and so we were taken in given our headsets and seated on a back staircase. I couldn’t see the altar area ( I think Brenda could see a flatscreen TV showing the service) and so the service for me basically entailed listening to the translated sermon and looking around at the crowd and ushers. It was impressive to see so many people gather in one place for a service. On our way out I asked how many people were there for the service and I was told the building held 10,000 to 12,000 people and the majority of people these days participate in the service at satellite locations (where the sermon is shown on TV).

After the service we went to a “Foreigner Briefing” which we were told would be about 10 to 15 minutes. It took about that long to get to the building where it was held. Then once inside we were met by a man who told us that the story he was going to tell us about the founding of the church would normally take 3 hours, but he’d squish it into one for us. I don’t think any of us were overly impressed. The story was interesting however, and it made me happy that we had attended a service where the founder of the church, David Yonggi Cho, delivered the sermon. It sounds like he only does a couple of the services each week.

While the church founder definitely is a remarkable man (growing a church from 0 to 800,000 in fifty years) his theology isn’t exactly in line with mine. He spoke of his trip to Hell a couple of times through the sermon, which I assumed to be some kind of metaphor even though he didn’t really use it in that way. At our briefing, our leader spoke about the founder’s trips to Heaven and Hell quite openly. He also talked about a woman he’d met who’d been to Heaven 17 times and Hell 3 times (He made sure to mention that on one of her visits to Hell she met her mother who was a devout Buddhist and lived a very good life). It made me feel a little uncomfortable.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the briefing was a 10 minute video that quoted some of the astounding numbers of the church. The video was a little outdated (and looked like it had been made in the ‘70s, though it probably was actually made about 5-10 years ago). It bragged about their congregation size of 700,000 people and the over 500 full-time pastors that the church employs. They also have around 85,000 deacons (62,000 women/23,000 men) and 1,319 elders (all men). It’s all pretty unreal. I couldn’t imagine belonging to a “congregation” of that size.

While it was an interesting briefing in most regards, we couldn’t help but feeling a little bit suckered by the length. So we told them we had to leave in a couple of minutes (I was glad Kevin was there – he’s pretty forceful). Before we could fully get out, we were given (well the entire room – there were about 8 of us) a quick speech on a book that had changed the elder’s life. It was written by the woman who had been to Heaven 17 times and was conveniently on sale there. I actually suspect if we had stayed longer there would have been more of a push to buy something. There was also a table of books written by the church’s founder with price tags on them.

Overall it was quite the experience. Enough so that I think it’s worth a trip back so Meg can experience it. Of course this time I won’t let them sucker me into the foreigner briefing...and I’ll make sure to get there early enough to get a seat where I can see something.
The church’s story is pretty amazing and definitely worth checking out if you’re interested:
http://english.fgtv.com/