Church Fills Spiritual Needs With a Cultural and Social Blend : Presbyterians: It is a gathering place for Korean immigrants who seek to meet people from similar backgrounds. Thousands of congregants travel from as far as Palmdale, Palm Springs and Oxnard each week to attend services.

Every Sunday morning, 57-year-old Chong Hee Yim walks from the main sanctuary to the education building at Young Nak Presbyterian Church with at least three leather-bound volumes in his arms: one Korean Bible, one printed in English and a hymnal in Korean.

That bilingual armload of books is symbolic of the diverse language and cultural needs addressed by this large congregation of worshipers who meet just north of Chinatown.

“Some of our young people here understand English, but some only know Korean, so I must be ready with both,” said Yim, a church elder who works with Young Nak’s college group.

The church counts 4,000 adults and 2,000 children in its membership, and an average of 4,000 adults and children flow through the church’s many doors each Sunday to attend three Korean-language worship services, an English service and an elaborate Sunday school program that caters to age groups from toddlers to post-college young adults.

The church is regularly ranked among the top 100 fastest-growing Protestant congregations in the United States, according to Dr. John Vaughan, director of the International Mega-Church Research Center in Bolivar, Mo. In 1986, Young Nak added 1,421 members, making it the fourth-fastest-growing church in the country that year. Young Nak’s senior minister, the Rev. Dr. Hee Min Park, said the influx of new members has slowed considerably since then--1989’s growth spurt was 350 adults and around 300 children.

The Los Angeles Young Nak church (a name of a town in Korea that translates as “eternal happiness”) began in 1973 when 39 Korean immigrants from the original Young Nak congregation in Seoul, South Korea, began meeting together at a house in Los Angeles. (The Presbyterian Church was successfully established in Korea by American missionaries 100 years ago, according to Nicholas Chun, general secretary of the Korean Presbyterian Church in America, the denomination that Young Nak belongs to).

In 1975, the growing congregation began to meet in a former synagogue in the Fairfax area. By the mid-80s, space for worshipers and their cars was growing tight, so the church purchased a 4.8-acre triangle of land at the intersection of North Broadway and Pasadena Avenue for $4.5 million. Construction of a 1,200-capacity church sanctuary and an education building just north across Avenue 18 was begun in 1987 and completed in June, 1989, at a cost of $6 million.

“We have a very diverse membership, but we seem to have many middle-class and upper-class members--the more-settled Korean immigrants,” said the Rev. Paul Yang, pastor of the church’s program for English-speaking members. On a typical Sunday, a healthy number of BMWs, Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes are wedged bumper to bumper between cars of lesser stature in the church’s overflowing parking lot. Financial giving from the congregation averages $50,000 a week and helps support an annual church budget of $3.2 million.

One of Young Nak’s main drawing points is the sheer size of its congregation. As a large church with thousands of members who travel from as far as Palmdale, Palm Springs and Oxnard each week, the church is a meeting place for Korean immigrants who seek to meet people from similar backgrounds.

“Primarily, people come to this church for their spiritual needs, but also because of their social and cultural needs,” said Park, a Korean native and graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary who has been head pastor at Young Nak for almost three years.

One of the church’s main challenges, according to its ministers, is to meet the needs of a diverse membership in which language and worship customs vary from generation to generation.

Before and after the three Korean language services, the walkway outside the church sanctuary is flooded with smartly dressed men and women, mostly over 35, who bow in greeting before they chat in Korean and sip cups of coffee.

But the 1 p.m. service is conducted in English. Yang presides in a suit instead of in a clerical robe like the one that Park wears for the Korean services. There are other touches of informality--several modern praise songs that are accompanied by guitar instead of organ, and Scripture verses read by congregants instead of ordained elders--that Yang says appeal to the mostly under-30 “new wave” of churchgoers who speak mostly English.

Across the street at Young Nak’s Sunday school headquarters, the teens and young adults are more likely to greet each other with “Hey, dude!” and a slap on the arm in place of respectful bowing. Many use the term “one-point-five” to describe their particular niche in the immigrant population. Born in Korea but having arrived in the United States at an early age, they feel neither quite like first- or second-generation Korean-Americans.

“Most of the 1.5s are bicultural,” explained Esther Cho, 23, who has attended Young Nak since 1975. “They’re caught in the middle with both the American and Korean cultures pulling at them, and so they need to find a middle ground where they can have the two cultures integrate.”

To assist in that integration, Yang tries to craft sermons for the 200 adults who regularly attend the English-language services that offer insights into the Korean people’s historical and traditional background.

In a recent sermon on the book of Galatians, Yang drew a parallel between Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation and the freedom from sin that Jesus Christ promises.

Henry Lee, 19, a Young Nak Sunday school veteran and a “1.5-er,” has attended the church with his parents since 1974. “I learned a lot here about my heritage,” he said. “Just being Korean and being around others also Korean, you find that you share a lot. You learn about yourself, and that others feel the same as you do, which wouldn’t happen as much for me at a non-Korean church.”

As more and more of these mostly English-speaking young people graduate from Sunday school to the adult English church across the street, Yang hopes the transition will be a smooth one that preserves church unity.

“If there is a unique part of the faith in Korean Christians, then we want to make sure it’s carried on through maintaining the connection between the generations,” Yang said. “Perhaps if we just separated the congregations, there would be less struggle. But we would lose a lot of traditional values by doing that.”