To Korea and Back:
12 days of
Prayer
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By Jonathan Brownson & Charlie. A.
Walter
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Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan
Brownson
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Table of Contents
Introduction ..............................................................................................6
Day One ..................................................................................................11
Scene 1 Beware at Ohare .......................................................................11
Scene 2 Welcome at Incheon Airport ..........................................................14
Scene 3 Fire Meat for Eight ......................................................................16
Day Two ..................................................................................................18
Scene 1 Floored by my accommodations ......................................................18
Scene 2 Children on Prayer hill .................................................................19
Scene 3 Chunmasan Prayer Mountain ..........................................................21
Day Three ...............................................................................................23
Scene 1 Ko in Korea ...............................................................................23
Scene 2 A Butterfly’s Hike .......................................................................24
Scene 3 Prayer pods ..............................................................................26
Scene 4 Chapel Pews .............................................................................28
Day 4 .....................................................................................................30
Scene 1
Office exteriors
30
Scene 2 Chapel Prayer ...........................................................................32
Scene 3 A second hike ............................................................................34
Scene 4 Central Presbyterian Church and Dr. Choi ...........................................37
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Day 5 ....................................................................................................41
Scene 1 Hospitality from Chongshin University ...............................................41
Scene 2 A Tour of Seoul ...........................................................................43
Scene 3 Dinner with Dongsan Presbyterian Church ...........................................45
Day 6 .....................................................................................................47
Scene 1 Preaching at Dongsan Church ..........................................................48
Scene 2 A Lord’s Day ..............................................................................52
Scene 3 Ping Pong ..................................................................................54
Scene 4 Neighborhood Outreach ................................................................55
Scene 5 Sunday night Worship ..................................................................57
Day Seven ...............................................................................................59
Scene 1 Wish you were here…Rick Warren......................................................59
Scene 2 Wish you were here…Dave Bast .......................................................63
Scene 3 Wish you were here…Mike Bickle......................................................66
Day Eight ................................................................................................71
Scene 1 My Korean “Tapestory” ................................................................71
Scene 2 North Korea ...............................................................................75
Scene 3 Our Chaplain Friend .....................................................................77
Scene 4 Glad you aren’t here (no picture) ....................................................79
Day Nine .................................................................................................81
Scene 1 Bed & Breakfast ..........................................................................81
Scene 2
Lunch at Kwandon University in Kangneung ....................................82
Scene 3 Wading in the water .....................................................................84
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Scene 4 John speaks at largest Protestant Seminary in the world .........................86
Day Ten ..................................................................................................88
Scene 1 Breakfast in Chongshin Guest House .................................................88
Scene 2 Daeshin General Assembly Seminary .................................................91
Day Eleven ..............................................................................................93
Scene 1 Subway ....................................................................................94
Scene 3 $Shopping for gifts for the Family ....................................................96
Scene 4 Friday Night Prayer Meeting ...........................................................97
Day Twelve ..............................................................................................99
Scene 1 John leaves family I come home to mine ............................................99
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Introduction
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Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are
not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is
the Christ and that by believing you may have life in his name… (John 20:31)
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I think that Jesus wants me to write a book/blog for you about my trip to Korea.
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Some might say that “my Jesus is historically constructed and subjectively
embraced”. And I would agree that Jesus, or at least stories about Jesus, were
introduced to me at a young age. “Jesus loves me…this I know…for the Bible…tells
me so.” Do I really know? Maybe not. Does the Bible tell me? Not without a little
help from a mother and father and a faith community.
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A world wide web of relationships bring me to Jesus and to be honest--as I hope
this whole book will be--some relationships tempt me away.
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Still, I believe Jesus wants me to write. I hope you want to read.
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I know at least one “you” does: Jeannette. This book really starts as a letter
from home to you. I fear going in search of God for 12 days in Korea that you, my
dear wife, will be in a much different place than I upon my return. We know of
others don’t we, who do not want to get any closer to heaven because they sense it
will tear them apart from those that they love on earth. There is something of that
fear in me that puts pen to paper (finger to keyboard) and first sends these words to
you.
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You are my inspiration. We have loved and cherished, promised and kept. Now
thirty plus years later we are still finding each other, knowing and not knowing,
becoming and “be-staying”.
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To you, Jeannette, I say thanks. You are both my introduction and
acknowledgement. If I can’t love you with this book, I can’t love anyone. You are
proximity to my charity. You are the way I “love the one I’m with”. I am looking for
you in these pages, hoping you will punctuate and perforate.
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This is for you, Jeannette. This is also for the children you give me. Benjamin,
Joanna and Sam you are everywhere between the lines of this book. Still, you will be
discreetly left out of the headlines. You are still teaching me and until I learn more, I
am choosing to say a little less. It is more important for me at this stage to listen to
you than to speak for you. You have already heard a lot from your mom and me. Now
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you want to hear from other voices. So, I must listen to the echo of those voices in
you.
The “you” in this book, the audience for it, is my wife and dear adult children.
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Still, there are so many other “yous”. In what category do I put our miscarried
one, lost on an ultrasound screen, motionless when at three months there should have
been, could have been a name, a sex, a future? Surely that child is somewhere in my
thoughts.
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This reflection seeks a truce to our polarized and politicized world. There is a
wideness I am after, not a definition but an expansion of audience. Maybe I am
looking for the “yous” that Gospel writer Luke sought many years ago:
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Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been
fulfilled among us just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first
were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore since I myself have carefully
investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an
orderly account for you (most excellent Theophilus) so that you may know the
certainty of the things you have been taught. (Gospel of Luke NIV)
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I think my “yous” might be Theophiluses (say that a few times fast).
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Biblical scholars can’t quite figure out whether Theophilus is a person or a people
group. Ambiguity lives in the name. Ambiguity lives in my audience. You are
personal and yet somehow universal. You are receiving a hand written invitation
without a clearly defined address on the envelope.… My hope is that more yous pick
up and plug into this book than my own prejudices and myopia might anticipate.
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I seek ambiguity of audience but clarity of content. I want this to be an “orderly
account”. And I trust that its order will enhance its accessibility.
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We live our life in time so the book will be arranged chronologically. We live in
space, so I will be describing a twelve day journey I took in Korea.
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More than time and space, though, a hunger hangs between us, a magnet draws us
together.
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We are loved.
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Luke’s Theophilus can translate either as “lover of God” or “beloved of God”. For
me those are the only two categories. We are all, I believe, defined by one or both
meanings of Theophilus. Not all are lovers of God but all are “beloved of God”.
There is an embrace that gathers in all religion and race. There is a sacred canopy
covering us universally and with particularity.
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We are together beloved by God. We are invited together, as Henri Nouwen
penned, to the “life of the beloved”. In his book by the same title, Henri Nouwen
writes for his secular friend, who has asked Nouwen to write on spirituality in a
manner that is accessible for all. Nouwen writes this..
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Ever since you asked me to write for you and your friends about the spiritual life,
I have been wondering if there might be one word I would most want you to
remember when you finished reading all I wish to say…it is the word beloved (P. 29 of
“Life of the beloved”)
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Nouwen’s friend reads the book and is unsatisfied. Beloved doesn’t translate.
Beloved doesn’t resonate. Beloved doesn’t penetrate his heart, his mind, his soul.
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Nouwen does not succeed, as he hopes, with his atheist friend. I may not with
you.
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Still, I must try. I must try to speak a language of love that transcends belief. I
must try to say God loves you even though I realize that for some I may be speaking a
foreign or perhaps more dangerously a hurtful language.
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So maybe I am asking you the reader to accept this term “beloved” on your own
terms. Read into that word whatever it might mean for you to be loved. Start with
whoever has done, might do or will one day bring that feeling or awareness into your
life. You may not accept that you are God’s beloved or my beloved. I am hoping you
will find in your reading and reflection that you are at least some one’s beloved.
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I write then to all the beloved...You in all your peculiarity...You, wherever and
with whomever this book finds you…You in whatever category society places youyoung or old, rich or poor, gay or gallant.
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My hope is that you find yourself in these pages and also find the ones and One
who loves you in these pages too.
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Maybe another way of saying it would be that when I left Holland, MI for Incheon,
Korea…love got larger for me. I pray it will for you. I hope that, for you, love will
become global in its reach and unending in its rotation. I hope that wherever love
goes around, you find it. My half a world away trip to Korea became for me a half of
the way home journey…may it be for you too. I left a beloved place and people. I
found a beloved place and people.
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You are the audience…
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Now let me say just a word about authorship.
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This book shares an author. I have asked Charlie Walter to help me write this
book. Charlie is a creative writing graduate of Hope College in Holland, MI. He is
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both audience and author. He is both reader and writer. He is a bridge from me to
you and back.
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Charlie if I say you are like a son, as you literally put pen on page to tell this story,
does that displace the grace and goodness your own biological father invested in you?
I hope not. Does it rival the deep appreciation I have for Ben and Sam? May it not be.
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Still, I do love you and need you to help me tell this story.
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I am a play by play commentator looking for a color man. I am a journalist in
search of a journal-er. I am a preacher in partnership with a poet. I represent an
older and established Christianity, you a newer and more progressive faith. Charlie
you are my first “you” and I am asking you to introduce yourself to our other “yous”
too (Charlie’s words follow in bold).
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I have become one who stays behind, without knowing it. For 23 years, I have lived on
a stretch of land in West Michigan-from home town to college town-connected by a twolane highway and a series of back roads, some dirt, that wind through farms to a granite
factory and a community Hospital. For 23 years, I have lived within 23 miles of my
hometown and the college town where I worked for four years on a degree for my future.
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Three and a half of those years I thought only of the present.
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And for one semester I muttered over the future, broke my foot, rode a Greyhound to
California, flew back and when I had no place to live (because a 23 year old grad must not
move back in with mom), I moved-in with my pastor and his wife, my dear friends,
Jonathan & Jeannette.
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I am one who went and came back. It was a failure the two weeks I spent in California
after college. A mis-step. My foot was broken.
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But the best thing about going and coming back is that you have new eyes. Things look
different. You stand in front of the mirror, and you are different. Your hands at your sides:
have they always reached so low? You open your mouth, turn your head side-to-side, your
teeth and your tongue.
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When you go and come back, there is a story on your lips; it’s what you see in the
mirror. There is something to be said.
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The story of my going and coming back to Holland right after graduation – it is a story
of mis-steps. I told many about the story and now it is out of me and tucked in notebook
pages, just tucked away.
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So Jonathan goes to Korea, and when he comes back, he wears suits and has slippers
laying on the first step of the stage in the front of the sanctuary. As a congregation we hold
our breath.
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For the story! Of the coming and going!
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The Story!
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He tells us that there will be 7:00 AM prayer, and we see he is wearing suits every day
now and the slippers when he preaches, but that is all we are told. Come to prayer at 7:00
AM.
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I am one who is staying behind. My friends have shot-off to California, D.C., Durham,
Atlanta, Tampa, Bolivia. They are on strings from this place, Holland, MI, where we all
went to school but the strings are thinning, fraying. I don’t believe they are ever cut. But
they do fray.
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Jonathan, then. He asks me, in a letter that he walks to my house and delivers on my
desk upstairs; he asks me to hear what the story is: the Korea story, which is not a story of
what happened in Korea, nor a story of what happened when he came back here to
Holland, MI.
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It’s a story of fraying, the link, the connecting string from here to Seoul. It is a string, a
strength, that cannot and has not and will not be cut, but it has frayed.
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Let’s say this is a story, an account, a recording, a testimony, of strings. I know no one
else in my life who is better at seeing those strings than Jonathan, so much that I often want
to say, “Jonathan, it’s just a string. Let it go.”
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Ah, but we are bound together, strong together, knit and sewn together. The Creator is
a seamstress!
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I write because deep down, I am certain of the same thing Jonathan is:
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That our creator works in threads.
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Day One
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Scene 1
Beware at Ohare
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It is 7:30 AM in Holland, MI where my journey begins and 13 ½ hours behind where
it will end. John & Sue Kim come to our home to pick me up and drive us to O’hare
airport. Jeannette, you ride in the van with me. Jim Feltman, my good friend and
neighbor, you interrupt your early morning jog to pray for me.
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It is August 17th, 2012 in Holland but I am to learn times and even dates differ
around the globe.
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We drive through our core city neighborhood in Holland, Michigan. I will miss this
place of economic and ethnic diversity, this small newly named “West Core”
neighborhood and the Nueva Comunidad Church who live here. Even though I will
only be twelve days away, I leave treasured people for whom I carry great love and
responsibility. You, dear congregation of New Community-Fourth Reformed, are kind
to share me in this way. You, West Core Neighbors, bless me with your house
watching and flower watering.
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We drive. Our GPS unnecessarily maps out our route. We are really habit and Holy
Spirit driven. We know it will take between 2 ½ to 3 hours to get to John’s daughter
Sarah’s apartment on the North Side of Chicago. Then after hoisting her mega
suitcase into our van we know we will lose most of the hour we gained coming to
Chicago in fighting traffic to Ohare..
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This is not the first time I meet you, Sarah Kim, but certainly the first time we
really get to know each other. You are confident, professional, passionate in your
faith. You remind me a little of a woman named Lindsey, one of the Hope College
students who was very active in our congregation. You will soon also remind me of my
daughter Joanna.
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John you do all the driving. Why? Is it out of a desire to serve or a desire to
control?
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I have known you now for over a year. I remember the first time we meet. I have
been praying with other Holland area pastors Thursday mornings at 7:30 AM for over
ten years. You join us for the first time February 17, 2011. You come in with suit and
tie. We welcome you politely and casually. Stories of your daily prayer meeting that
you had started January 1st 2012 at 6:00 AM challenge me.
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You come to pray with us on Thursday. Jeannette and I leave the following Sunday,
February 20th for the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, MO. There,
another “beloved Korean” prays for us, welcomes us into her home for Korean
cooking, and prophesies us back to Holland with the conviction that I must learn more
about your country and people.
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For many years Koreans fascinate me with a disciplined and corporate life of
prayer. I want to know more about a people whose medium income could rise in half
a hundred years from $100 a year to $40,000 a year. I hear testimonies of a piety that
breeds that prosperity, a passion that could produce the largest church in the world,
along with some of the most sophisticated engineering of our time. I want to know
more about this people group. You now personify my pursuit.
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So I wonder as we embark on our journey together, do you drive out of a desire to
serve or control?
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I suspect the answer is yes.
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Once in O’hare airport, with some last minute calling, traveler miles get credited.
We endure customs with the normal embarrassments. Travelers are twice cursed. We
leave those we know only to be intimately searched by those we don’t. We hurry up
and wait and hurry up some more.
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Slightly after 12:45 PM Korean Air Flight #0038 lifts off the runway and into Koreabound air.
John you arrange seating so that Sarah and I have a seat between us in a three
seat section on the plane. You take an aisle seat adjacent.
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We take almost 14 hours to fly. We give away 12 hours of daylight. I don’t get as
much done as I had hoped. Don’t get as much sleep as I had hoped either. Still, the
meals stand out and conversations sink in.
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Questions accompany my quest. What about the sermon I must preach to a Korean
congregation I have never met? What will I hear on the prayer mountain? How can I
find ways to keep listening to God and to others? What am I supposed to do when I
get back from the trip? What about “Korean style prayer”(a term some Americans
use for everyone praying out loud together in the same room at the same time)? What
kinds of practices will be transferable to our multicultural congregation?
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Worries find a seat next to me on this trip also. As I visit one wildly successful
church after another in Korea, will there be questions about the church I serve? What
can an 80 in worship revitalization pastor say on the steps of an estimated 800,000
member Yoido Full Gospel Church?
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I am embarrassed to say I am embarrassed. Not of the quality of people at New
Community-Fourth. I only worry if and when they get reduced to a number rather
than names. Let me talk about Abdelhadi a Muslim from Morrocco who finds a Savior
from his alcoholism in Jesus. Permit me to brag about Juan who lives down the street
but volunteers throughout the neighborhood. Or how about Isikah from Kenya or the
many college students we have sent out in mission to Uganda, Bolivia, Mexico?
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Names don’t embarrass me. Numbers do and numbers are the short hand version
of pastoral conversation.
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We depart from O’Hare about lunch time on Monday. We arrive in Incheon,
Korea about suppertime Tuesday. A night and a day rotate away on our way over to
Korea. Worse yet, by the time I get to Korea I will be 10 months older. In Korea, life
and the measuring of our age starts at conception.
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Scene 2
Welcome at Incheon Airport
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We land in Korea at 4:30 PM. I have difficulty with my “welcome ticket” and
confuse it with a “customs application”. I expect to see men and women dressed in
business suits to greet us. Instead, you dear friend of John’s and “car doctor” Song
Sung Pum, dress in blue jeans and bring with you Kim Young Ja and Kim Me Kyung.
You welcome me, because you know John, who leads your church years ago. For me,
it is grace by association.
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I learn some things about your names.
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In the United States, we say our title, first name, last name (i.e. Dr. Jonathan
Brownson). You tell me that Koreans say the Family name-given name and title. (i.e.
Brownson, Jonathan Dr.).
Does this mean you have greater respect for your family names? I wonder. I think
again about the gift of my good family name. I remember that this trip is a
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Brownson, Jonathan trip, paid for partly by a church with a small budget and mostly
by my parents and some of their friends with kind hearts.
