Church Provides One-Stop Center for Koreans’ Needs : Religion: Immigrants benefit from Young Nak Presbyterian’s help with jobs, language classes and housing.

It’s Sunday morning and thousands of Koreans are flocking to Young Nak Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles. A dozen male volunteers in bright orange vests are directing traffic with an efficiency and enthusiasm that rivals the attendants at Disneyland.

“Yuh-gi-ro-osae-yo (Come this way)! Juh-jjok-euh-ro-kasae-yo (Go that way)!” they shout in Korean. The old folks and visitors get a break; they are allowed to park close to the church. Regulars, especially if they’re young and male, get directed to a distant parking lot, a good walk from the main sanctuary.

With 7,000 registered members--and 5,000 attending every Sunday--Young Nak, which means “Eternal Pleasure,” is the biggest Korean church in the United States. Located at the edge of Chinatown at 1720 N. Broadway, it draws worshipers from as far away as Riverside and Palm Springs.

For rich and poor, old and young, the church is one of the most important institutions for Koreans in the United States. It has been central to the success of many Korean immigrants, acting as a one-stop community center and providing newcomers with a vital social network. It also supplies them with spiritual strength to help overcome the obstacles they face.

“The church helps new immigrants find jobs, register their kids in school, locate housing, move them and even helps them find driving instructors,” said the Rev. Paul Yang, who until last April was an associate pastor at Young Nak and is now senior pastor of Orange Korean Christian Reformed Church.

And since the spring riots, the church has become the hub of even greater activity, providing help to thousands of Koreans affected by the unrest and assisting in the effort to improve relations with other ethnic and racial groups.

During the riots, many Koreans discovered how isolated they were from the political mainstream and from other ethnic minorities; community leaders voiced frustrations about being politically impotent.

As a result, institutions such as the church emerged with new potential as agents of change.

“I’d like to see the Korean churches reach out to Hispanic and black communities,” said Eui-Young Yu, a Cal State L.A. sociologist and the son of a Presbyterian minister. “The Korean community is a church-centered community. If churches don’t do it, who’s going to do it?”

Accordingly, the role of the church has become a central issue in the Korean community since the riots, which are referred to as 4.29 (pronounced sa-e-gu) poktong, meaning “April 29 riot” in Korean, in the customary Korean style of using dates to name historical events.

Moving from discussion to action won’t be easy. Korean churches are no more monolithic than mainstream U.S. churches. With 700 Korean churches in Southern California alone, ranging from the fundamentalist Full Gospel Church to the liberal United Methodist Church, the religious community has not always found it easy to create consensus around a common cause.

Still, churches have one thing going for them that other community organizations lack: Church leaders enjoy the respect and broad-based support of people from all walks of life.

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The role of the church among Koreans here is more powerful than in their ancestral land. Two-thirds of Koreans in the United States are Christians, compared to only 25% in Korea, where Buddhists are dominant. Presbyterianism is the prevalent denomination.

The Korean-American community in the United States--only 100,000 in 1970--now numbers about 1 million and supports more than 2,300 churches. The explosive growth began in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s as 30,000 Korean immigrants entered the country annually after quotas that restricted the number of Asian immigrants were changed.

In Southern California, 80% of the Koreans who responded to a survey by Yu, the Cal State L.A. sociologist, said they attend church regularly. Many, like Kyong-Ran Yun, have converted to Christianity here because it meets their social and personal needs as well as spiritual ones.

“I didn’t go to church in Korea even though friends tried to get me to go,” said Yun, a member of the Oriental Mission Church on North Western Avenue in Koreatown. Once here, though, she decided to convert after an elderly Christian woman visited her every day when she was hospitalized. “You can rely on your church family more than on some relatives or friends.”

She chose Oriental Mission Church because of its location and the wide range of classes it offers to children, she said.

For many, Sunday services and the socializing that follows are the high point of the week. Class and educational distinctions dissolve; seamstresses, waiters, grocery store clerks and gas station attendants worship side-by-side with prosperous lawyers and businessmen.

Indeed, Kyung-Ai Park, 87, says her life is her church. With her $4 monthly RTD senior pass, the spry grandmother, who speaks no English, travels from her apartment near Koreatown to Young Nak four or five times a week. She attends services Sundays and Wednesdays and on other days takes classes for seniors that range from conversational English to nutrition and health maintenance.

“We do exercises, we pray, we study the Bible, English, music, singing and learn current events,” she said. “We visit seniors in nursing homes and hospitals. I don’t feel lonely even though I live alone. I can’t live without the church.”

Young Nak’s first of four services begins at 8:15 a.m with a 100-member choir. An English-language service is conducted at 1:15 p.m. A Sunday offering can bring between $60,000 and $80,000 into church coffers.

