4-Year-Old Korean Church Bursting at Seams

The auditorium has few religious trappings even though it rings with the Korean-language hymns and prayers of an average of 1,300 worshipers each Sunday morning.

Aside from a large cross at the back of the stage, no permanent Christian symbol is visible. The only statuary are life-size representations of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln standing in wall recesses, usually behind curtains, on either side of the make-shift sanctuary.

The fast-growing and wealthy Grace Korean Church has been holding its services in this leased auditorium at the closed Excelsior High School in Norwalk since February, 1984.

Started 4 Years Ago

No one has removed the presidential figures or given the auditorium a stained-glass look because the church, perhaps the third-largest Korean Christian congregation in the Los Angeles area, may outgrow even the 2,000-seat auditorium in a year or two.

The church was started four years ago next month by the Rev. Kwang Shin (David) Kim, now 51, an ex-landscape architect ordained a minister only the year before. His first service in Fullerton was attended by 70 people. The next year, when he was negotiating to rent the high school campus in Norwalk, the congregation had about 300 adults attending services.

Now, besides the 1,300 attending services, the church has 900 children and teen-agers in Sunday school classes.

Lofty Goals

Seated on a couch in his classroom-turned-pastor’s-study, Kim said in an interview this week that he has set an attendance goal of 2,500 adults for the end of 1986. He is also sticking to his previously announced target of 7,000 adults by 1988. On a table in his office sits an architectural model of the existing high school campus with added scale models of a 10,000-seat sanctuary, a multistory missions center and senior citizen housing.

This year, the church has a $1.7-million budget, an ambitious missionary program designed to eat up half the annual income, and a well-to-do cadre of 550 lay deacons.

One deacon, Shin H. Cho, said the deacons average more than $30,000 a year in donations to the church. “That’s why the church is so successful (in its projects); we’ve got plenty of money,” he said.

Cho, a purchasing agent for a steel supply company, said he was awed recently when the church raised money to buy land for a retreat center in Corona. One member pledged $20,000 on the spot, several others pledged $10,000 and he said, with some embarrassment, “I was only able to say I’d give $300.”

Pastor Kim attributes the church’s growth to a dedication to conservative Christian ideals. “The Bible teaches us how to fulfill these goals,” said Kim, a graduate of Talbot Theological Seminary in La Mirada.

A contributing factor, the pastor said, is a network of 84 groups of 10 to 15 people who meet Sunday evenings in homes for Bible study, intensive prayer, evangelism planning and fellowship.

The fastest-growing churches in Southern California are Korean-language congregations, church officials agree. In contrast to South Korea, where Christianity is a minority religion, about 75% of the immigrant Korean community in the Los Angeles area attend Christian churches, according to Eui Young Yu, director of the Center for Korean American and Korean Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

“The church is the most basic social institution of the Korean community in Los Angeles,” Yu said.

The two biggest Korean churches, the Oriental Mission Church and the Young Nak Presbyterian Church, are based in Koreatown, west of downtown Los Angeles. But Yu said that Grace Korean Church’s “effective organization” and the following developed by the pastor have made it one of the largest in the region.

Some Pastors Complain

Yet, the rapid expansion of Grace Korean Church has been accompanied by charges of member-stealing and “heresy” by some other Korean American pastors.

For those reasons, the Council of Korean Churches in Southern California delayed action on the membership application last February by the Korean churches of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, said the Rev. Chung Kuhn Lee, the council’s executive secretary.

Lee, who is also a Los Angeles pastor, said some council members object to the application of the Christian and Missionary Alliance because Grace Korean Church would be included. The council has about 400 churches in its affiliated denominations.

“Their (Grace Korean) membership growth is fantastic, but it is not from new converts but from a shift by churchgoers from other churches,” Lee said. “Some of the churches cry because their memberships have decreased significantly.” Lee said that the shift of one family to another church can mean loss of many members because of the close-knit nature of Korean kinships.

Kim says his critics are wrong. “Right now around half of the church members are newcomers to Christianity,” he said. “I think that among the rest I can safely say that two-thirds of them used to go to church but they were not really Christian. They found Christ when they came to this church.” He estimated that even 15% to 20% of his own congregation comes to church for social or economic reasons, rather than out of spiritual concerns.

The charge of heresy comes from pastors who have listened to Bible study tapes from the church (which sends out 13,000 tapes a month). Lee said Pastor Kim mixes Christianity with shamanism, native beliefs about spirits still strong in South Korea, when talking about demons and evil. One of Kim’s ideas mentioned in the tapes is that spirits of the deceased which do not go to paradise may cause illness or misfortune among living people.

In response, Kim said he has never mentioned his “theory” from the pulpit but mentions it only as his opinion in Bible studies. “It’s a trifle, a non-essential area of theology where pastors can have a difference of opinion, such as when the Second Coming (of Jesus) will occur,” he said. On doctrine essential for salvation, he insists, he is orthodox.

Says He Was Atheist

Kim said he was an atheist when his brother-in-law, visiting from Seoul in 1977, told him that he had been miraculously cured of throat cancer just before a scheduled operation. “When he told me his story I was holding a can of beer in one hand and smoking a cigarette,” Kim said. “My feeling had always been that I sinned in broad daylight and Christians sinned in the shadow of the cross, in secret.”

But after his in-law’s account, Kim said he decided that his reasons for denying God were groundless and he prayed for direction. He said he felt “born again” the next morning and found himself crying uncontrollably hours later in a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Mission Viejo that he had attended previously for only social reasons.

Kim said that four months later he experienced “speaking in tongues,” utterances said by Pentecostal Christians to signal the acquisition of certain spiritual gifts. “I believe in that but I don’t have that kind of practice in the congregation yet,” he said.

‘Exciting to Watch’

The Rev. R. Harold Mangham of Fullerton, district superintendent for 120 Christian and Missionary churches in the Pacific Southwest, said that Grace Korean Church is the fastest-growing U.S. congregation in the 400,000-member denomination. “It’s been exciting to watch them,” Mangham said.

The secret may be prayer, Mangham said. “I don’t know another person who takes prayer more seriously or spends more time in prayer than David Kim.”

The most immediate prayer focus for the church is the fate of its location.

The Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District will hear next week a report from Rand Corp. on projected enrollment and school facility needs. If the school property, located about a block from Cerritos College, is declared surplus, the church and some Norwalk City Council members hope that a long-term lease can be arranged to keep the congregation (and its pre-school, a program for the handicapped, and other projects) on the campus with a new sanctuary. That would allow the city the use of the gymnasium, athletic field and auditorium.

“I for one would love to see that happen,” said Councilman Marcial Rodriguez, who just finished a term as mayor. “We don’t have a community theater here and the auditorium would be great for that.”