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Korea graces me by association with your pastor. Holland graces me by my
association with my family name: Radio minister Father. Seminary professor brother.
Public School administrating mother. Two brothers who die. Two left to carry the
legacy on.
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I suspect Brownson Jonathan will be happy to be “Kim, Jonathan” for 12 days, a
smaller fish in a bigger, less familial and familiar pond. I will accept my new grace by
association, thankful for my heritage and now my host. (Charlie’s words follow in
bold)
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!Pastor. Prayer. You are always a prayer. To me, you are your worship.?
!What I am saying is this: I can’t think of anyone more deserving to go and see than you.Pastor
Jonathan,
!When I first meet you, I know what it is to feel graced.
!You invite my friend Caleb and I, after one of our first visits to your church, over to your house
for lunch. We eat in your dining room with your wife Jeannette and another couple from the
church--a young couple in seminary, who lead the worship music. You and your wife are gracious
hosts--in the pews and at the dining table.
!Later, I meet your father. Your mother. Further on, your brother.
And somewhere in those spaces, through stories, I “meet” your beloved, deceased brothers. And
somewhere in those spaces, for a time, I live like a son in your home.
!It’s not that your family hasn’t been important to me. It’s just that I meet you first, and who are
you when I meet you? Pastor. Prayer.
!It’s not that your family name isn’t important to me, but I always am reminded that first I meet
you, and who are you?
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So, “pastor and prayer” planes down at Incheon airport.
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Incheon originally consists of two islands separated by a shallow sea. Koreans “reclaim” the land, which means that they fill in the sea, joining the two islands into
one. Then they build an airport. Then they build two bridges, the Incheon Bridge (it is
newer and longer) and Yeongjong Bridge.
!If you have faith as small as a mustard seed. You can say to this mountain, move from here
to there and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you (Mt. 17:20)
!You industrious and faith filled Koreans say to two Islands, Move from here to there and they
do. What might you say to me? Will your mustard seeds of faith be able to move me too?
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Scene 3
Fire Meat for Eight
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By 6:00 PM we are enjoying Korean Fire Meat and Soo Rim Pork. The meat is thinly
shaved and cooked over hot coals (not charcoal but a kind of wood that is burned in a
sunken pot at our table).
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This is my first foray into chop sticks and to my enduring credit, I become quite
proficient. It is my purpose to be all things to all people in order that “I might be
saved” through this Korean culture (a slightly altered reference to the Bible passage
of I Corinthians 9:22).
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Korea represents a culture which Neihbhur’s typology will not let me separate
from Christ. So, like the meat I chew and swallow, I know I must take it all in, instead
of picking at the food.
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Taking it all in tonight I enthusiastically assume means taking in some music
playing in another room of the restaurant. So I go, smile and entertain myself in this
separate room only to find later it is a private family party. It is the first of many
such cultural gaffs.
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I discover when I try to pay for my first meal in Korea that I have suddenly become
a rich man with my traveling money. I take inventory of how many dollars I have and
discover that every dollar equals 1,000 Wun. Better yet, I am to find that at most of
the restaurants my American money is no good. Welcoming Koreans will not let me
use it.
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You Koreans are a prosperous and a patient people. You feed me like a king AND
put up with my ignorance. Because I am the only white person traveling with two
Korean Americans, I suspect that throughout the trip I get preferential treatment.
Grace undeserved.
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After the meal and some “nonverbal bonding”, we set out for our hotel where we
hope to retire at 9:00 PM Korea time. The Royal Hotel is booked, so we go instead to
the Ramada Inn in Song-Do. Lots of driving gets us to the hotel only to find the
reservation cancelled. We drive a distance to another hotel. I see the city at night,
lit up with lots of Red Crosses.
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Song Deacon, you chauffeur me. You manage a local car repair and rental shop
and whenever John will let you, you provide transportation for John’s trips. You are a
true diaconos (Greek word for deacon). You serve the small measure of Christ in me.
And the more you serve me, the greater Christ looms in you.
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I want to connect with you. I sense a deep kinship. Still, I know nothing else to
say to you except “Sonata,” the name of the car you are driving us in. So I sing my
sonata and after marveling at the make of your car a few times our conversations
drags.
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We arrive at a Ramada Inn. Our new and quite expensive hotel has no beds or
chairs in the rooms! I sleep on a mat and sit next to a miniature table.
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In the early stages of our journey, I am connecting with the culture more than with
the Internet. I know it will be hard on you Jeannette at home, not hearing from me.
A “thread frays” with the delay of communication back to you in Holland, MI..
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I try to call you by cell phone and that frays too.
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So cell phone becomes alarm clock and my computer a glorified typewriter. I set
my phone for 5:30 AM after I tap a few keys on my laptop. I get to bed at about 9:30
PM Tuesday night in Korea (8:30 AM Tuesday in Michigan). I sleep well-with the help of
Melatonin and Tylenol PM.
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Day Two
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Scene 1
Floored by my accommodations
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South Korea has been known as “The Land of the Morning Calm”. Calmed, I rise at
5:30 AM on this first morning of my re-birthing and re-claiming trip.
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Tradition trumps Western comforts at my expensive hotel. Mats and pillows
decorate the floor but no beds. Sleeping on the floor is not new for me. Before my
freshman year at the University of Michigan, I lived with 11 other young men in a
house. We slept four per room on the floor in three bedrooms. Two other bedrooms
of our five bedroom older home housed God (prayer room) and guests (guest room).
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Crossing cultures can happen without crossing oceans. God builds bridges early for
me, like the Incheon bridge I cross in Korea. I grow up on one Island--Conservative
Reformed Church in America righteous and republican small town Holland, MI. I
bridge over to another Island--a Catholic Charismatic Community cloistered in a
decadent, democratic, misdemeanor-for-marijuana town called A-squared or Ann
Arbor, MI.
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In both bridgings, how I lay me down to sleep shapes how I live me up through the
day. Position shapes purpose. So, starting out on the floor seems fitting for this trip.
I must say, though, that my Korean hotel heated floor beats cold, college- life
hardwood floors any day.
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John and Sarah meet some family early at a local cemetery to pay respects to
loved ones who have been buried there. I journal in the morning after taking a
shower. I enjoy my first Maxim (instant coffee with cream that you mix with hot
water) in the room. It will become a tradition.
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From 6:30-8:00 AM after John and Sarah get back, we eat breakfast together at a
small restaurant in Song-Do. Again I am “floored” by the culture. Instead of lying
down, I am sitting on the floor, this time with chopsticks in my hand to eat, rather
than a few blankets spread to sleep.
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Breakfast is anything but ham and eggs. Vegetables and meat must be chopsticked up delicately and they go down uneasily. Still we get the job done.
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Scene 2
Children on Prayer hill
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At 8:00 AM, John is off to the Doctor. You Sarah, and I walk around the
neighborhood surrounding the hotel. We work our way up a hill behind the hotel. We
pass an elementary school, two churches and a Buddhist plant store (with a sign that
looks like the Nazi swastika?). We keep taking the higher road until we get to the top
of the first of two “prayer mountains” we will climb today.
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Walking with Sarah reminds me of walking with Joanna, our daughter who shares
her age. Song-Do dissolves into San Francisco. And this hill we climb becomes Mount
Davidson. The “high places” comparisons continue. In Song Do, crosses crown city
buildings. In San Francisco on Mt. Davidson, a 103 foot tall free standing cross
watches over St. Francis’ of Assisi’s namesake city.
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Our “high road walking” takes us past Buddhist temple praying. As we walk past it
and farther up the trail, you Sarah, pray against the temple. I am more comfortable
at the time praying for the people who might go there in search of a Savior. I sense
both prayers are heard and both roads will bring us to the same destination.
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You ask about each of our children and I share more personally than I had planned.
Something about this rarified “hill air” makes me think it is OK.
!
You say you will pray that my children change. I say that I pray I can change
enough to accept the ways they may not change. What I share with you, I do not
share with your father…at least not yet.
!
Children “school” parents in humility. And I start to wonder whether I am really
the best one to be on this trip with you and your father John. I come from a small
church. I parent faith questioning children. Certainly, I think to myself, you could
have found someone who has done a better job as preacher and parent.
!
Still we press on and up the hill. Maybe this trip and my life are more about taking
higher roads than conquering the highest.
!
Providentially on the top of the mountain we meet several Catholic School
Children drawing pictures of the scene they are seeing from the mountain. You Sarah,
share that you had been prompted to pray for children in Korea that morning. It is
one of many “holy coincidences” that will punctuate this pilgrimage.
!
After our hike up our unofficial prayer hill occupied by Buddhists and Catholics, we
wind our way down to the best BBQ restaurant in Song Do. My American money is no
good here either with Song Sung Deacon footing the bill.
!
!20
!
Scene 3
Chunmasan Prayer Mountain
!
!
We finish lunch and leave our hotel. We drive 1 ½ hours to Heavenly Horse Prayer
Mountain. We pass one satellite city of high rise apartments after another. We drive
through a gate and up a steep hill into a complex of buildings and prayer sites.
!
An associate of John Kim’s founds this “prayer mountain”. A museum honors him
on the site. The land comes from a wealthy member. Another member donates
money to build on it. Over 80 acres of land now exhale sin and breathe in the saving
graces of God.
!
Grace by association gets me a VIP room normally reserved for big name speakers.
The caretaker of the property gives us a tour. A Chapel focuses prayer. Residences
house church pastors and leaders who are here to study/pray. There are meeting
rooms for larger groups to use during the day.
!
Cut into the mountain are two outdoor venues for prayer; the “Garden of
Gethsemane” and the “Mount of Olives”. A fresh water fountain guards one entrance.
A maouseleum where members can spread their ashes stands next to another. Human
ashes dust beautiful white rocks which get washed regularly with sprinklers. When
!21
the sprinklers begin, black spiders climb up out of the ash, over the rocks and then
back into the dark.
!
After the tour, John & Sarah nap while I try to get my computer to work, this time
with a direct cable hook up. Still no providence. I leave them sleeping and go out to
walk around the grounds. I sit on a swing overlooking the city below.
!!
!22
!
Day Three
!
!
Scene 1
Ko in Korea
!
!
I wake up a little after 5:00 AM. Thousands of Koreans have connected with God
already through early morning prayer. I still can’t phone home.
!
So, I decide to listen to you Pastor Ko over breakfast instead. You, I discover, are
the interim director of the Heavenly Horse Prayer Mountain and an associate pastor on
staff at the large church which purchases and peoples it. You are, by Korean
standards, “an ordinary pastor”. By American standards you have already had an
incredibly fruitful ministry.
!
!23
You teach medical students, oversee missions, lead daily prayer and now as one of
the pastors of the large sponsoring church for the prayer mountain (2-3 thousand
people), you coordinate activities at the prayer mountain until they find a new
director.
!
You tell me how you fasted with no water on two different occasions for an entire
week. They say (whoever they are-in this case I google my way into a livestrong web
site-that’s another story) that the human body can’t survive much longer than a week
without water. So, you fast to the point of death as a way of expressing your desire
for the life of Jesus to thrive in you. And I realize that Koreans have a whole
different/deeper and more difficult way of celebrating spiritual disciplines.
!
!
!
Scene 2
A Butterfly’s Hike
!
!
After breakfast and conversation with Ko I hike up the mountain behind the retreat
center. This is not heavenly horse mountain (which rises higher). It is a smaller hill
which faces that mountain.
!
!24
I have never competed in any kind of organized running race. However, just
before leaving on this trip, I decide to participate with my wife Jeannette in the Tulip
Time Run in Holland, MI. The race will wind through our inner city neighborhood and I
sign up to run the 5K or about 3.1 miles.
!
So, my hike in Korea becomes my training for Holland, “5K for the day” (I actually
walked about 10 K in total).
!
Satellite cities lay siege on this mountain. My prayer and perspiration take me
above them and to its peak of 566 Kilometers.
!
I stop and with a picture capture a butterfly on a flowering bush. It is a sign,
perhaps it points to the beauty of the mountains we pray in superimposed over the
valleys we live in.
!
I must think small on this trip and let God build big. My realtor wife Jeannette
sells homes in Holland. I seek houses of prayer for all nations. Jeannette starts a
new company Brownson Properties. I sustain a Church called “new communityFourth”. I was the minister for prayer in the Reformed Church in America from
2004-2007. Now I serve as minister of a small city church.
!
I want God to ask me to do daily prayer in our sanctuary at 7:00 AM when I get
back to Holland, MI. I want something to do to make myself feel like I am worth what
feels like an enormous investment of time and money in me on this trip. I want to
mobilize prayer because I am a Brownson who got his trip to Korea paid for and now is
getting treated like he doesn’t deserve. I want to do something for God but God
doesn’t ask me.
!
Perhaps God waits because God has already spoken. I am a pastor not a prayer. I
am no longer the Minister for Prayer in the Reformed Church in America.
!
Still, I wonder why. Did the Reformed Church in America miss the voice of God
when at the 2003 General Synod with the crafting of a ten year goal proposed the
establishment of the first ever prayer position in our denomination? Did I confuse the
voice of God when out of forty days of prayer and fasting I said yes to this task?
!
I know now that for lack of money there will be no Minister for Prayer in the RCA.
I wonder though whether I can still minister prayer as a local church pastor. I hope it
is possible, but am not sure, that I can live out my life call “to be devoted to prayer
and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4) in Holland, MI the way pastor Ko and others
do in Korea.
!
I take with me to Korea and will take back many questions about prayer and prayer
mobilization.
!25
“To whom much has been given…” Much has been given to me. Much will be
asked of me. There are higher mountains to hike, but it must be one step at a time.
!
Two hikers take my picture at the peak. I wonder if even though they speak
Korean, I could, with Bible in hand (I take it and a diary everywhere I go), say “Jesu
Christu”.
!
I want to communicate with them and what I want to communicate most is that
they are “beloved”.
!
Maybe I will write a book instead!
!
!
Scene 3
Prayer pods
!
!
I walk down from the heights and past prayer pods of concrete and old tires.
!
And I wonder, maybe my hiking must start with my humbling. Maybe prayer has to
start on the side of the mountain, not the top. Maybe piety fits best, like fresh
cornerstone concrete, in the spaces defined by old worn out tires. (Charlie’s words
follow)
!
!
Jonathan,
It sounds like there is an abundance of land and space up on the prayer mountain and
dotted all around are the prayer pods--old tires and concrete.
!26
I am thinking of the church building back in Holland, of the churches. There is an
abundance of church in Holland, Mich.
Every church building in Holland has a parking lot. There is space. There are parking
spaces.
I am thinking of New Community 4th back in Holland--that on a Sunday there are, at most,
20 cars in the parking lot, and then there is open space.
But on Tuesdays, there is the Feeding America food pantry, when the food truck parks in
the parking lot and tables are set up and people stand with a shopping cart, waiting to gather food,
I’m thinking of July, Vacation Bible School, when the kids play dodgeball and Sharks and
Minnows and Duck Duck Goose out on the parking lot, which is sizzled, with the asphalt-rubber
covering cracks in the cement.
I am thinking that God uses rubber and concrete on mountains in Korea for prayer and in
Holland, where space is abundant, God re-uses half-full parking lots to feed the hungry and gather
children to Him.
We kneel and pray.
Sometimes, we kneel on hot cement, waiting to be soaked over the head in a wet game of
Duck Duck Goose.
I am thinking, Jonathan, that space matters.
I am thinking that how we use space matters the most. You say the church is built on
breathing, not buildings; confession, not construction.
Functional fixedness: when we cannot separate an object or a space or a person from its
functionality.
Drive on tires. Drive on cement. Park in a parking lot.
No.
God says pray on tires. And feed others on cement. And on that hot parking lot, throw a
dodgeball at a kid.
I am thinking we are not to be so fixed.
!
And I am not so fixed or so fussy to refuse these prayer pods. So, even with a
backpack of questions I suspend my hike in the Garden of Gethsmane. I sit on
concrete and rubber and pray.
!
What seems like a repetitive and mindless style of prayer from other “pod
prayers” distracts me. I keep wondering why doesn’t God ask me to do anything. I
finally bend to God’s invitation just to come into His “pod presence”. I come this day.
I sense afresh His call to come and sit with Him every day. I will love God first with
heart, soul and mind. Then, when the call is clear, hands and feet will join in.
!
God calls me to sit a little closer to Heaven first on this Heavenly Horse prayer
mountain. He doesn’t call me to do anything else.
!
A group prays below, about and beside me…A chorus develops of different sounds
from different directions…I do not hear words, just tongues or more like chanting.
!
They are praying on “prayer pods”. As they sit cross legged they form a kind of
inverted mushroom shape. Heads planted in the heavens. Feet crossed over rubber
and concrete.
!
!27
On the side of this hill called the Garden of Gethsemane, I stand at the center of a
cross of concrete and tires above the city below. I petition but mostly I just praise
the One who sits in heaven while I sit crossed legged on concrete.
!
!
!
Scene 4
Chapel Pews
!
!
After prayer in the afternoon I eat with Pastor Ko again. He encourages me to
“pray through” things in my life, an admonition I will remember often. I work on
memorizing John 20:19-31, the text God has given me to preach about with the
Korean church on the 28th.
!
Prayer in the chapel starts at 7:30 PM. From prayer pods in the garden of
Gethsemane to wooden benches in the chapel, I again position myself for prayer. The
prayer meeting is led by Pastor Ko.