The social hour after the service is a time for snacks, gossip and networking. In some churches, Korean real estate agents, insurance agents, car dealers, lawyers and doctors make business contacts to follow up later in the week.

Spouse-hunting goes on here, too, as parents and grandparents discuss saeksii-gam and sillang-gam (bride and bridegroom material). In fact, the possibility of finding a prospective spouse is the main attraction for some.

Young Nak, which has an operating budget this year of $4.5 million, sprawls over 4.8 acres and includes a two-story main sanctuary and two separate buildings where parishioners are offered a host of services and classes, ranging from Korean language, culture and music to the martial art tae kwon do and computer technology. Despite its size, the church is quickly becoming too crowded, and a $3.5-million capital campaign is under way to build another facility for education.

Next to the 1,200-seat main sanctuary is a television studio where sermons are taped for distribution worldwide. Sok-Won Choe, who faithfully watches Young Nak senior minister Min-Hee Park’s sermons on Channel 26 in San Francisco, says she often thinks of moving to Los Angeles just to be able to become part of the Young Nak community.

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The church has been the most enduring and pervasive institution in the Korean community since immigrants first arrived in California at the turn of the century. During the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, Korean churches in America collected money to fund the independence movement.

At times churches have played a divisive role in the community.

The oldest Korean church in the continental United States, San Francisco’s Korean United Methodist Church, is embroiled in a nationwide controversy because the minister and his supporters want to sell the historic Chinatown church and move to a bigger building in the Sunset district on the western edge of the city.

Opponents of the sale established the Korean American Heritage Foundation to save the church, whose founders include Chang-Ho Ahn, revered as modern Korea’s greatest patriot. They say that the San Francisco church is the only remaining historic site of the Korean independence movement in America and should be preserved for the future generation.

The controversy in San Francisco over the 88-year-old church mirrors a larger debate within the community about the religious and social philosophies of Korean churches and their lack of sophistication and broader vision in relating to the secular world. Many Koreans tithe, believing that the more you give the more you receive in return. Numerous churches list the names and amounts of donations in their Sunday bulletins, setting up a competitive atmosphere.

“Those church bulletins shame you into giving more even when you don’t want to,” said a San Francisco merchant who doesn’t always agree with the way his church spends money.

Edward Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside, said too many Korean ministers are preoccupied with building the “biggest and richest” church and hand out elderships and other church positions to big donors as rewards. This feeds into the yearning for recognition that few immigrants fulfill outside the church because so many are engaged in non-professional jobs. Since Koreans address each other by a title rather than a personal name, church titles, such as elder and deacon, are carried into the secular world, making bearers feel important.

“Korean churches take tremendous financial and human resources away from the Korean community. Other organizations have a hard time raising money because it is all going to the churches,” said Chang.

Chang advocates the sharing of church resources with other Korean-American institutions and social agencies that are struggling to survive.

But such proposals must compete with the reality of ministers who are developing innovative ways of marketing Christianity. These efforts changed the religious terrain in Southern California in the last two decades and added a host of terms to the church lexicon: “airport ministry” describes ministers who go on recruiting sprees at airports for new arrivals; “carpetbagger preachers” refers to self-styled men of God with suspect credentials who move from place to place, and “body snatching” describes ministers who try to draw members away from other churches.

Slowly, however, changes are coming. Although first-generation ministers and elders still run the churches, a small but growing number of reform-minded younger ministers are arriving on the scene. Bilingual and bicultural Korean-American preachers, such as the Rev. Peter Kim of Torrance First Presbyterian Church, are beginning to make a difference. They minister to younger Koreans who came here as children and English-speaking second and third generations. Their philosophy is to make Christianity relevant every day, not just on Sundays.

Still, Kim said, working with an English-speaking congregation within a Korean church isn’t easy.

“All the intergenerational issues are constantly at the surface,” he said. “People use language and cultural problems as a scapegoat. It’s not that people don’t support the second-generation ministry, but at the same time they constantly would like to keep that under control. Often the first-generation agenda is to eventually make the younger generations like themselves.”

Difficulty with English and unfamiliarity with American culture leaves many immigrants feeling like “deaf mutes” and isolated from the mainstream culture regardless of their economic and social status. Half the respondents to a survey by the Times Poll of 750 Koreans living in Los Angeles County cited the language barrier as the primary thing holding them back.

“The first generation hesitates in reaching out (to other communities) because of the language barrier,” said Young Nak’s Hee-Min Park. As a result, younger people who are comfortable in both worlds may ultimately be the bridge to other communities.

“Korean churches have a dual role: To keep Korean traditions and to be a transforming agent,” Park said. Acknowledging that often churches overemphasize the first role, he added: “We need to get away from self-absorbed and material-centered ways and concentrate on how we can participate in this society. The 4.29 poktong was a turning point.”