RELIGION : From Faith and Scotch Tape : One of the Country’s Fastest-Growing Churches Was Rooted in Pastor’s Jailhouse Conversion

Charged with espionage and facing a North Korean death sentence, Dong Sun Lim began to remember his brother’s talks about the Bible--preachings that he had rejected in the past.

“But there in the jail cell, I began to pray and then I met Jesus Christ,” he recalled. “I heard three answers:You will not die in jail. You will become my servant. Do not fear.”

Released a few weeks later after the intervention of a highly placed acquaintance, he was sent south by the Communist authorities with instructions to infiltrate the student body at Seoul University before the outbreak of the Korean War. But once Lim crossed the border into South Korea, he never looked back.

His jailhouse conversion was the seed of a ministry that eventually led to the founding in Los Angeles of the Oriental Mission Church, which started with 30 members, half of them children.

‘God Gave Me the Power’

It now jams more than 5,000 people each week into worship services and Sunday school classes in a remodeled supermarket and an adjacent education building on North Western Avenue. Many of them drive from outlying areas to attend the services near the heart of Koreatown.

“It is not my wisdom. God gave me the power,” said Lim, who will be the first Korean pastor ever to preach in the Easter Sunrise Service on Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl.

His church is one of the most successful of more than 400 Korean congregations that have sprung up in Southern California in recent years, part of an evangelical boom that has seen more than 20%of the population of South Korea convert to Christianity in less than a generation.

About 70%of the estimated 700,000 Korean immigrants in the United States attend Christian services every week, surveys have found.

Christianity is especially strong in Southern California, where evangelists compete like Koreatown merchants for the loyalties of 150,000 to 200,000 countrymen.

In the remodeled Ralphs market that is the home of the Oriental Mission Church, Pastor Lim said, “Praise the Lord” when asked why his congregation has come to be rated as one of the fastest-growing churches in America.

“God has blessed our success,” he said in an interview.

Now 65, Lim was in his early 20s when he opted to study for the ministry at a Baptist seminary in Seoul.

Joining the South Korean air force as a chaplain, he rose to rank of colonel (“full colonel” he proudly tells a visitor) before coming to the United States in 1964 to study at the old American Baptist Seminary in Covina and at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

It was the mute evidence of Lim’s worn-out Bible, held together by faith and Scotch tape, that persuaded a seminary professor to pass him on an oral exam despite his poor command of English.

“The professor said this Bible is a witness that this man will be a real good preacher,” said an associate, the Rev. Kap Soo Cho.

Lim founded the Oriental Mission Church in his Los Angeles home on July 29, 1970, and moved it twice before settling in its current location.

He is well regarded in the Korean community for his devotion and self-sacrifice, said the Rev. Mathew Ahn, an Episcopal priest who serves a parish of largely Korean-born people in Hollywood. Ahn said Lim sold his own house to help raise the funds to buy the former supermarket.

“A lot of times we clergymen speak one thing on the pulpit and do in actual life like a lot of TV preachers,” Ahn said. “He (Lim)is a guy who not only preaches but lives the way that he preaches.”

Bursting at the Seams

Operating at a 1988 budget of about $2.85 million, Lim’s church is so popular that a parking space shortage forces many worshipers to leave their cars at Los Angeles City College on Vermont Avenue and commute to Sunday services by van.

Next door to the church, a 1-month-old, $3-million education building is already bursting at the seams, according to education director Samuel Lee. “We need to set a very heavy time schedule to utilize these facilities,” Lee said.

Lim spoke partly in English and partly in Korean as he explained that his church is not affiliated with any denomination because he wants “no boundary, no limitation, for promulgating the Gospel.”

“The emphasis in my sermons is on three points: the Gospel, our attitude as immigrants and as new pioneers, and on the need to promote international understanding,” he said.

“I tell the people that the value of living in the United States is not simply having a big house and big cars, but to be a good person and more committed to God.”

Founded with the help of nine Korean churches, the Oriental Mission Church now supports 175 small churches in Korea in addition to 35 foreign missionaries elsewhere.

Church Ranks Swelled

Many converts from those churches swelled the ranks of the mother church when they immigrated to Southern California.

Other new members are introduced by neighbors and relatives upon their arrival in the United States, and Associate Pastor John M. Song has 130 church members honing their techniques of door-to-door proselytizing in an “Evangelical Explosion Program” designed to fuel continued growth at home.

This evangelical zeal is hardly out of place in the city’s rapidly expanding Koreatown, where immigrants have come to dominate commercial streets and residential blocks alike.

“They’re very aggressive about individual salvation and about planting new churches,” said C. Peter Wagner, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary.

He said devotion to prayer was a major factor in the phenomenal growth of churches like Lim’s, which start every day with 5:30 a.m. worship sessions.

“That enthusiasm for winning Koreans for Christ has just transferred over here to the Los Angeles area,” he said. “Prayer releases a lot of power for healing the sick, for evangelism and power to realize goals. Koreans are great goal-setters. They’re entrepreneurs and this carries over into the church.”

Many Korean churches offer a taste of home while they help newcomers adjust to life in a strange land. They remember that Christianity introduced modern medicine, science and schooling to Korea, which was once closed to Western innovations. They also know that Christians were in the forefront of the struggle against Japan’s annexation of Korea between 1910 to 1945.

The wave of immigrants who came in the last 20 years found a well-established network of Korean churches dating back to 1904, when students founded a chapel at USC.

Many of those who were already Christians naturally joined existing congregations, while others brought their own pastors with them from Korea or split off from established churches to found new ones.

Reasons for Starting

As for the rest, “many non-Christians who came to the United States started going to church for other reasons,” said Eui-young Yu, a sociology professor at Cal State Los Angeles.

“They want to have their children exposed to other Korean children, and they themselves like to meet other Koreans,” Yu said.

Parents took classes in English and Western culture to help them be better Americans, while their children studied the Korean language and culture to help stay in touch with their roots. Church members sometimes band together to help newcomers get started in business too.

“So they go there for social reasons and gradually they become Christians,” Yu said.

Korea’s traditional faith, Buddhism, has also grown in Los Angeles, from a lone temple to 13 since the latest wave of immigration began, but Buddhists are estimated to make up no more than 5%of the immigrant population, Yu said.

There are some Korean Catholics, but most immigrants have hearkened to a fundamentalist, evangelical brand of Protestantism--the old-time religion that missionaries Henry G. Appenzeller, a Methodist, and Horace G. Underwood, a Presbyterian, brought with them when they landed in Korea on Easter Sunday 103 years ago.

“It might embarrass some liberal Protestants today to be associated with this old-fashioned Christianity,” said Prof. Ivan Light, a UCLA sociologist who has studied the Korean immigrant community.

Light said it appears that some of Christianity’s appeal comes from its lack of hostility toward businessmen, who rank below scholars, military men and peasants in the traditional Confucian world view that was prevalent in Korea.

‘Changed the Value System’

“Christianity has changed the value system . . . by encouraging them to believe that you could make a contribution to society by engaging in business, especially the old-fashioned Protestant ethic, amassing worldly goods and glorifying God,” he said.

Sociologist Pyong Min of Queens College in New York agreed, saying that many immigrants work exceedingly long hours to keep small businesses afloat and that “church services help them to endure hardship.”

“They hear that God is impressed by people who work harder,” Min said. “They have no time for leisure activities, and in church they have hope that what they are doing is correct.”