!
Only seven people attend the Thursday evening prayer meeting, partly because
this prayer mountain is quite a distance from the sponsoring church. Small #s come to
all the events and make the place feel at first brush a little like Robert Schuller’s
cavernous Cathedral I visited in her last days. I wonder if this is a place that may
have already had its heyday and is in decline. (I realize later that I may be a bit
presumptuous when two bus loads of women ascend to the mountain just as we are
leaving).
!
!28
My thoughts return to some English phrases my praying pastor mixes in with his
Korean message at this Thursday night prayer service of seven:
!
!
Isaiah 6:1-8 “Here am I, send me”.
And I say, as I walk into accommodations I do not deserve to experience a sleep I
can hardly wait for, Here I am too.
!
!29
!
Day 4
!
!
Scene 1
Office exteriors
!
Ben, son of my right hand, I think it was a combination of you and God that got me
up at your birth time of 3:33. (I have long ago stopped asking God to give me good
sleep. Now I ask for good nights and sometimes a good night’s sleep gets interrupted
for more important things.)
!
So, at 3:33 AM I wake up. I think of the pastor’s admonition the night before to
“pray through” requests. I believe I am to particularly pray through some concerns I
have for you Ben, along with your brother and sister.
Do you mind?
!
!30
I am learning with each of you to “make my prayers with thanksgiving”. So often I
focus so much on what I think God ought to do with your lives, that I miss what God
already is accomplishing.
!
So, I go to the “Mount of Olives” a smaller prayer site on the campus of this
“Heavenly Horse Prayer Mountain”and I “pray through with thanks”.
Tires and concrete “drive up” the side of this hill. So do some “shell chairs” which
have come a long way I surmise from Herman Miller in Zeeland, MI. How curious that
these chairs grow not only in fancy offices but in pine needles on the side of a hill.
I sense from God (not really hearing, seeing or touching but a combination of all
the senses) that one of my assignments when I get back will be to pray daily with your
mom for all of you. Again, I hope that doesn’t seem manipulative to you. I feel like
God might want to tell me things about you. Or perhaps in another way of putting it,
if we give ourselves time, mom and I might realize things about you that will help us
relate to you better.
I just know I can be a better father to you…So I write in the journals you gave me
some of the ways I hope to be that for each of you.
This praying/thinking/realizing through things-I know I must do for you. Your
grandparents can’t stand in for me. Jeannette can partner with me but never replace
my role. So I know I must pray every day for you and obey whatever God tells me to
do for/with you.
Praying through includes a listening time at 5:00 AM.
!
I wonder if I have stopped too soon in my praying? Is it possible to pray enough for
evil to be cast out but not kept out? I wonder if in some instances where I have
prayed only briefly evil has returned with greater vengeance. Like a wild animal, I
wonder if my prayers sometimes rouse it but don’t destroy it.
I know in the future that I need to “get assignments” from God for you my children
with your mom. I must not tell anyone else about those assignments, but I do need to
record them so that I can be sure to pray them through to an answer every day. This
praying for you will help me know the Heavenly Father’s heart and cause me to love
God and you all more.
!31
!
Scene 2
Chapel Prayer
!
!
Sarah and John sit a few rows ahead of me at early morning prayer at 5:30 AM.
There is an entryway or foyer in most public meeting areas in Korea. There are racks
to put shoes and pick up Korean slippers. So with slippers on foot I step up to higher,
holier ground (the floor is raised about four inches above the entry way).
I worship with Koreans in Korean. I am not listening for words I can see forming on
people’s lips but rather for values which shape people’s lives. It is not lips but
beaming faces which create in me the greatest impression.
I feel compelled to kneel during the entire service which lasts for about 45
minutes. This will not be the last time. I want to get lower than the speaker and
hearers because I feel lower--a true assessment of spiritual stature.
I want to be submissive to the Christ in this Korean culture. It is out of respect for
Christ in the culture, not simply for the culture itself.
Pastor Ko graciously does announce the scripture passage in English, so I start and
stay reading in Matthew 16:13-20.
!32
!
Who do Koreans say that I am? But what about you? Who do you, Jonathan, say
that I am?
!
I say you are God’s only Son begotten not made. When I see you, I see God in
human skin…
I am in Korea because God wants me to know what others believe. Still, God will
build on my confession the way God does on Peter’s. What I believe about Jesus will
do more to shape New Community-Fourth Reformed Church in Holland, Mich., than
anything else.
!
God builds not on buildings but on breathings. His rock is confession not
construction. Perhaps that is why most daily corporate prayer in Korea starts with a
confession of faith using the Apostle’s Creed. Believing in the heart and confessing
with our lips opens the doors of heaven and puts the keys to the kingdom into our
hands.
I receive a word earlier for my family. I hear a word now for my church. We must
be a confessing church. We must confess not as a way to keep people out but as a
means to invite God in. If we are to please God, we must believe that God exists and
that God rewards those who seek God.(Hebrews 11:6)
!
Western cultures build fancy buildings where they leave God out so they can get
“unchurched” people in. Koreans build prayer centers where they invite God in so
that they can get God’s people out to the ends of the earth.
!
!33
!
Scene 3
A second hike
!
!
!34
After early morning believing prayer, I go back to my room briefly. While lying
down in my room, I feel called to go back on the trail for a longer hike than I took the
afternoon before..
I will again train for my 5 K Tulip Time run in Holland, MI with a Korean Hike.
!
I sign up for my first organized race ever because the race routes itself directly
through our “West Core Neighborhood” in Holland, MI. We will run through the
streets that I have been prayer walking, along tulip-lined boulevards, past the
Washington Square Mall where Perredies serves Dutch people Italian food and Mexican
people make Chorizo sausage next door that goes into some of that Italian food. (have
I said this before?)
There is The Biscuit for breakfast and more recently Kingdom Grounds for coffee
and a few Bible verses from its Charismatic Mexican owner.
There is also the Minute Mart, where food stamp fraud has robbed the government
and now our neighborhood of its only grocery store.
I sign up to tip toe through these tulips and traditions and shops and houses.
And since I sign up, I assume I had better “buff up” while in Korea. So I hike to
the mountain which faces Heavenly Horse mountain.
!
My hike represents a “song of Ascent”-what Eugene Peterson in his commentary by
the same name calls “a long obedience in the same direction”. I check the trail
markers which are conveniently marked in Kilometers and I end up walking at least a
10 K.
There is, in this hike and in all of my experience in Korea, a call to persistence. I
promise myself at every incline that I will keep climbing without stopping until I reach
the next plateau. It is an arbitrary exercise but feels like a prayer to the God of my
uphill places.
I ascend to the first and highest lookout on this trail-566 KM. Rather than
returning as I had the day before, I continue down the trail to a second peak at 475
KM. As I start to go farther down the trail, I clearly “hear” God tell me to stop.
(Charlie’s words follow)
!
And what is that, Pastor Jonathan? You say you hear. You say that you hear clearly. You are
up on the mountain, and you are hiking and pushing yourself, getting a sweat down in the middle of
your back and really breathing and looking down at your feet, and you say that you are hearing.
!I was always told that you go uphill by looking down at your feet--that if you look up ahead, you
will only get discouraged by the distance.
!But then I read this: a good runner maintains posture going uphill by looking into the distance.
!35
!And good posture is a core of good breathing and good stride.
!If we position ourselves well, then we breathe well, and we stride well, and we can climb
mountains.
!Jesus said we can move mountains, but we can climb, too.
I agree Charlie. Prayer prostrates. Prayer walking projects. When in the Chapel, humility,
perhaps even piety, press my face to floor. But on the mountain, eyes which dare not look too high
(Psalm 131:1) suddenly see beyond the immediate. In spite of the possible discouragement of miles to
go, there is a magnificence on which to meditate. In the looking there is a different kind of hearing.
There is a day to day going forth speech which translates into every language--a creator’s call to all
creatures. An upward gaze tunes the ear and a voice breaks through.
To be more specific Charlie about how I “hear from God”, I would say that a thought comes into
consciousness. If the thought lingers, I think the thought some more. Maybe then I see if the thought will
hang on Jesus’ two great thoughts of loving God and neighbor. If I can love God and not hurt myself or
others in thinking the thought, I think some more. Then I speculate about whether the thought requires
obedience or action.
!Jesus says of His followers that “my sheep hear my voice”. Christians believe that God speaks
most clearly in Jesus throughout the canonical scriptures. So the best way to hear Jesus’ voice is by
reading the Bible. Then the more we read the Bible the more we can “pick out his voice” when we think
thoughts today. And then the more we hear and obey those thoughts, the more instructions Jesus will give
us. When the sheep hear and obey the Shepherd’s voice the Shepherd keeps calling out more.
!
It is also interesting Charlie...that every day of the trip I have “belted” a camera to my side. I
look for pictures to take, a vision to pursue. Then, I run after the vision. On this hike, though, I forget my
camera. I wonder. cameras change our seeing and hearing. I wonder if the less we can see and capture
the more acutely we may be inclined to listen.
! I know my explanation of what happened to me on the trail loses clarity in its culture crossing.
Still, I do stop when God “says” stop. I turn around and go back “home”.
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
!!
!36
!
Scene 4
Central Presbyterian Church and Dr. Choi
!Our time at the Heavenly Horse Prayer Mountain is a calm before a storm of activity that
follows. After roughly a three day retreat we will spend several days stepping into the stories of
some amazing saints of God.
For the arranging of these encounters I owe you, John Kim, my eternal gratitude.
Everywhere you ask, we receive. Whenever you knock, doors open. Whomever we seek out
with our natural gas driven car your Deacon Song gives us, we find.
John, you arrange the encounters. You, Sarah, ask the right questions. While I stand, sit or
kneel found dumb by these heroes of my faith, you query and then record amazing answers on
your portable IPAD.
We drive to the Korean Central Presbyterian Church and are guided on a tour of the
sanctuary first by Pastor Kim, one of the associate pastors at the church. We hear that this
10,000 seat sanctuary gets filled every early morning with daily prayer. We witness the wellappointed pastor’s prayer room just off the stage area of the church where leadership bows the
knee before bringing the messages every Sunday.
!Then we go to a side office to meet the 78 year-old founding pastor. He has just come back
from a trip to Japan and is about to head out on another mission trip to distant lands. He has
the wisdom of a 200 year old and the energy of a 20 year old.
!He invites us into his small, by Korean standards, pastor’s office. John, you comment on it
later saying that the presiding pastor should be ashamed of not providing better
accommodations for this pastor emeritus. Older pastors here in Korea do not get sent to
retirement homes to golf; they remain in the center of the congregational life of the churches
they serve. Long pastorates don’t end they extend.
!
!37
In the United States there is life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In Korea, for Dr. Choi
anyway, there is only a life time, never-ending pursuit of God.
We have polite conversation in which he comments on my height and on my being
handsome. There are also, with every stop, questions for you, Sarah, about your marital status.
Still, it is his stories, prompted by your timely question about “encounters with God” which arrest
us.
Dr. Bok-Kyu Choi founds this Central Presbyterian church in 1962. 50 years later it has
grown to between 4000-4500 members.
He has his own daily 4am prayer time before 5:20am early morning corporate prayer at the
church. His major frustration, “He doesn't have enough time to prepare for the sermon but he
believes as Jesus spoke don't worry about what you will say because the Holy Spirit will speak
through you.”
He has set foot in and brought good news to 120 of the 220 countries in the world. He has
an extensive network of relationships in particular with believers in North Korea (200,000 or
more) but cannot tell us more about them for fear of their persecution.
For Dr. Choi, “Faith is not simply knowledge; it is experiential biblical knowledge--there is no
doubt.”
He tells of the time he preached for 11-12 hours straight at Yoido Full Gospel church (the
largest church in the world). He is on his feet and speaking without a break from 7pm to 6-7am.
!How we ask (as you might ask) is such a thing possible physically-only by the power of the
Spirit.
!How is it possible ecclesiastically-a Pentecostal Church sitting under the teaching of a
Presbyterian pastor for such a length of time. Again only by the power of the Spirit.
!Were there bathroom breaks? According to our friend that I have no reason to doubt, not a
person left for even a potty break.
I am in a different world. The biblical heroes whose actions after so many readings seem
distant and historic, now step into the room with us. I can hear Paul talking about preaching
through the night (and bringing Eutychus back to life after he falls out of the window).
And I wonder, how did these accounts become so removed from this day and this hour of
“greater things than these” that we live in? (Charlie…)
!!
Jonathan,
! Yes! With you, I wonder. You quote John 14:12. I tell you, believe in me and you will do what
I have done, and then you will do even greater things than these, greater things, I tell you, because I
am going to the Father.
!
Does Greater come from closer, Jonathan? Greater things because Jesus is going close to the
Father, Greater things because the Spirit is coming close to the disciples. Greater things because of
God’s closeness with Himself.
!38
If we are in an age of Greater Things, then I am thinking we are in an age of Closer Things.
It’s at our fingertips. What did Jesus say? The Kingdom of Heaven is near? Or here? I don’t
remember.
Pastor, I want to be of Greater Things. I want to be of my Father’s Business.
You touch on it Charlie at the beginning of your comments. Jesus leaves (goes farther away) but
the Holy Spirit comes. And the Spirit comes not only to the temple Jerusalem but inside the temple
Jonathan. God gets inside me (with a lot of help from Jesus and the Holy Spirit). This is the closeness.
This is the Greater One in us that yields the greater things through us
!Dr. Choi continues thanks to your encouragement Sarah. You ask about “encounters with
God” and he has more than a few to share.
“When I was 15, my mother died at the age of 44.”
I am thinking something will follow like,
She prayed for me her whole life. I know she is in heaven.
Instead, Dr. Choi explains that at his mother’s memorial service, she is resurrected out of
her coffin.
So again, I am thinking it was a temporary, extraordinary resuscitation. No, Dr. Choi’s
mother is resurrected at 44 and she lives to be 84. God gives this dear lady 40 more years to
pour into her son Dr. Choi’s life.
To my 54 year old day, I have never met anyone who had a member of their family
resurrected from the dead. I have read it. I have not seen it.
At the age of 5, his son fell into a fire pit. He was taken to the emergency room and the
doctor pronounced him dead. The doctor wanted to put his son's body in the refrigerator. He
fought with the doctor believing his son would resurrect because he saw his mom resurrect. He
took his son’s body from the hospital and his son resurrected in 9 hours! Now this son is a
successful CPA in the Silicon Valley.
He told God he can't serve God unless he experiences heaven or hell for himself. He
gave God 30 days to show him. On the 30th day, during breakfast with his family, the heavens
opened and Gods huge leg came down and kicked the utensil out of his hand. Then he went to
hell for 3 days. He said hell was pitch black dark, he couldn't see anything and couldn't see the
demons, but anytime he let himself think about anything except praising God, praying or the
Scriptures, it felt like he would be taken deeper into hell by demons.
!After he woke up from experiencing hell, he was scared so he asked his church
associate pastor to sleep in his room with him. When they laid down to sleep side by side, a
demon came into the room threatening to take him back into hell. He got up and starting fighting
the demon and the associate pastor couldn't see the demon so he tried holding him back and
thought the pastor was going crazy. Finally the demon left him through the door.
!
Two angels came down to him and said the Lord Jesus wants to see him. They took him
to heaven and he approached a white house and the gate and door opened. There was a long
white carpet like a wedding and he saw Jesus sitting at the end of the carpet stand up from His
throne. He said Jesus looked like a young man. Jesus said I've been waiting for you. They didn't
communicate verbally but spoke through the heart. He approached the Lord and said, "Lord my
teeth hurt because they are black with cavities and it's hard to eat." The Lord said "I know." So
!39
he told him to open his mouth. The Lord had what looked like an ice box next to him and
opened it and there was pure gold, and he mixed up the gold, then put it in his mouth. His
mouth was then filled with gold teeth. The Lord said, "There, now you can eat anything you want
and be healthy."
!After sharing more about his visions and visitations, Pastor Choi prays for Sarah and me--
that we will be used to expand God's kingdom internationally and be fruitful for God's glory. He
prays that God will send you Sarah a husband to do ministry together with you.
After we meet with Dr. Choi, we have dinner with a couple from John’s church. They also
think I am handsome, but I cannot communicate with them, nor they with me. They want to
know why you, Sarah, are not married (even though the average age in Korea for women to
marry is 27 and for men it is 30). The meal is more than we need and for me, at least, the
conversation seems anticlimactic (it is hard to beat stories of resurrection and visits to heaven
and hell)
(Charlie)
My pastor,
!
We are in a house, like the first apostles were, praying and laying hands. We are with our
friend Michael, who is hunched over, head down. One cheek on his face is swollen like he’s holding
an apple inside. One of his eyes is swollen shut. He needs a root canal, for $2000, which will be an
uninsured procedure. $2000 that he doesn’t have.
We are laying hands, and I have Greater Things running through my mind, Jonathan. I
hear myself thinking, This would be a greater thing, Lord., and I am thinking about Dr. Choi and
resurrection and a son who was raised and lives in Silicon Valley, an ocean, now, from his
resurrection.
I picture how Michael will lift his head after we are done and his cheek will be flat and his
eye will be open and the redness, gone.
We pray. Some rebuke the sickness. When we are done, we all back away, as if giving
Michael space to transform.
