Greetings from South Korea! I’m here with Senior Pastor Lawrence, Deputy Senior Pastor Daniel, Pastor Patrick Pang and Pastor Asher Tan for G12 Korea Conference. It has been wonderful catching up with Pastor César Castellanos, Pastors Laudjair and Eline Guerra, and our hosts, Pastors Lee Seung Bang and Choi Jin Sook. More than 8,000 faithful and zealous disciples from 130 churches across nine provinces of South Korea, including delegates from Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Mongolia, have gathered in one accord to receive a fresh outpouring from God at this conference!
This year’s theme, “Back to the Start”, is most appropriate for South Korea. I am claiming a revival to start in South Korea, like it did in the early 1900s! Let me shed a little light on the history of Christianity in Korea. Korea experienced a great revival a little more than 100 years ago in the city of Pyongyang, which Christian historians referred to as the Great Pyongyang Revival. This revival had immense impact on the Korean Church. It provided spiritual strength and wisdom for the Korean Christians then. By the power of the Holy Spirit, they endured the severe persecutions during the Japanese occupation of their land from 1910 to 1945. By the grace of God, the spirit of this Great Revival has persisted, even during the Korean War that led to the divide of North and South Korea.
Even though East Asia was one of the last regions to receive Christianity, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, South Korea today has the largest percentage of Christian population in Asia. From the 1960s to 1980s, South Korea was the fastest-growing Christian population in the world. It is true that South Korea has gone through a lot of tragedies. But, for the Christians there, the history of the South Korean Church is one of God’s faithfulness through the many missionaries who sacrificed so much, and many Christians who remained faithful in the midst of suffering and pain.
Join me to pray for our dear friends in South Korea, that like their forefathers, they will continue to be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain”. (1 Corinthians 15:58)
- Senior Pastor Nina Khong