He doesn’t. He looks up at us. He is swollen and red and tired.
I wonder: what encouragement would you have for me, Dr. Choi?
!
!40
!
Day 5
!
!
Scene 1
Hospitality from Chongshin University
!
!I start out sleeping on the floor at the Ramada Inn. I do not stay there. For the next three
days, I stay at the guest quarters of the Heavenly Horse Prayer mountain and sleep on a queen
size bed. Now at day five, I am on the fifth floor of the guest quarters for visiting speakers to
Chongshin University. In five days I have risen from the floor to occupy beds reserved for
distinguished, international church leaders. Yet, still I have done nothing to “earn my keep”.
!I am John Kim’s American friend. I am Jesus Christ’s friend.
!It is these associations which carry me to and through my early morning breakfast with Jun
Il-Woong, the president of Chongshin. Dr. Woong leads the largest Protestant seminary in the
world.
!We dine privately at a five star restaurant within chauffeuring distance from the Seminary.
He drives up in limousine. We drive up in Sonata. We enter into our private dining room
partitioned by sliding doors. After limited English and more body English we peruse the buffet.
!I have never seen so much food prepared for breakfast. Pastries line one side of a large
square setting of tables. Fish and sea foods line another. Fruits decorate another line-much
more luscious than what my palate remembers even from California fresh. Then there are
!41
meats, drinks and vegetables. It is another embarrassment of riches and I suspect that if my
American money was good here, it wouldn’t be enough.
!Who does this seminary president imagine me to be? World traveler? Famous preacher?
!Friend to John and friend to Jesus.
!My suit buttons up my questions. My tie ties up my doubts.
!I sit across from the president of the largest Protestant Seminary in the world.. John sits
beside him. They ask me to pray. I start by saying it is an honor to be with such a distinguished
guest, and then I refer to that guest as Christ Himself.
!Mr. President asks me about the Reformed Church in America. I “feel led” (again not sure
how to explain that) to talk about our long history in ecumenism. He responds by saying that his
denomination opposes the World Council of Churches who will meet in Seoul in May.
Personally, John confesses him to be a closet ecumenist. Publicly, he will be measured by the
company he keeps and doesn’t keep.
!He takes great pride in the conservative Presbyterian denomination he represents. He also
fears the isolation of his denomination and seminary.
!He goes on to explain another reason why Koreans tend to be suspicious of ecumenism.
There was a Korean National Church Coalition that was utilized by the Japanese as an arm of
their imperialism during their occupation. The organization divided between the North and
South after the war and became even more of an arm of the state in Northern Korea.
He admitted that the church does need new ways of coming together. In Germany, though
there has been war between Luther and Calvin, now the church has confessed sins of fighting
around communion and have come to a common understanding. At this point he mentions the
seminary’s leadership in refo500 the celebration in 2017 of the 500th anniversary of the
Protestant Reformation. Several activities will be held at his school. Chongshin will lead all
Asian countries who come together for this celebration.
!At this point I mention the Reformed Church in American’s involvement in Christian Church’s
Together (a much smaller ecumenical effort limited to the United States).. He says he likes the
title. He values ecumenism because we speak with more authority when we speak with one
voice.
I ask him how I can pray for the seminary. He mentions the 500th anniversary celebration
He also asks that I pray for their network of graduates in over 110 countries that they might
be able to network more effectively for the Gospel. Then he asks that I pray that they would
send out graduates to all the nations
When I pray for this leader of the Korean church, I will not pray alone. I discover my request
follows one hundred faculty members who pray for the president of their seminary every day.
!How small my snowflake prayers must be to the Lord of Intercessors!
Not just professors at
the seminary, but pastors of this Presbyterian denomination pray. 20,000 pray and if they learn
proper habits from Seminary, 20,000 pray with their congregations every day! 20,000 pastors
pray and 13,000 churches grow in the HA-PTONG Presbyterian Denomination.
!
!42
!
Scene 2
A Tour of Seoul
!!
!I am fed. I am led.
!Today I will tour Seoul.
!My chauffeur-an Associate Pastor from the church I will preach at Sunday. My translator-
The Senior Pastor’s Samonim (or as we would say in old Dutch-the yiff-frau). Dr. Yo, the senior
pastor is teaching a class for young believers and so his wife joins me instead.
!On the prayer mountain for three days, I could not find a cloud even “the size of a man’s
hand”. In the valley of Seoul the sun goes into hiding. So our first stop takes us inside the War
Memorial Bak-mul-qwan (forgive my slaughtered transliteration of the Korean word for
“Museum”)
!What would my slides show you? You would see displays of a Korea devastated by war.
You would see the resolve of a people trying to rebuild after that war. You might learn like me
for the first time that we are blood brothers with South Koreans. The United States provides
88% of the 341,000 international soldiers who fight against the invasion of North Korea into
South Korea.
!43
!Out of gratefulness, in every major U.S. conflict after the Korean war there is shed and
shared blood with Koreans. In particular, I am amazed to find in this Korean war museum a
large display on the Vietnam war.
!It is still raining quite heavily when we leave the Bak-mul-qwan. So we drive to the
Namsong tower. We circle looking for parking. I take the time to brush up on some Korean
descriptions of what we might see: Jhindalee (purple blossoming tree) and Ga-na-ri (Yellow
blossoming tree), I also review what I might say to those I see ( i.e. An-Young…all is well)
!I also cram on cognates…television, hotel, sandwiches, chocolate, hamburger, coffee,
chicken
Unfortunately the language does not get committed to memory and the Namsam tower does
not get climbed. It is too rainy a day.
!Instead we go to the “Center of Seoul”. It promises a step back in Korean time to a simpler
place of small houses with simple appointments. I have pictures for you my realtor wife
Jeannette. I don’t have many words. I tend to think more about why we live than how we live.
What might a house in Seoul, Korea have looked like a hundred years ago? I should have
some answers for you from my visit to the “Center” but I do not.
!Houses in Seoul interest me. Houses of Prayer consume me.
!So, we leave the Center of Seoul and drive to the Yoido Full Gospel Church. Wikipedia tells
me they have 1,000000 members. Dr. Kim estimates between 400-800 thousand. In Korea
people are members of several churches at once and with multiple people at multiple locations
worshipping at multiple times, it is not possible for these mega-churches to get an accurate
number of their parishioners.
!I don’t have accurate numbers. I do not even go inside the building. On a rainy day, my
hosts graciously and illegally park so that I can get out and take a couple pictures of the front of
a building.
!Who is the Yoido Full Gospel Church? I don’t know. Where is the church building? That I
do know. It sits on what used to be a sand pile in the middle of the Han River. When God first
gave her pastor Cho a vision for where the congregation would one day reside, there was not
even a bridge to this Island. Now this Island rivals Manhattan.
!Like Incheon Airport...land gets reclaimed again. And with airports and churches come other
buildings as well.
!So, after a picture and some illegal parking at Yoido Full Gospel, we drive two blocks over to
the international headquarters of LG. And “life is good” for this multi-national corporation who
employ, according to their web site, about 82,000 people worldwide.
!Why go there? I go to their corporate offices because they come to my home town of
Holland, MI. LG Chem has recently chosen to manufacture batteries for electric and hybrid
vehicles in Holland, MI.
!I look at LG’s twin towers. I remember Manhattan’s twin towers. And I wonder whose Life is
Good now and why?
!
!44
!
Scene 3
Dinner with Dongsan Presbyterian Church
!
!An afternoon in Seoul. An evening with the leaders from Dongsan Presbyterian Church.
!Dongsan is a small congregation (by Yoido and any Korean standards) that is pastored by
Dr. Yoo. The church is part of the Tae-Shin family of Presbyterian churches.
!John arranges a dinner with the founding and present pastor, along with the spouses and
some of the elders (elected leaders who are mature in the Christian faith). The rain still falls and
the wind still blows around a canvas covered patio that seats our group of about 15 people.
!We eat well. We speak well.
!The founding pastor shares some stories of beginnings. He fasts for 37 days drinking only
water. He deprives his body of food so that he can provide the congregation with direction.
Their concern: Does God want them to relocate to their present facility? He had hoped to fast
40 days as Jesus does in the wilderness. His body says no. His wife, his “sa-mo-nim” says let
me. So she finishes out his forty day fast with a three day fast of her own.
!“Should I fast for forty days?” I ask.
!45
!“You have to be called to do it” They answer.
!We eat well. We speak well.
The wind and rain howl outside our elegant but fragile dining room. The conversation
continues.
!An elder shares about his military service in the Vietnam war. Another shares about a
brother who pastors a church in Kentucky? I welcome translation but do not expect every
conversation will cater to the visiting American.
!I ask, “Who are the leaders in the church?”
! Sa-mo-nim (the founding and present pastor’s wives)
Chong-ki-pum (the Associate pastor who drives us around)
Chang-doe-sa (three Seminary students (for youth, college, weekly meetings)
Cho-Yok-Chang (the church supports 40 missionaries)
-26 cell groups where leaders meet once a week
!They seek seminary partnerships with the RCA. They want to invite other pastors like me to
come to Korea and they want to find out more about RCA mission
!“What kind of a schedule do you keep Pastor Yoo? (It sounded funny to me too)”
!
-sleeps 4 to 5 hours a night
college etc.
-attends every early morning prayer meeting and preaches at most
-Holds weekly meetings with seminary students, cell group leaders, youth,
-Conducts Sunday services at 5:00, 9:00, 11:00 and 7:00 PM
-Leads the Friday night prayer vigil from 9-12 PM
Maybe I should say, we eat well and Koreans work well.
!
!46
!
Day 6
!
!
!47
!
Scene 1
Preaching at Dongsan Church
!Jonathan,
! On the first day of the week, in the evening, Jesus appears to them. He says, “Peace!” then
he shows them his hands and his side. They are overjoyed, and Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on
them.
Thomas is not with them. So later, when they say to him, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas
replies,
“Unless I see the marks, put my hands where he was scarred, I don’t believe.”
Thomas is asking for an encounter with Christ. It is not enough to hear how his friends
touched the newly-risen Christ. Thomas wants an encounter.
A week later, Thomas is with them. They are gathered as they were the week before,
perhaps secretly hoping that Christ in all his expansiveness, will come “same time, same place.”
And Jesus comes. “Peace!” and then to Thomas, “Touch my wounds.”
Thomas declares. “My Lord, my God!”
Thomas is the doubter. For a week, Thomas doubts. For a week, the other disciples walk
around breathing each breath with the Holy Spirit.
An encounter with Christ erases doubt. Thomas wants to believe. then he sees. He believes!
But in the midst of his doubt--for one whole week--Thomas misses out.
He is Doubting Thomas.
He is Believing Thomas.
But he is also One Who Missed Out.
For those who believe, for those who move in the Spirit, there is new breath. Christ breathes
on the disciples a new breath, and for one week, they are breathing differently.
Thomas misses it: a whole new way of breathing. New breaths.
!
So, Charlie, I take a breath this Sunday morning.
!48
!
I do not share my pastor friend’s discipline. My routine in Korea does, however,
parallel part of my Sunday morning routine in Holland, MI. I normally get up at 5:00
AM and put the finishing touches on my sermon for that day from 5-8.
!
What do I actually do when I put “finishing touches”? I open up my mind to new
thoughts God might give me about a particular section of the Bible that I have chosen
to try to understand better...in this case John 20:19-31
!
Why do I choose John chapter 20? I do not fully understand at the time. It
certainly saves me time and stress. I will be gone 12 days and have to preach as soon
as I get back. So if I can preach roughly the same sermon twice, it saves me having to
write two new sermons while I am gone.
!
Still, I realize after I have preached the first message at 9:00 AM that this passage
and what I say about it are “just what the doctor ordered” for this church, just the
right prescription for what challenges them.
!
But let me step back a bit and tell you about how the day begins. I wake up both
exhausted and exhilarated as I do every morning. I make the 13 and ½ hour time
change fairly well but even if I hadn’t I am for all 12 days I visit Korea, benefiting
from what feels like an extra supply of adrenalin. It is not as much that I am excited
to preach on this day (honestly I don’t like being in front of people all that much). I
am excited to pray this day. Knowing that Pastor Jong Pil Yoo’s day started with 5:00
AM prayer at the church challenges me.
!
So, I obey my alarm and get up out of my double bed five floors up at the guest
professor’s housing for Chongshin University. I thank God for these amazing and
undeserved accommodations. And I try to listen to God for any last minute
instructions or changes God might want me to make to the sermon I preached roughly
6500 miles away in Holland, MI last Sunday that I will now preach here in Korea.
!
Some of the sermon updates have to do with language. I rehearse the few Korean
words I have already mastered. God gives me (I don’t know how else to say it) a bad
pun. I will talk about the gift of “Kim-che” the cabbage that is served at almost every
meal. And will add to that the even greater gift of Dr. “Kim” my guide and host.
“Kim and Kimche”, gifts of the Holy Spirit in Matthew and the Holy Spirit herself in
Luke.
!
I need to find some terms of endearment to this kind Korean congregation, since
tey have for the first time ever in their history opened up their pulpit to a U.S. born
preacher.
!
Dr. Kim my friend who sticks closer than a brother during this trip, knocks on my
door at the appropriate time. We take our elevator down to the main floor. We hop
in our natural gas powered Sonata and drive to the church.
!49
!
There is already much activity when we arrive. No church building, in my
experience, compares with this six story sanctuary. There is no stand alone sanctuary
with rising spire that has towered over the neighborhood for years. Instead I enter a
re-purposed building with first floor sanctuary, second floor offices, third floor
children’s area, fourth floor youth, fifth floor meals and ping pong and sixth floor
music, choir etc.
!
In my full day of preaching, praying, eating and laughing I will visit each floor.
!
We pray together-John, Sarah, Dr. Yoo and me. Then my translator, new friend,
co-laborer in the Gospel and I walk through a half full sanctuary and up to the front
pulpit area. It is elevated as are many public places in Korea. And when you step up
to an elevated floor you leave your outside shoes behind and slip into slippers. So,
while I have preached in stocking feet before (that’s another story) I preach for the
first time slippered.
!
A full and robed choir primes my preaching pump. And there are more
peculiarities. My translator pastor friend is shorter than I (fitting all our western
stereotypes although in my contacts with young people I find several who are taller
than me. I speculate on those later encounters that Korea’s prosperity and the
changes in diet have led to changes in body type).
My translator is shorter so he stands on an elevated platform behind the pulpit and
I, now slightly shorter than he, preach beside him.
!
I welcome this demotion. Dr. Yoo after all has prayed and pastored this
congregation to her place. So I welcome the opportunity to take my place below him.
!
A big clock backs the sanctuary to provide some accountability for the visiting U.S.
born preacher. John and his daughter Sarah sit below it ready to leave just before the
end of the first service so that John can preach at another, larger congregation.
!
Again, I thank God for the smaller venue and ask not for wise and persuasive words
but small demonstrations of the Spirit’s power. (I Corinthians 2:4)
!
Slippers remind me I am on holy ground. So do eyes and ears open. What can I
possibly speak into a culture and congregation for whom I carry such respect? How
can I inspire those to whom I aspire?
!
I offer words like a few loaves and fish and pray for a multiplying of meaning. I
ask for stomach acid assistance to break down all that I bring over from the States
that cannot and should not be digested into this body.
!
Somehow God speaks. To me. To us.
!Jonathan, I will keep pressing. How do you hear from God in a church service?
!50
!
I am not sure Charlie...but I believe that the crossing of text and context, like the crossing of
the Red Sea,, requires a miracle. Whether in Korea or Kalamazoo, people can only hear from
God with God’s help. This is God’s gift of tongues to the preacher and the gift of interpretation
to the hearer. This is the miracle. I speak my native, materialistic, American brand of Bible. The
Korean congregation hears, in their unique Korean dialect, of the Divine.
I do not create the miracle, nor does my Korean interpreter. The Holy Spirit speaks and
interprets.
Perhaps I could say, then, that hearing from God is Holy and Spiritual. Hearing is Holy
in the sense that it is different. It happens when we are set apart, when we step back or step out
of the world in which we live. When we are “not conformed to this world but transformed by the
renewing of our minds” (Romans 12:2).
Hearing is Spiritual in the sense that it transcends the physical. It is more than a vibration
of the ear drum; it is a stirring of the heart. And then it is more than a stirring of the heart or any
other muscle of the body; it is a transformation of our consciousness. It is not the flapping of the
sail in the wind, it is the wind itself.
To hear God is to experience cause not effect.
!
Jonathan, I interrupt you. I’m turning it over in my mind. To experience cause, not
effect.
!
May I hear more?
Yes Charlie. When we hear from God, God one-ups our senses, or sixth senses us. God
immerses and embraces us. God revels and reveals. To hear is to encounter the Holy Spirit. To
use the Pentecost picture, God doesn’t just touch the disciples, God torches them.
!
!
!51
!
Scene 2
A Lord’s Day
!
I can’t say it any other way. Pastors in Korea work harder and longer than pastors
in the United States. Dr. Yoo tells me that he and many other pastors he knows
average around 4 ½ hours of sleep. Instead of preaching only on Sundays, most
churches have early morning prayer meetings every day and most pastors speak from
the Bible at each of those gatherings.
!
So, how can I be tired after just the first of two sermons today?
!
At roughly 10:00 AM, while still on the preaching platform lounging in my slippers,
tea and pastries appear. I sip and savor. Perhaps after having given what Americans
consider the weekly bread of God’s word, I am learning about daily dining. Better
yet, Sunday snacking.
!
Tea on the pulpit. Assorted beverages and more pastries follow once I have
reached Dr. Yoo’s office. Windows line two sides of his sixth floor sanctuary. Books
line the other two sides. A large square of tables. A smaller rectangle of couches. A
cluttered desk.
!
The office opens by combination, assuring a level of privacy I am to later realize is
welcome when you spend the entire day every Sunday in the church building.
!
!52
Dr. Yoo has many responsibilities each Sunday but seems genuinely appreciative
that I have taken one away from him. He comments briefly on my sermon with
appreciation. Then he waits on me and I awkwardly acquiesce.
!
We are only a short way into what will be a long day. After snacks a brief snooze
follows...more like two or three minutes of looking around the office while Dr. Yoo
attends to parishioners outside.
!
Then, I am back in slippers, this time standing before a full 11:00 AM worshipping
congregation. No John & Sarah Kim to cheer me on in back. Instead, male elders (or
church leaders on one side in front). Female choir members occupy the other front
section.
!
I step back in time when I step into this Presbyterian worshipping congregation. I
step back to hymns early missionaries might have taught Koreans to sing. I step back
to a more traditional style of worship. Still, I hope it is a step back to the future for
me. I know that what I experience here is not simply a difference in style but a
measurable difference in substance. Same old words, yet the hymns are hallowed in
a different context here.
!
Second service ends. Snacks segue into several servings of Korean food at the
noon hour. I am poured out in preaching. I am filled up in eating. We ride the
elevator up from the sanctuary on the first floor to the dining room on the fifth.
Small sitting height tables are brought out for everyone but the American guest and
his entourage. I eat awkwardly again seated in a chair-a higher place flanked by Dr.
Yoo and his elders. Women cook and serve, though not exclusively. I embarrass them
with my camera. They turn the other way as I try to snap a shot and throw a
compliment their way.
!
I want to sit and dine at the lower tables. They do not let me. I cannot put my
body on the floor, so I put chop sticks in my hand instead. There is more than one
way to “con-ascend”.
!
I sleep less in Korea. I eat more. I leave no food un-tasted to the delight of my
hosts. I can’t speak the language but I can consume the food. It is a parable of this
pilgrimage. I receive more than I give.
!
!53
!
Scene 3
Ping Pong
!
Chop sticks to eat. Ping pong paddles to play. With loosened ties, Dr. Yoo and Dr.
Brownson step into the competition. The dining tables collapse. Three ping pong
tables replace them. Maybe fifty people wait for, spectate or ignore three doubles
matches.
!
God is on the side of the preachers for the first three matches. Thoughts of
inherent U.S. superiority cross but do not linger on my mind. After all, both
Doctorates come state side. Dr. Yoo and I both earn ours from Western Theological
Seminary. Ping pong does require not only a steady hand but a strategic mind.
!
The fourth match proves our demise.
!
Dr. Yoo wants to pick up the paddles again after sitting out the obligatory one
game. I lay them down for good...or not so good.
!
I can only compete with my Korean friends for so long. They will out-love and
outlast me at least on this trip.
!
Ever since the Korean War we have fought on the same side. But that story must
wait. And I must rest.
!54
!
!
Scene 4
Neighborhood Outreach
!
I don’t know if it is because I lost at ping pong or because I heard ping ping instead
from outside the doors of the church, but I leave. I tell my hosts that I want to do
some neighborhood outreach, so I grab some brochures about the church and step out
the door.
!
I do not get far before one of the youth pastors at the church comes running after
me. Apparently, he has had experience with wayward children before. With broken
body English punctuated with Korean refrains, he convinces me that an American
alone in a bustling city with winding streets might not be a recipe for success.
!
Jonathan,
!
Because I know you, I laugh. Of course you’d be toting church brochures on a
Korean street.
I know that He is on your lips everywhere you go, for everyone. I’ve heard you
fumble through Spanish with the neighborhood. On porches. In the parking lot. I’ve heard
lots of that.
Then, once, I was in a prayer service with you. You were in the pew next to me.
Do you know what I heard from you?
You rolled your “rrrs”. You elided vowels. It was perfect Spanish. I stopped praying
and watched you.
!55
You were a mouthpiece.
So I laugh, because I believe that in a moment, you could be on a Korean street
speaking in perfect Korean. I believe that.
Just not on this visit...
!
!
At inappropriate times I interrupt our stroll to force a church brochure onto some
unsuspecting Korean, reinforcing perhaps some stereotypes and breaking others. “An
young hay say yo”...or some butchered version of a greeting follows my outstretched
gift.
!
We find our way to a small park and pagoda in the city.
!
Maybe I get a glimpse of what it is like for other people to walk into a Christian
Church building when I walk into a pagoda. Is there such a thing as a Christian
building or a Hindu and Buddhist one?
!
We spend some time in the small park, pointing and gesturing but still not
communicating too well. I impose on some more unsuspecting urban dwellers.
!
We start to wind our way through the streets back. I think I could have found my
way alone but am thankful not to have to worry about it. What would it have been
like had I not had John to drive me around and now my youth pastor friend to walk
me around? What would it be like to be truly alone and without the ability to
communicate in a foreign land?
!
On our way back we stop at what appears to be a real estate office. I ask my
walking guide to take pictures of me with the two real estate agents in the office. I
take a picture of the map of properties they have on the wall. I think of you
Jeannette selling properties in Holland, MI. What would you have said? How might
you have interacted with them?
!
Houses of prayer and Houses of property. Where we live and where we love.
Where we work and where we worship.
!56
!
Scene 5
Sunday night Worship
!
So from pagodas and people we find ourselves back in the sanctuary of Dongshan
Presbyterian Church. I know now after my walking tour of the neighborhood, there is
a world outside. I notice as I start back into the sanctuary that there is a world
represented inside as well. The church, small as it is by Korean standards, supports
21 different missionaries around the world.
!
Sunday night church begins. I wonder what conclusions would a visitor to the
United States draw from experiencing just one service at one church on one particular
Sunday of the year? And how reliable would those conclusions be?
!
I do not know this church. I have no point of reference with other churches. I will
simply try to describe what I observe.
!
I walk in a side door in the back of the gathering room. Both doors enter from the
side since business not religion births the building. There is a young, twenty
something worship leader getting us started. Guitars, vocals with overhead slides on
the screen. The church is full again. Most of the congregation has been in the church
building the entire day.
!
!57
I sit and then quickly kneel in the back. Tonight I see the backs of heads rather
the faces that I see in the morning. Some heads bob back and forth. Some are
looking down at hymnbooks/bibles in their hands. Most are looking up at the screen
in front which projects words of the next song or now at the beginning of the service
announcements. Just as I don’t see faces, I don’t see the “wizard of oz” behind the
technology of the service. The sound/light and video boards are not immediately
visible.
!
The most glaring omission is the absence of a choir in the service. Instead, after
some initial rubrics, six people stand to sing and play. Later in the service a visiting
family comes up for special music (a previous elder and his family who have been on
the mission field). After more worshipping in song, Sarah Kim-John Kim’s daughtersteps behind the microphone but not the pulpit. I suspect there has never been a
woman who has stepped behind the pulpit. Sarah shares her testimony.
!
As the service concludes, a day (not an hour or two) of worship and fellowship
concludes for me. A “Lord’s Day” draws to an end and a new day will begin for Dr. Yoo
at next morning’s 5:00 AM daily prayer meeting.
!!
!58
!
Day Seven
!
Scene 1 Wish you were here…Rick Warren
!I don’t know how I get up in time to go to early morning prayer on Monday. I don’t even
know why. “You can do more”...the God-sense in me says. And I am starting to believe it.
!On this trip I have gotten by on less sleep and had more energy than ever.
!So I am up at 3:30 (didn’t check to see if it was 3:33 AM or not). John and I are out the door
by 4:00. Fortunately even in the cities of Korea, the traffic is light when there is little early
morning light. We arrive sooner than we expect. In fact in every car trip thus far, we arrive
quicker than our GPS predicts. Hats off to you John Kim.
!Up a back alley and around a corner we find prime parking right next to the entrance to the
church. A huge choir (I estimate 80-100 members) sings us to our seats right up front. The
choir tithes the church (approximately a tenth of the total number of people present).
!The pastor talks about the condition of prayer (from what I am told by my interpreter John). I
pick up a verse out of the epistle of James.
!“You do not have because you do not ask. You do not receive because you ask wrongly to
spend it on your passions.”
!
!59
I am on my knees and under the conviction of the Holy Spirit as the congregation continues
to pray after the message. God is giving me a “prayer language” and it comes in handy during
these times of Korean worship. I speak out the words which transcend language. I sense I am
saying something of significance to God but am not sure what. It is the sighs I hope that are too
deep for words. To others they may sound too cheap for words.
!God has me on my knees. In-between the gift of tongues comes the practical remembrance
that I need to get gifts for our kids before I leave. Hitched to that “to do list” follows the
remembrance of all my sins of omission. I think of times when I have known what is right and
failed to do it. I wonder too about seasons when “I have sinned against the Lord by ceasing to
pray for family and congregation”.
!I am penitent. I am passionate. Suddenly, I am interrupted by a hand on my shoulder. Dr.
Gil, Jayeun the Senior Pastor at Wangsung Presbyterian Church has come down from the pulpit
to have a word with me. Who is this American who would start his week in Korea with a 5:00
AM prayer meeting? Am I a curiosity? Does he know how small my congregation, how weak
my faith, how little I have accomplished with the much I have been given?
!Dr. Gil leads Dr. Kim and me out a side door, through a parking lot, up some stairs. As we
walk he turns back to say something in Korean to Dr. Kim about me. He tells him that I “have
the face of Jesus”.
!Dr. Gil presides over the Korean Coalition of Christian Churches for three separate terms.
He holds the trust of Christian leaders around his country and the world. He graduates 4 years
ahead of John at Chongshin University. His church (like about 700 other churches in Korea)
has their own prayer mountain where he stays often to retreat. His biggest challenges in his
position as president are the fear and mistrust of people (All churches are corrupted from
Adam). He was the President of Calvin Seminary in Korea.
!We cross over into another building up an elevator than some more stairs and end up in Dr.
Gil’s office. Several upholstered chairs frame a beautiful conference table. A beautiful, young,
almost geisha girl looking secretary brings tea on fine china. We dine on some amazing
pastries that are hand made by members of the congregations and provided to the pastor for
guests.
I know that I have absolutely nothing to say or contribute to this Christian leader in Korea.
Since I have no words for him, I ask “Do you have a word for the U.S”?
!He reflects on how almost 130 years ago U.S. missionaries came to Korea (Rev. Dr. Horace
G. Underwood a 1884 graduate of New Brunswick Seminary comes first). Ever since that time
the Korean church has been learning from the U.S. church.
!First those lessons are positive. For instance, Koreans learn from the Puritans about self
government.
!However, now the United States is a big land with many denominational churches. From his
perspective, we are becoming weaker and weaker, causing the depravity of our society. He
sees John F. Kennedy as the beginning of preventing prayer in public schools
Our American system is becoming a monster. The church needs revival.
!Remember, all of these comments come through Dr. Kim who is doing the translating. First
he must translate my questions. Then he must translate Dr. Gil’s answers.
!
!60
The Korean church has a lot of problems but still they praying and reading scripture. Five to
ten million Christians came from North Korea as refugees during the Korean war. After the war
the average income in South Korea was less than $100 GNP. Many years later now in Seoul it
is $40,000.
!Even by end of the 1970s South Korea was still poorer than North Korea. Then the country
started praying in earnest. Billy Graham came to preach in 1973 to over 1 million Koreans.
The % of believers grew to over 12 million out of 40 million.
!The church during those years went through different seasons:
1) The Holy Spirit in the 70s.
2) The Bible in the 80s Bible Study.
3) In the 90s Discipleship.
!Korea’s transportation system is now better than in the U.S (that is confirmed for me in my
later travels across the country by car). They enjoy apartment style high life living, recreational
and cultural centers in local areas.
!Atheism and cults still attack the church…he also gets attacked personally by the media.
He believes we have to get back to the basics of prayer and discipleship. And getting back
is exactly what they do.
!
!
*3056 intercessors pray for him three times a day, early, at 3:00 PM and in evening
!
!
*2700 members typing and 1300 members writing the scriptures every day
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 tells us that two are better than one. Having just one other person
praying with you can make a difference. What would it be like, I wonder, to have 3056 people
praying for me three times a day? How might it shape life and witness?
In the U.S. there are many different types of Bibles and Bible studies but very few “typers”
of the Bible. It used to be that people had to copy the Bible and in copying the Bible by hand
they learned to copy the Biblical teaching by habit. Perhaps this is why Dr. Gil calls the scripture
copiers his only discipleship “program”.
! Today machines do the copying and people do the ignoring. Scribes used to have to
painstakingly write down by hand what the Bible says by hand. Not so anymore.
!Jonathan,
! It is put in us young: that how we write matters. We write big, whole, purposeful letters that
fill an entire page.
Then we downsize, fitting our letters onto lines, scrunching a sentence onto a page.
We are deliberate, tongue in the corner of our mouths, hunched low and eyes narrowed on
the tip of our pencil.
We are in 4th grade, then, and it’s script. Cursive. Everything we have learned goes out the
window. We could cry. Every letter is loops and swoops.
We are told by our teacher that our loops matter, and that by the loops, we can connect
whole words without lifting our pencil.
But really, this is how it begins:
A a A a A a A a A a A a A a.
Four letters per week. Over and again.
!61
We are told that how we write matters. By rout and rut and Aa Aa Aa, we have it: Charlie.
Jonathan.
It matters deeply to us that we can write our own name.
Then it’s on to the computer lab--cool and dark and lightly humming. Typing exercises and
WPM. Our teacher holds a paper over our hands. Don’t watch your hands. Watch the screen.
We want to watch our hands. We look down. She is covering our hands with her grade book.
Like a jumper on a precipice, she says, “Don’t look down.”
We stumble under the grade book, but we learn to stop watching our hands. We watch the
screen. We fly. our WPM rises.
By sixth grade, script is dead.
By seventh, we type papers.
By tenth, we email assignments.
In college, we write a one-page letter for an English assignment. Our hand cramps.
!
I re-learned to write by hand in college. I was told that the fastest way to write is by hand.
WPM=JWPM (junk words per minute), as in, The faster you type, the faster you type junk.
I can fill a Word Doc in minutes. I need twenty to fill my notebook with careful words.
I re-learned by writing in CAPITAL LETTERS. AT LEAST TWO SPACES
TALL. IF I FILL A PAGE IN LESS THAN TEN MINUTES, I AM RUSHING.
I MUST SLOW DOWN.
The Koreans are a fast people--their transportation, their walk. But they are learning to
slow down, slowing in God’s Word:.
Oh, I believe in that.
Slowly. IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED.
!I learn from Korean scribes and I learn from you Charlie. We are writers, not typers. Computers
put words on a screen but they cannot inscribe them on hearts. This is a holier, more painstaking and time
consuming process. When we type we do not meditate. Screens cannot find words and eat them.
And so Charlie, I welcome you to be the cursive to my typeset. Keep me writing creatively and
not just efficiently. Stay with me in the process and perhaps together something of the word written will
become the word digested in us and in our audience.
!
Dr. Gil tells me that 125 elders come front and center to every early morning daily prayer
meeting (more elders than any presbyterian church). People in Korea pray for their pastors.
They know their Bible. And they lead by example.
!
Dr. Gil says that many of the members of his congregation are poor. In fact he
intentionally starts the church in one of the poorest sections of the city. Many are poor in the
church and have great respect for him because of the great financial sacrifices he makes to
start the church. He serves as a physician before serving as a church planter. He sells
everything he has and literally gives his life for the poor. He leads by example and expects his
elders to as well. “They all listen to him.”
!
When the elders pray three times a day, they always kneel. When they come for early
morning prayer they kneel in front. They pray at least three hours a day.
!
!
!
What must pastors do I ask...
1)
Pastor must pray first (I suspect that there wouldn’t be 3046 people praying for
the pastor without the pastor praying)
!62
!
2)
Pastors must be evangelistic. Every member must be “pregnant” with at least
three non-believers. They are called to “be in travail” for at least three people
who do not know Christ. Pastors must lead the way in their heart for the lost.
3)
Pastors must be reformed...and by this I believe he means theologically trained.
!
Dr. Gil serves first as a physician. When he senses God calling him to be a pastor, he
leaves his practice to fast and pray for six months. After that season of fasting and praying,
instead of planting a church, he goes to seminary for several years. Koreans value an educated
clergy as they value education in all areas.
!
!
After about two hours of conversation, Dr. Gil excuses himself and I pinch myself.
!
Scene 2
Wish you were here…Dave Bast
!
!After early morning prayer and later morning tea with pastries in Dr. Gil’s office, we head
back to our accommodations at Chongsin University’s guest lecturer’s lodging.
!We pick up Sarah and then go to the Council of Presbyterian Church in Korea’s Professional
Missionary Training Institute.
!There are a lot of “largests” on this trip. So our next stop is at “the largest” mission training
center for ordained pastors in the world.
!Dr. Na runs the center. In the one class we are able to attend, class members come from
Vietnam, India, Norway, Japan, Philippines, Cambodia
!63
!I am asked to speak on missions to this distinguished group. I talk about Missions from the
RCA around the world. Horace Underwood to Korea. Shudder to Saudi Arabia. Samuel
Zwemer to Muslims. Mary Geegh to Indians...etc...
!I conclude by mentioning Words of Hope, a world wide radio ministry which targets
unreached people groups and that for years was led by my father.
!Then my “Korean father” John speaks. What are the components of missionary training?
!
1) Biblical Theology of mission
2) History of mission (called, trained and supported-what went wrong and right)
-Nevius principle
-self supporting
-self propogation
-self government
-must be called, trained and supported
3) Anthropology (folk religions and animism)
-examples of how culture can get in the way
-Italians drinking, Europeans smoking, worship in India 4-6 hours
4) Church growth
5) Leadership (Bob Clinton, faculty from Fuller, 1980)
-passion for the gospel and ministry
-develop the skill of leadership for ministry
-preaching & counseling from leadership
!After John speaks, Dr. Na takes us to the large missionary map on the wall in lunch room.
He tells us that 639 tribes are not reached yet with the gospel around the world. This school
focuses on those unreached people groups
!Then, with sufficient prompting, we hear some of Dr. Na’s story.
!He was an airborne paratrooper and a military captain, but he wanted to be a generan and
command 100,000 soldiers. That was his hope.
In 1988, the Olympics came to Seoul. It was a momentous occasion. As the Beijing
Olympics were to China in 2008, so the Seoul Olympics were to South Korea. A showcase. A
stage. Triumph.
North Korea boycotted.
Dr. Na was placed in charge of all security for the Olympic Games. In preparation, he
had studied 160 countries for two years.
The Games were a success. A showcase. The stage. And triumph.
Then after the Olympics concluded, Dr. Na was passed over for a promotion in the
military. He would not be a general.
! The day after his discharge Dr. Na planted a new church for foreigners. That church
plant grew and now houses the mission center.
! Dr. Na is a general in missions. The church plant after 17 years, has sent out 10 full time
missionaries. He does not command 100,000 military…instead, he serves hundreds of
missionaries.
!
Dr. Na, again at our prompting, also shares about how he met his wife. In Korea most
people have a polite disdain for the military. When Dr. Na first met and was smitten by his wife,
!64
she was interested in a banker. So were her parents. But Dr. Na would not be denied. At his
wife’s engagement party for the banker, Dr. Na came in a jeep with a gun and kidnapped her.
The family went crazy. They wanted her back. Dr. Na consented.
And then seven more times, he took her away. She always wanted to go back, and
Dr.Nna always consented.
Finally he stopped coming for her.
Then she came for him.
!
Now her whole family are involved as Pillars of the Church he planted. She was his first and
only love...he never dated and they were first introduced by a friend.
!We talk some more about a map that is in the lounge. It focuses on unreached people
groups. For the 1st two weeks of the mission training, they talk only about countries where
there are no missionaries. Even if ordained pastors feel a call to a particular place, they
convince them that they must be willing to serve in any way, anywhere.
!
Jonathan:
!
The Olympics mark an important moment for South Korea on the global stage. Did Dr.
Na say anything about this...or do you have any reflections on the significance of the
Olympics for Korea? (added 10-2).
!
The Olympics are all about doing more physically. We learn from athletes who make us
believe that the body can do more. Korea teaches me that the Body of Christ can do more also.
This has physical implications which I point out earlier (pastors getting by on less sleep, fasting
for longer periods of time than in the U.S. etc). There are also other dimensions to this doing
more which I continue to discover in retrospect.
!
!
!65
!
Scene 3
Wish you were here…Mike Bickle
!
I have been around the world and back with Dr. Na. Still the day is less than half over. I
know my sensory sponge can absorb only so much living water. Details will be missed. Pearls
of wisdom will stay clammed up. I already begin to grieve what will be lost in the translating of
my body and mind back to Holland, MI.
!
Still, Mt. Carmel, or Gamelsan, awaits. So, we hop in our naturally gas powered Sonata
and travel to another one of the “largest” and most active “prayer mountains” in the world.
!
!
These will I bring to my holy mountain (Isaiah 56:7) tells us and so Koreans bring
themselves to Holy Mountains. They bring their joys and sorrows, praises and petitions
to over 700 such mountains throughout the country. Not every prayer center overlooks
a picturesque valley. Not every one is even on a mountain. Still, they go to places set
apart.
Americans have their “third places”--coffee shops where they can socialize not around
work or family but some third purpose. Perhaps prayer mountains are one Korean version of
the same phenomenon. Could there be Korean third places, inhabited by a Triune God where
the pious can look beyond work and even family to find greater inspiration and encouragement?
!
Gamalsan schedules the “bringing” (as does everything and everyone in Korea):
Groups meet daily at 5am, 11am, 3pm and 7pm led by local pastors and prayer leaders. On
Thursday and Friday intercessors pray all night from 11:30 pm-4am. Saturday they start a half
hour earlier at 11:00 PM.
!
!66
Pastor Im with his wife and some friends staredt the center on May 3rd, 1982. Less than 30
people met on the first day. In Korea you need at least 16 to officially start a new church-I am
not sure how they settled on that number. So Pastor Im’s founding members number enough.
!Their founding principle is simple. Persevere in prayer. (many pastors don’t, he adds).
! Dr. Im directs the founding group and also invites other pastors from all over Korea to
come with their parishioners to the center. Trustworthy pastors respond from all over to work
together. They must be preachers and not politicians, those who can see past denominational
and political differences to the one church united in Christ.
!
As with all my Korean conversations about programs and starts, tenacity and not
technique emerge. It is not that Korean Christians do things differently than American
Christians. It is simply that they do things more persistently.
!
Koreans pray together daily. Koreans pray together fervently. I have grown up praying
before I go to bed at night. Our children have grown up with us praying over them at night. Still,
not until Korea did I consider praying “instead” of going to bed. Americans tend to pray twardso
something. Koreans tend to pray through something. We pray up to the night. They pray
through the night. So, at Gamalsan, believers pray through the night Thursday, Friday and
Saturday. Pastor Im says praying constantly pleases God (I Thess 5:16-18)
!
!
!
!
!
!
Early in the conversation Pastor Im turns to me and says,
“Why are you here?”
I stumble to an answer.
“Uh...I am not sure. I am asking that question myself.”
“You should start a prayer mountain” He says matter-of-factly.
“We have started Mt. Carmel Prayer Mountain in LA but we need a prayer mountain on
the East Side of the United States.” (I am thinking that leaves a lot of room).
!
Dr. Im continues (through Dr. Kim’s translation)
!
!
!
!
“The American church lacks prayer and if it adopts Korean praying it would be great.”
“How could such a movement start?” I ask.
“Be consistent in prayer, faith and passion from the first day.”
The conversation continues into less awkward territory. I do not want the focus on me, not
just out of humility but more realistically out of embarrassment. I am embarrassed at my own
sins of omission. My lack of prayer and faith.
!
!67
So I ask about the history of the church in Korea. For 130 years Korean church growth
happens, according to Dr. Im, because of all night praying and fasting. All Korean pastors get
on their knees and pray but many in the USA do not. Pastors must have a passion to pray.
!He starts in a basement of a local church praying. You have to start with passion and
conviction.
!When he starts the prayer mountain at its present location 30 years ago, the area is remote.
A Buddhist Temple next door dwarfs their small building. Still the people who come initially feel
like they are entering heaven.
!Now ½ million people a year come. At a prayer mountain like Gamalsan, thousands of
churches can be covered in prayer. Prayers can and do rise up for the unification of North and
South Korea and the spread of the Gospel around the world. When you pray (like that) you can
enjoy Gods blessings continually
!He believes that because the US money has "In God We Trust" on it, the USA will be
stronger than China. Without this confession on our currency (my English alliteration not his) the
US will fail.
!Praery comes easier, he cautions, when there are a lot of people. In the days when no one
was at the center, it was hard. You have to believe in prayer and that its not about the numbers.
Jesus said he will be amongst 2 or 3 that gather in his name.
!What type of spiritual warfare did you experience? Sarah asks
!“You have to give up all worldly desires.”
!He goes on to describe how he gave up all the worldly desires and sought only to the Lord.
He gave up his reputation, authority and power.
!As long as we try to please God, He will work for us. There was a famous Buddhist temple
next door. They did not want them to start a prayer mountain. He had conviction, no matter
what anyone said. He looked to God for this prayer mountain. Pastor Im sold everything he
had, including his apartment, to start the church and the prayer center. After his wife went to
heaven Aug. 28, 1988 - I believe he said was the date he fixed his eyes only on heaven. He
and his wife planted a church in 1981 then the prayer mountain 1982 - both of his sons (whom
he raised alone from the time they were young) are now pastors.
!He keeps his personal prayer life separate from the church and his two prayer mountain
meetings. He spends himself only for the ministry and the prayer ministries.
!What role does fasting play in the center?
!The basic fast is 3 days with only water (following Esther’s example)
They also observe 5, 11, 15 and forty day fasts all based on the biblical models of such
fasting. They remind themselves that Isaiah 58 is the true fasting.
!“So,” he turns to me again. “When are you going to start a prayer mountain?”
!I stammer and fail to respond. The more he talks, the more distant his life and witness
seems from my comfortable and nondescript United States state.
!“It is easier to start a prayer mountain if there is a facility already in place,” he advises.
!68
!Sarah mercifully changes the subject again. “Can you tell us about some of your encounters
with God?”
!“When my wife died suddenly, I lost the meaning of my life. I wanted to die to go to heaven
too.
I became depressed and unproductive. Later I got into a big (serious) car accident myself. I
didn't die, but I realized I can't control death. I changed my beliefs and then wanted to live for
God’s kingdom.”
!There are approximately 1 million Koreans in America. In China, Dr. Im knows of 70 pastors
that he or someone has ordained to start churches and prayer mountains.
!About 90% of prayer mountains in Korea are independent, the others are affiliated with a
church or denomination. There is ownership when one person is responsible and builds it up.
God exercises spiritual power through one person. It was always God and one man like Moses,
Paul, Jesus to start their ministries or responsibilities
!So, when are you going to start a prayer mountain?
!The format of the prayer services are typical of many in Korea: apostles creed, worship,
singing and then a message. This pattern then yields to intercessory prayer directed by a
prayer leader and then continued with everyone praying out loud as God individually prompts
them.
!How is the center run now? I ask.
!35 total full time pastors:
3 missionary pastors
2 associate pastors
5 evangelists
The rest are staff for operations
!So when are you going to start a prayer mountain? He reiterates.
!By his estimate there are 300,000 churches in USA. You could start a prayer mountain to
cover all these churches. Remember, though, that it's harder to persevere when you rent
because it feels temporary rather than the feeling of permanence and ownership that comes
with a purchase. When you buy it, you have it as your own and will persist.
!The tulips:
!With Gideon like resistance, I have been listening to Pastor Im. I don’t ask for a sign but I
sense that God knows I am going to need something to get me beyond my profound sense of
inadequacy to persist in this purpose that God may be giving to me.
!So, after sitting down for a time during our the conversation we all stand. Dr. Im has to
leave for a moment and the rest of us walk over to a a large map of the world in his office that
stands behind his desk. It stands by my estimate about 20’ feet wide and 10’ high.
!On the map what look like pins mark mission stations or prayer centers with wichm Dr. Im
has had contact around the world. When I look more closely, I discover not pins but TULIPS.
!I marvel.
!69
!I have just come from Holland, MI where every year our city purchases and plants
approximately one million tulip bulbs in celebration of our largest visitor attraction of the year
that we call Tulip Time. I have signed up before leaving on this trip to participate in a “Tulip Time
Run”.
!Can the director of a center that receives ½ million visitors a year possibly have known the
significance of this flower for our 1 million tulip bulb a year city of Holland?
!Perhaps it is at this point that I realize that God is speaking to me in this encounter, not just
Rev. Im. Only God could have arranged for such punctuation to the prophecy. Only God could
have “dotted the i” of his plan with such a living and beautiful accent.
!Tulips dot the map of the world that lines the office of Rev. Im in Korea. Tulips which by the
end of our conversation have one more addition...in Holland, MI.
!!
The tie:
!!
Tulips decorate the landscape of God’s not so gentle leading on this day. And a tie ties it up.
Rev. Im reaches for two gift boxes before we leave. One holds in it the aroma of Christ (actually
afte- shave called Romantic that my wife and others who get close to me enough enjoy smelling
when I get home). The other box opens to a crystal studded pink tie.
!It catches the light. It carries the Spirit.
!I take my own tie off and put on my new accessory. I tell my gracious host that the tie feels
like a mantle. And I pray (in the silence of my own thoughts) that this mantle will bring with it
even a small portion of the anointing of the Spirit I sense in its giver.
!
!70
!
Day Eight
!
!
Scene 1
My Korean “Tapestory”
!
Koreans are stereotypically a small people. Yet everything on this trip for me
looms larger than life (at least than my present Spiritual life). I have been wowed by
Willow Creek. I remember kissing the carpet with my praying tears at the Brooklyn
Tabernacle. Still, Korea feels like “church on steroids” to me.
!
What I experience on this eighth day out should not surprise me. But it does. Like
trying to take a picture of the Grand Canyon, I will not succeed in passing on to you
the largeness of the love of Jesus I experience in Myunsong Presbyterian Church.
!
Let me start though by trying to capture my smallness. I pastor a church that had
dwindled to about 50 in worship on a good Sunday. Still after 4 ½ years we hover in
the 90s. I truly believe I am on this trip with John and his daughter only because no
other pastors had the time or inclination to go.
!
The last three congregations I serve are a failed church start, a solo pastorate
where an elder invites me to leave and then a staff ministry where I am unable to
!71
partner well with our Senior Pastor. After three painful pastorates, I agree to serve as
Minister for Prayer in the RCA again mostly by default. I learn some things about
prayer in that self funded position with the Reformed Church in America, but not
enough to turn a self funded position into a denominationally funded one.
!
I struggle as a pastor, as a prayer and finally as a parent. There is still some
lingering love of God in the hearts of my children and a genuine love of their parents.
Still, precious little love remains for the Church.
!
I look taller than most of the 25,000 or so people who will pray at Myunsong
Presbyterian today. I feel smaller. The map on Rev. Im’s office puts me in a place.
But it doesn’t feel like my place.
!
So, I welcome what waits for me at the front of the sanctuary for this early
morning of prayer.
Three tapestries drape the front of the sanctuary. I cannot size them but hypothesize them to be close to 50’ high and 30’ wide.
!
These three canvases or sheets hung on the front walls of the church are not the
first thing I see. Before entering the sanctuary. we take several pictures of the front
facade of the church building. Crosses crown two towers. Stained glass windows and
three porticoed entrances. The rapid growth of the congregation creates the
anachronism of this older sanctuary sitting right next to a new modern looking
sanctuary just built. I do not get inside the new sanctuary. That honor remains for
my former boss when I was Minister for Prayer. Gregg Mas,t president of New
Brunswick Seminary will preach at the opening of the new sanctuary just a couple of
weeks after my visit. He will preach there because the congregation has donated
$250,000 towad scholarshisp at the Seminary for U.S. born Korean students.
!
The canvasses are not the first thing I see. They will be the most striking thing I
remember.
!
After some fairly traditional opening worship I see on the big screen that drops
down in front of the three big blankets a video of the oldest active pastor in Korea. I
am not sure who is older the pastor or the pulpit he preaches from.
!
How big is this prayer meeting? Again I hypotho-size that about 10,000 people
pack the sanctuary. Two services have already met at 5 and 6 AM so my safe estimate
would be a total of 25,000 people will pray here this day and every day.
!
In 1999 my host Dr. John Kim arranges for Rick Warren to come to this church.
Now thirteen years later, I come. He brings a message. I am not sure what I bring.
!
In this old sanctuary, the oldest active pastor in Korea speaks by video on Genesis
3:7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked;
so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Presbyterians
!72
preach the whole counsel of God and when you preach it every day at daily prayer
meetings God’s whole counsel takes you to some strange places.
!
One praying woman behind me may sense my discomfort at the topic of the day.
She pulls out her notes from yesterday’s sermon and offers them as a substitute. I
really don’t understand why God takes me all the way to Korea to hear an old man
talk about getting naked...at least I don’t understand until my surprise Sa-una which
follows that evening.
!Deut. 32:7 Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father
and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you. Yes, we must ask of God and his
words.
!Then the103 year old pastor fluent in four languages, missionary to China for many years
begins preaching by taped video on Genesis 3:7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for
themselves.
!Her commentary on that…They felt ashamed after they disobeyed God. Moses wanted
Israelites to remember their history, the days of old. God created the Garden of Eden and it was
good. But the state of being good discontinued. Incarnation was the peak of God’s love of
redemption for the lost. God always seeks us through his words and His Spirit. Why do you
want to die? Return to me and live. The difference between God and livestock is that animals
don’t feel ashamed. After they ate the fruit God forbade, Adam and Eve felt ashamed. Heb
9:27/I Cor 13
!We die once and after than comes judgment. Although God created the wonderful, good
place for them to liv,e Sin and temptation made them fall into blaming his or her life partner.
God made a garment of leather (the redemption of God) for them while Adam and Eve tried to
cover themselves with the leaves of a fig tree. A lamb was killed and blood came out for the
sinful and lost souls. Because of our weakness, we do what we don’t want to do. O wretched
man that I am. Who can deliver me from the body of death? Who can separate us from the
love of God? Solution of God was an aaimals skin. We believe in Jesus’ blood and his
wonderful name, we are priviedgde to become God’s sons and daughters. If I surrender my
body to the flames (my own self-righteousness). I cannot be redeemed. We should listen to
Jesus’ cry “Eli-Eli
!
After my mixed messages delivered by the lady behind me from the day before
and the old man by video in front of me, “Korean style prayer” ensues. By this I mean
that the speaker gives 10,000 people the opportunity to pray out loud. (Jesus
says...when you pray SAY). So God’s people say out loud together what God has put
on their hearts. To be fair I should tell you that I think I heard some speaking in
Korean tongues. Evenmore shockinge I think I heard some speaking in other tonguesat a Presbyterian church no less!
!
It is during this time of open ou loud prayer that the eyes of my heart hug the
huge sheets spread over the front of the sanctuary. Jesus coming again in all His
Glory, blankets the center front panel. Jesus and his cross carrying friend stand at
the left panel. On the right drapes a display of the one and only passage I ever have
and maybe ever will preach in Korea (John 20:19-31).
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!
Tulips on a map. Blessed and believing Thomas on a wall.
!
Jesus is putting on a show. I am audience. I wonder at His extravagance. I try to
explain away these holy coincidences. I end up as close to Thomas’s wall and his
Savior’s side as I can get.
!
What happens to me at the foot of the tapestry?
!
My experience there feels like the tetragrammaton of the Jewish scriptures...not
to be vowel pointed, perhaps not even or ever to be written out...except to say...
!
Jesus loves me.
! I am kneeling in a row on the farm, one hand pushing back the leaves of a green bean plant,
so that I can look underneath for thick, dangling green beans.
On the farm, which is just outside of Waco, I weed and harvest and transplant and dig and
scrape and muck and peel and pick. I arrive with the sun. I leave with the straw in the fields
glowing gold.
In the beans, today, I am harvesting. I have my Ipod in, listening to the folks from Bethel
Live. It is the song, “Furious.”
His love is deep. His love is wide. And it covers us.
His love is fierce. His love is strong. it is furious.
Furious. Furious. Furious.
I don’t know how God speaks to others. I press you, Jonathan, because I want a full
explanation. I want no easy way out. I want it laid-out. I want proof, evidence of Greater Things.
When I am moved by God--in a word, in a song--I only know that I want it more.
Jonathan, when you are kneeling at the tapestry, you have everything, right? Is that a way
to say it? That we see we have everything we need--that we are fit and full and whole?
When I am kneeling in the dirt and my lower back is so stiff that I cannot straighten up and
I am making $8 an hour, I tell you, it is a true harvest to be satisfied in
Furious.
or
Beloved.
or
Jesus Loves Me.
Just satisfied.
!
Yes Charlie … hearing is knowing we have everything we need...Hearing from God puts
everything into its proper perspective. My sense of my smallness and God’s bigness is more a
kind of false humility. It reveals a greater clarity. Jesus on the wall towers over me on my knees.
Jesus is bigger than my life, my. problems, my worries and concerns. Hearing is healing, hoping,
letting go and letting God. Hearing is seeing all things from Mary’s vantage point at the feet of
Jesus. Hearing is knowing only one thing is needful.
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!
Scene 2
North Korea
!
I walk around in a daze after Jesus’ love proves larger than my life. We take
pictures of different rooms in the church building. Pictures tell another story of a
church deeply engaged in mission. We leave the building nda walk past a sculpture of
children holding up the world. And I pray that whatever praying power I just
experienced somehow gets passed on to those children and to mine.
!
Three hours of driving from the West Coast of Korea to the East Coast parallels and
prepares us for our visit to the DMZ. Dr. Gil’s description does not lie. Roads,
tunnels, banked curves convince me that Korea moves her people more efficiently
from point A to point B.
!
On an amusing side-note, we stop at a Korean rest area off the highway. Along
with the normal fare of restaurants to feed you, shops to fleece you and bathrooms to
release you...there are vibrating chairs. No coins required, only a willinnessg to be
gentye and not so gently massaged. Wow. I lounge first, then John, then both of us.
Even Sarah joins in. There is a row of 10 chairs at least, there for the relaxing.
!
Back into the car takes us over and through mountains. Finally we arrive at a park
outside the DMZ location. Here, you John introduce me to another one of your old
!75
friends who now become my new friend. He is the chaplain of military and pastor of
the northernmost and easternmost church in South Korea. We are as far North in Kore
ast we can go without getting shot and as far East as we can go without getting wet.
North Korea stands across the DMZ. Japan stands across the East Sea.
!
Now that we have arrived at the East Sea, it is time for “sea-food”. We stop at
one of many restaurants where the catch of the day becomes the meal of the day.
Large sea water fed basins hold a colorful variety of underwater( soon to be on the
plat)e life. I want to know what I will be eating....I don’t want to know.
!
In the restaurant we again “step up to our plates” leaving street shoes behind,
slipping into slippers, sitting on the floor and swallowing the sea. Our host looks like
anything but a military chaplain. John your friend has one of the kindest faces I can
remember. I want to tell him my life story as soon as I see him. Instead, he tells us a
portion of his.
!
He, like all Korean men, serves a compulsory period of time in the military. With
Canadians to our north and Mexicans to our south, United States citizens find this hard
to imagine. How could you force people to fight? It reminds me of our trip to Israel
where they too have compulsory service. So the man with the gentle face must
enlist. And when he does, it is not to defend South Korea from North Korea but to
defend South Vietnam from North Vietnam.
!
320 thousand South Korean soldiers were sent to Vietnam.
My chaplain friend brought back with him stories I am sure. He also brought back
“agent orange”. While serving beside US soldiers in Vietnam he was heavily exposed
to the herbicide tainted with what some have called the most toxic compound known
to mankind. After returning from the war the effects of the disease became so severe
that he was near death due to neuropathy. Thirty fellow pastors/chaplains offered to
pray for his healing and his life was spared.
!
Shortly after his healing, he was called to serve at his present position.
!
Wars defoliate and depopulate. The lingering effects of Agent Orange and the
redemption of a life for further service.
!
We talk while seeing our sea food move from plate to palate. How does someone
get healed of Agent Orange neuropathy? Is there an antidote for such toxic
treatment?
!
The gentle healing hand of Jesus takes a man from the defoliated jungles dividing
North and South Vietnam to the cold corridor between north and South Korea. He
gives him an extra five years of life that Agent Orange tried to rob. Then my chaplain
friend gives it back in service to soldiers on the border.
!
!76
Not only is our chaplain pouring his life into these soldiers, he has left his family
back in the States. Why such sacrifice to God and country? I suspect it is out of
profound gratefulness for both.
!
I don’t know if Koreans have purple hearts to decorate their military. I do believe
my friend to have a soft heart...
!
Scene 3
Our Chaplain Friend
!
After lunch our chaplain friend escorts us down more roads that will eventually
lead us to the dead end of the DMZ. It takes a tremendous amount of military to demilitarize an area. Our chaplain attends to the spiritual needs of those military. His
parishioners are soldiers. His parish is a small stretch of land that overlooks the East
Sea to the East and missile silos to the North. Those missiles point at South Korea.
!
We tour the Gangwan-do Demilitarized Zone Museum. I cannot tell well and will
not try to describe the horrid history in pictures and artifacts of the Korean war and
its devastation of both North and South.
!
We then go to the Northernmost place of worship in South Korea. It is a Christian
Chapel, a sanctuary on a hill that cannot and will not be hid from a threatening north
and a beckoning sea..
!77
!
In Michigan riparian rights tell me that as long as I access the lake legally,I can
walk anywhere on the shores of Lake Michigan and swim in any of her (by one internet
estimate) 1,299,318,233,965,804.5 U.S. gallons of water. Riparian rights provide a system of
allocating those gallons among those who possess land about its source. Riparian rights include
such things as the right to access for swimming, boating and fishing; the right to wharf out to a
point of navigability; the right to erect structures such as docks, piers, and boat lifts.
!
In Korea, where North meets South at the East Sea, nobody swims, nobody boats,
wharfs, or erects structures.
!
Instead they guard. They look for threats, not pleasures, from the sea. Rather
than docks out into the sea, there are fences stretching over the sand for several
miles of beach south of the DMZ. No sunbathing or surfing. Just an almost paralyzing
fear of ships bringing soldiers and soldiers bringing guns.
!
Chaplains and soldiers are on constant watch. Curiousl,y thoug,h chaplain and
soldier have two types of watches. Chaplains watch and pray. Soldiers watch and
fight. One looks for the move of God. The other looks for the move of the enemy.
!
There are houses that people live in here so close to the border with North Korea.
There are also tents...one of the few places I see this kind of makeshift housing.
Perhaps it is because the South Korean government has to pay people extra to live
here.
!
There are houses that people live in. Our chaplain friend, however, offices in a
house where people watch. They watch and they prar. They watch with Isaiah 56:7
passion. It is the verse over the large window which looks over the road and beach
and landscape that leads to the cold, the missile-pointing North.
!
What one prayer request seems closest to the heart of all South Koreans? Not the
destroying of half a country to the North but the uniting of an entire country both
North and South.
!
So they watch and pray. They watch ready to fight.
!Jonathan,
! There are other DMZs. In-between Iraq and Kuwait, where Saddam marched his armies
for oil. The skies burned when they retreated. They burned the sky.
I’m told parts of Sinai are DMZs--vital to world shipping, the vein of the Suez. Israel. Arab
nations. Arab Spring. Desert and dust and spaces where no tanks tread.
Antarctica, too, cold and sheet ice. There was an agreement, amidst the armament of the
globe, to leave the very bottom of our planet weapon-free.
Then there is the 38th parallel in Korea. The most heavily-militarized border in the world.
Like a scar, except this running between the eyes. Korea was one. Korea is now two. An eye and an
eye of the same body.
I think of Judah and Israel and how what was intended as one is rent into two.
!78
At the moment Christ gives up his body and soul, the curtain in the Temple is split in two. It
is the declaration of closeness.
One into two is not always separation. It can be a coming together.
So I hear a witness coming from Korea. I am not speaking of prosperity. I will not. I am
speaking on priority--that the nation that gets on its knees at 5 am every day in prayer will be
blessed in spirit. Maybe money follows. Maybe the high-rises and the natural gas cars.
Part of me wants to say that the DMZ in Korea is a group divider--one half getting the
“treatment;” the other half, a “placebo.” A sugar pill.
But Korea is not a study, not an experiment. It was a bloodbath and now is two brothers
side-by-side, like a Cain and an Abel, next door neighbors 50 years after Cain bloodied a rock on
him and nearly destroyed him.
I wonder, then. How long till North Korea is on its knees in prayer?
And how long, then, will the South continue on its knees? 5 am. It is easy to get up off your
knees, even in gratitude, Thank you, Lord. I’ve gotten what I needed,
Saddam invades Kuwait and brings it to its knees.
Imagine: a closed Suez and world trade is on its knees.
Imagine a Korea on its knees for its brother. Reconciliation! Reconstruction! Restoration
!
There is a connection between being on knees and in need. When on your knees, you can’t pull
yourself up by your bootstraps, but you can see into the eyes of kingdom children. When on your knees, it
is harder to run away from God’s gentle chastening and instruction.
North and South Korea share the same posture. They do not, however, share the same leader.
iictator to the North. Savior to the south. The South is not a Christian nation. It is, however, a nation
free to honor Christ. The North instead is a nation bound and gagged to do homage to another. Can
there be reconciliation spiritually without a reconstruction politically?
There is a stigma in the North, a stench of hypocrisy and secrecy, a mold that grows in the dark
and destroys from the inside out. There is, instead, a stigmata in the South that points to a reconciling
Savior. The country still shows wounds inflicted,, in the sense that the de-miltarized zone that is doubly
militarized. is the spear in the side of the once united country. There are wounds still seen in the south.
But they are scars that have healed and they rest on a country that has been resurrected.
A dictator preys on people in poverty.
A chaplain prays from a place of piety and there is a constant waiting and watching for two
countries to become one equally yoked in marriage.
!6 I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night.
, give yourselves no rest, (Isaiah 62:6)
You who call on the L
!
ORD
In John’s Chaplain friend God has posted a watchman. And I will not soon
forget his silhouetted hands raised in this northernmost South Korea chapel with its
picture window panorama of East Sea, Northern mountains and the Hope not just of a
DMZ (de-militaried zone) but a DMC (de-militarized country).
!
!
Scene 4
Glad you aren’t here (no picture)
!
!
I start the day listening to an old man telling me about being naked and
unashamed. I end the day being that man…perhaps not as old and unashamed, but
still naked.
!79
!
When coming to Korea to learn about prayer, I did not count on the Sauna, I think
it is pronounced “Sow-una”. This practice so prevalent in Korea seems strangely out
of place...at least until I put myself in that place.
!
I am transported back to the shower rooms of my sport spent youth. When you get
sweaty with your team-mates you get naked with your teammates (at least you have
to step into a shower room together to get clean).
!
Koreans are all about team. They get stressed together so it makes perfect sense
that they get unstressed and undressed together.
!
When the day begins early at the Myansung prayer meeting, the oldest active
minister in Korea proves both preacher and prophet. As the day closes I am
undressed.
!
After several trips between wet and dry sauna and hot showers, I am also “unstressed”.
!
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!
Day Nine
!
Scene 1
Bed & Breakfast
!
I miss Jeannette my “Samonim”-pastor’s wife. I want you here, yet I know you
would not be a fan of floors. You prefer to do your sleeping on a bed.
!
This foray into even more foreign territory eases my guilt a bit. It is good to be
“floored” again. Yet, even in this remote Northeast corner of South Korea where they
have to pay people to live; even here where North Korean missiles threaten and life
seems tenuous; even here they spoil me. After my sauna at night, I get my private
room again. If there is fear which hangs over this area so close to the craziness of
North Korea’s dictator, it does not enter into my room. I “sleep in heavenly peace”. I
wake to an elaborate early morning breakfast.
!
!81
My stomach tells me that vegetables and meat for breakfast will not work. Still, I
take in this culture’s fare with a smile and a boatload of easily translatable
compliments. The samonim hostess likes me and whether it is for business purposes
or not she wants me to come back with my own samonim.
!
Her husband/preacher dies. She hosts and we are the better for it.
!
The night before, we try to prevail on our chaplain to stay with us after sow-una.
He prefers some space and silence and so drives back to his place of residence about
a half hour away. He does, however, come back to join us for breakfast and receive
food from the samonim fit for a married man “baching it”. She offers extra food to us
as well but we have no idea what we would do with it on our trip south down the
coast of the East Sea.
!
!
Scene 2
Lunch at Kwandon University in Kangneung
!
Once you get past fences of fear and barricades of bravado, this beautiful beach
becomes accessible to the public again. This civil war between North and South can
!82
only spread its fear and facades so far. We choose a route that runs a little West of
the Coast because we want to make Kangneung by noon.
!
Our conversation in the car ebbs and flows. Sarah, for much of our driving you
insist I sit in front with your father. I think this is one stretch of the trip where I
prevail on you and you ride shotgun while I sit in back. I am thankful for the change
in seats and status. I find that Kangneung is an important place for you. When we
reach the beach, you point out a hotel where you stayed with your family at a pivotal
time (but that is your story to tell)
!
We arrive in Kangneung early and go directly to Kwandon University where you
John spend your college career. We move back in the chronology of your life to the
pre-seminary years. It is refreshing and threatening both. The university is clean. It
is big. It is Christian. (a pretty good description of much of the infrastructure of this
country).
!
After a quick tour we tofu for lunch. We eat in a place wicho claism to have been
one of the first areas in Korea to serve Tofu and to serve the tastiest. So my search
for superlatives moves from largest to tastiest, from churches to restaurants.
!
After tofu we drive over by the boardwalk and beach of Gangneung. We stop for
coffee at the SweetBuns Coffeshop which overlooks the East Sea. Here is where I am
finally asked the dreaded question, “How big is your church?”. My questioner is a lay
person/elder at the Gengneung Central Methodist Church which numbers around
5,000 in membership. You can bet your sweet buns that I quickly change the subject.
!
!
!
!
!83
!
Scene 3
Wading in the water
!
I pack my bathing suit to Korea. If there is any point in the trip where it might
come in handy, it would be in Kangneung. The beach and boardwalk here John claims
are the best in the world.
!
Perhaps In Israel and perhaps other cultures as well, the water is feared for its
storms (the reason why Jesus’ calming of the storm has great significance). You take
fish out of it but don’t step into it or pay millions to live next to it. In Korea,
however, once you get a few miles South from the DMZ, there is enough peace and
prosperity to calm the fears and gild the coast. So these fishing towns where
seaweed used to dry in the sun become populated with people drying in the sun.
!
There will be no drying in the sun today though. It is rainy and cold. There will be
no swimming (I don’t have my bathing suit on this leg of the trip with me anyway). I
do, however, wade. Picture me with suit, tie and bare feet-pressed pants rolled up
enough to get me “calf-deep”. Picture John’s friends giving up on covering me with
an umbrella.
!
!84
This is my “Baptism” in the East Sea. I hope this vast body of water that separates
Korea from Japan will soak into my DNA.
!
Brownson, Jonathan Dr. I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. And in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the only king and head of the
Church, I now declare that Jonathan is received into the visible membership of the
Holy Korean Church and is engaged to confess the faith of Christ crossing this East Sea
to Japan and then crossing many more seas and cultures to Holland, MI. Still, the
words catch in my throat a bit, because I know that across this sea lies a land almost
impervious to the Gospel, a land awash in materialism and independence. And then
across that culture lies an even more foreign land which medicates rather than
meditates, which militarizes rather than spiritualizes. It is the land of my birth but
now not the only land of my baptism.
!
There is a East Sea holy water mixed into my/his blood now.
!
This is my baptism. This is also my footwashing. I seek anointing on this trip, an
outward sign of an inward impartation of the Holy Spirit. I also seek cleansing. I say
with Peter (in my thoughts anyway, though, not out loud with my Korean church
member numbering friend) wash not only my feet but my entire body. Cleanse me of
the laziness. Wash away all my sins of omission.
!
!85
!
Scene 4
John speaks at largest Protestant Seminary in the world
!
!
Best beach for a baptism, Tastiest tofu and near Kangneung you can also find the
largest seminary. We have been staying in the guest quarters of one campus of
Chongshin Seminary, the largest Protestant Seminary in the world. We now drive to
her main campus for John to speak at their night chapel. Approximately 2,000
seminary students will worship along with us.
!
John will quote the man he will later bring to Holland, MI for a revival: Juan
Carlos Ortiz. He preaches the same message at two different campuses about the
importance of practicing our faith. At both sites he finds a piano and a “willing
volunteer” from the audience to illustrate his point about practicing making (and not
making) perfection..
!
There is also talk with Sarah at this conservative Presbyterian “men only in
ministry” seminary about her sense of call into ordained ministry.
!
!86
It makes me think of my own partner in ministry Jeannette. So, at the end of day
9 I finally get set up to communicate with you Jeannette by SKYPE. We plan it for
just before I go to bed and just after you get up from bed. I can’t wait to talk, yet I
know that our conversation will be rushed and both of us will end it a little frustrated.
!
Still, we finally connect. SKY-Peer to peer and suddenly you are in Korea and I am
home. I want to tell you everything but memory and minutes fail me.
!
They say that when you lose sleep you never find it again. I pray the same does
not hold true for traveler miles and memories.
!
!87
!
Day Ten
!
!
Scene 1
Breakfast in Chongshin Guest House
!I have a good night but not a good sleep. I wake three times at 1:30 AM, 2:20 AM and 3:30
AM. Finally at 5:00 AM I get up for good. For the first time I sense that perhaps God wants me
to capture in a book some of what I am experiencing here in Korea. I think of the verse in Luke
8:15
!But seed on the good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word,
retain it and by persevering produce a crop.
!I confess the shallowness of my soil, my penchant for hearing but not retaining and for
retaining but not persevering. I ask God’s grace perhaps to write a book. I see 12 chapters to
!88
coincide with the twelve days of our trip, twelve months in the year and twelve years until I am
65.
!Charlie you know that there are other things that I sense from God that now in retrospect, I believe I
misheard or at least heard with some static. I read in my journal that I was certain I was supposed to buy
a particular piece of property for a prayer center on my return. Though I still believe there will be a
prayer center in Holland, it now seems that it won’t be on the origina sitet I thought God told me to put it.
!I also sense on this day that I should set up our worship services more like Korean prayer meetings.
Again, this plan later seems to have been a bit presumptuous.
!Why do I mention these things? They are good reminders that trying to do what we believe God
wants us to do is not easy. There is a fine line between “hearing from God” and “hearing voices,” as my
dear brother David was prone to do in his struggle with mental illness before he died.
!I believe that the Bible is a sieve, a filter through which every thought or inclination of our hearts
must pass. So we need to keep asking, Does what I think I should do match up with the God I have come
to know through the revelation of the Bible?
!God’s word filters. God’s people also focus. There is a continuum between prophet and pastor when
it comes to consultation. If God calls you to be a prophet, you may have little opportunity for
corroboration. However, If God calls you to be a pastor (as I believe he has called me) you must (I must)
listen to the people. I must ask not only whether it is consistent with biblical revelation but also whether
it seems right to the Holy Spirit and our local congregation.
!So, I pray for clarity in writing this book I am backed into humility. Whether I like it or not, I suspect
that God will keep pointing out the places where I need to re-listen. Even the title and direction of this
book continues to evolve or more theologically to the point “reform” as this reformed pastor writes it
!Pastor,
! I am in on this reforming, too. I saw how the prayer mountain was coming together. The site
on the long road out to Lake Michigan. A beautiful spot, perhaps a mirror of your trip to the East
Sea. The prayer mountain was set to be a place of prayer and baptism and rejuvenation. Everything
was knit together by God. He was working, His fingers purposeful, doing what I know you love-connecting.
Then it unraveled. As smoothly as it had come together, in just the same way, it came apart,
like finding one thread that you tug on and it all goes.
Is there disappointment that comes with that?
Does it deflate?
Does it bring you back into more prayer?
Do you hear “not now” or do you hear “not ever”?
!Surprisingly, what I hear, Charlie, is well done and wait. I believe God says “well done” to my
efforts to do exactly what I think He wants me to do. (John 2:5). I believe God says “wait” for a complete
answer as to why God wanted me to obey in that way.
Perhaps another way to say it is that the best “soil” in Jesus’ parable of Luke 8:15 are those who
hear God;s word, retain it and persevere. In Korea I hear and retain. Now that I am back in the United
States, the call is to persevere. I believe God wants me to persevere in “doing whatever He tells me” and
trust that there will be 100 fold fruit in God’s time and way. (There does seem as of this writing to be a
miraculous twist to the South Side prayer center search which I cannot share now...that may be someone
else’s story to tell at some other time.).
!89
So, after some journaling (what I would from a Luke 8:15 perspective call “hearing and
retaining”) I leave my apartment and knock on the door of John & his daughter Sarah’s suite for
breakfast. Up to this point in the trip, we eat at restaurants for every meal. Today, we eat
around the kitchen table of the suite where John and his daughter Sarah stay.
!John prepares instant coffee (maxim of course). He buys a loaf of bread and eats his
favorite breakfast and mine--peanut butter on toast. Shortly before our trip, John discovers that
he is diabetic, so it is important for him to eat regularly. I am prepared to fast but its seems
incongruous. I have been feasting for ten days on the grace of God and the hospitality of God’s
Korean people. This is not a time, it seems, to fast.
!So, we eat. Even this meal, toast with sliced oranges on the side, seems more savory than
U.S. fare. I suspect though that it is not just the food but also the company. We have so much
to talk about already. Some of our conversation focuses on John’s upcoming hospital visits.
Without prying, I gather from his appointments that John not only has friends in high places in
Korea, he has friends in hospitals. And with a 60 plus year old body, he is getting all the
medical work done on it that he can while we are among friends.
!My itinerary involves journaling for the morning. We will visit another seminary in the early
afternoon and then go out for a meal and conversation on the town that evening.
!What do I read/study and/or write during my journalling?
!Throughout the trip, I try to keep up with the discipline of reading through the Bible
chronologically in a year. There are some obvious challenges in this for textual critics,
particularly in the Old Testament. Still, it has proven a helpful alternative to my normal two
chapters OT, one chapter new and Psalms/Proverbs daily.
!At this point in the year, I study the life of David out of I Chronicles 6 We have a musician
son Samuel. So I read with interest about the temple musicians whom David puts in charge of
the music in the house of the Lord after the ark comes to rest there. They minister with music
before the tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, until Solomon builds the temple of the Lord in
Jerusalem. They perform their duties according to the regulations laid down for them. I also
note for the first time that I can remember, Samuel’s grandson was one of these temple
musicians…
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!
!
Scene 2
Daeshin General Assembly Seminary
John returns from his hospital visits. Then we travel to Daeshin General Assembly
Seminary. The night befor,e over 2000 mostly men, mostly young sing hymns with
fervent hearts. Here older second career students sing choruses with a praise band.
In both chapel services at both seminaries attendance counts. A registrar sits outside
the door crossing off or writing in names whichever seems most gracious (I tend to go
with writing in names in the chapel service book of life).
!
John brings the same message to bothgroups of congregants. In Chongshin, three
large screens amplify his face and he stands elevated and set apart from the rest.
Here, just one screen behind him projects what seems to me to be a wearying face.
!
John serves as chauffeur, speaker, administrator and overall host. He drives late
into the night. He prays early into the day. As I listen to him speaking, I am again
overwhelmed at the kindness he has done for me. I will never be able to pay him
back for bringing me to Korea. I hope to pay others forward into the same spot with
this book.
!
The president of the seminary sits with us and then offers to take us out for dinner
after John speaks. Again we are dined like deities. The beauty of this city shines in
her night lights. We drive home to another miracle (the car runs for another ½ hour
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past empty as we search for LPG natural gas). It is miracle of multiplication. Cars
can do more. We can do more. When we have nothing left; when there is no more
gas in our tanks; God can keep us “running on fumes”.
!
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!
Day Eleven
!!
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Scene 1
Subway
After breakfast in our rooms again today, John makes some contacts with friends while
Sarah and I ride the subway into Seoul for the first time. We walk from our Chongshin
University housing about a half a mile to the subway entrance. Just before the entrance I notice
a coffee shop with a person-sized brown teddy bear propped up on a seat facing the window. It
is an advertising gimmick I know, but to a foreigner like me another curiosity. Floppy ears, dark
brown bead eyes, one arm-paw resting on the table.
!Then we arrive at the Nameseong Subway street entrance. There are Korean characters I
have not yet learned (although I understand the alphabet is not that difficult7.
!How do they get and keep everything so clean? No graffitti on the walls. Polished floors like
pools of water reflect fluorescent lights. Though I walk down into this subway, my expectations
rise. Subways do not have to be sub-par.
!My second impression, the accessibility of English. Instead of struggling with Korean here
thousands of miles from my home I can find a sign that reads:
!“Ticket vending and card retail device”
!Again it does not seem fair that I should be honored in such a way, that I should be able to
hear “the Gospel” in my own native tongue like the first witnesses at Pentecost. In my
experiences of seeing my language written out in a foreign land I know now viscerally how
important it is to provide others that same joy in the U.S. I want to find more ways to be multilingual in work and witness.
!I follow the ticket vending sign and purchase my ticket. Actually to be honest I should admit
that Sarah follows signs and purchases it for me. To Daerim-Onsu we read on the subway sign
which arrows us down one more flight of stairs and the tracks to line #7. Again on the next
Subtreranean level I find the same spit shine cleanliness on floors, walls and ceiling. I hear no
busskers? I see no graffitti. It is clean...
!I wonder is Korea uniformly, antiseptically clean and is anything lost in the cleansing
process?
!Some would say yes, uniformly clean means antiseptic uniformity. Creativity gets
squeegeed out with the wash. Perhaps, but I remember now in looking back on my pictures the
twenty something passenger with the blue and orange laced tennis shoes. I also remember
seeing a building wit ao large sigs outside it “The Theatr2”. Maybe people find ways to put their
peculiar fingerprints on even one of the cleanest windows of the world.
!People sit first and then stand if necessary in the subway car we enter. Most have a mission
and do not have need of conversation. We will need to transfer Sarah tells me. Again, as with
driving the car, I would be lost without an interpreter. Out of the car we rush and down another
escalator (I have yet to find one that doesn’t work). They move people up and down. They also
have moving sidewalks for long tunnel areas. There are business people in suits. There are
tourists in baseball caps. There is Korean Sarah and captivated Jonathan.
!After some slight confusion, Sarah gets us to the restaurant where we will meet her father
and some friends. We are early, so we look for a place to have some coffee and talk. “God in a
cup” appears (I should say that we see a coffee shop called that) We walk in, order coffee that
costs too much and will not yield its color to cream.
!
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!
Scene 2
Lunch with John’s Seminary Classmates
!
After coffee we go to the Korean Church Centenniel Memorial Building. Here we meet three
couples who John and Sue have gotten to know guite well while in Seminary.
!We eat in a dining hall where everything shines white. Table clothes hide any darkness of
their supporting tables. Slip covers cover what I imagine to be greys and blacks of chairs. The
suits and dresses of John’s friends superimpose and standout on this white canvas.
!Most of John’s friend retire and are soon to retire. They seem relaxed, genuinely interested
in each other’s lives. I am generalizing based on very limited contact with Koreans. Still, I see a
paradox. They work more and sleep less than Americans. Yet they seem to live longer and
happier lives. These older married couples represent this paradox to me.
!The Korean Church building serves a meal every day, an elaborate buffet. I encourage
them to go before me in line. Then, after they sit down, I bring a tray of glasses of ice water to
their table. It is a privilege to wait on their table and learn from their lives. I trust I give to them a
cup of cold water in the name of Christ. It is no match for what they and so many other pastors
like them have given to the Korean Church and the church around the world.
!Humor doesn’t always translate. Still, body English tells me there are many stories told
around our lunch tables about John, Sue and their antics at Seminary.
!
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!
Scene 3
$Shopping for gifts for the Family
!My trip and everything about it have been a gift to me. Parents, friends and our church pay
for it. John Kim plans and coordinates it. A host of people populate and host it. And behind
every person stands a Greater Love. I do experience these eleven, soon to be twelve days in
Korea as God’s gift ultimately. God knew what my heart longed for...what I hardly dared hope
for...and God went out nda got it for me.
!I want to learn how to give like that! I have an afternoon to give it a small try.
!Before I come back home, I want to take the leftover money that I haven’t spent on
expenses and use it for gifts for you my family members. What, I wonder, do your hearts long
for? What would say just the right thing to you in just the right way?
!I hope to find gifts that reflect the culture here and also will somehow be a welcome addition
to the culture back in the U.S.
! A Korean drum for our son who started out banging on pots and pans almost 20 years
ago and a diary from Korea to match the diary he gave me from Tibetan monks in India.
!A tiger ring for our other son Benjamin symbolizing strength to be worn on his right hand
as our Benjamin, son of our right hand.
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!A silver cross for our daughter Joanna, namesake of one of the witnesses to the
resurrection mentioned in the NT account.
!I actually ask God to show me what to buy. It is a prayer I don’t often utter (to me it
almost seems sacrilegious). Still, it feels like a prayer God does answer.
!I may not change into a hilarious giver in spending the rest of my money. At least,
though, I am less of a resentful or thoughtless one. For me, this is great progress. Ingrained
deeply in me resides a reflexive “buyers remorse”. I find joy in saving. I normally experience
depression at times in giving...but not so today.
!!
!!
!!
! !
!
Scene 4
Friday Night Prayer Meeting
!I cry at Myunseung’s early morning prayer. I shout tonight. God reaches into my intestines
and pulls out emotions I did not know were there at the feet of Jesus’ tapestry. I reach up to
Him on this last night we spend in Korea.
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!Wang Sung Presbyterian Church, like many churches in Korea, has a rhythm of prayer, a
breathing pattern: early morning times of daily prayer and then weekend seasons of more
extended prayer (in this case prayer from 9-12 PM every Friday night).
!What can you possibly do for three hours in church on a Friday night? My Korean friends
teach me.
!What can the pastor do? He can stand! Three times in two verses (Eph. 6:13-14) we are
encouraged to stand in the spiritual battle. Dr. Gil takes this admonition studiously. I have often
thought of Jesus’ question, could you not stay with me one hour. For the first time, I am now
considering three hours not just of staying but standing. The senior pastor stands for three
hours. Behind the pulpit, flanked by choir and musicians, crowned by a large screen with his
larger than life image, having done all...the pastor stands. Korean pastors sleep less and stand
more. And a thought-dare I call it a revelation-synapses in my brain. Not with morses
conviction but with eager anticipation, it occurs to me that if this seventy some year old preacher
can do it...so can I.
!What can a song leader do? Perhaps a son, at least a spiritual son, runs up to the stage i
nbetween the scripture reading and intercession leading efforts of the standing preacher. In
tightly fitting suit he waves his hands and shouts/sings his praise to God for us. Music weaves
through worship and word. Scripture speaks. Music moves. The pastor presides.
!Everything in one sense is prayer in these Friday night prayer meetings. The Scripture is
God breathed prayer to us. Song and speaking are souls stirrings of prayer back to God. God
speaks and the congregation listens. The congregation sings and speaks and God listens.
!How do 2,000 or so Koreans all get a word in edgewise during worship? Very loudly. Dr. Gil
from his pulpit Bible reads or speaks out prayer requests and scripture passages. Then he
loudly says “Chew Yo, Chew Yo, Chew Yo”. It is a Korean/Prebyterian low church form of a
higher church Kyrie. It is also a call to out loud let loose with passionate persistent prayer.
!You need to hear it. Better yet, you need to experience it. It shakes me like a rock concert
where you end up right in front of one of the floor to ceiling amplifiers of the band’s bass guitarist
(well maybe not floor to ceiling anymore but you know what I mean). Your whole body
resonates or vibrates with the vibration of the bass guitar’s notes. You don’t just hear the music,
you literally feel the music inside you. And again, even though 2,000 Korean voices can’t be
distinguished, faces can be seen and translated. They are in love with God, eyes teared closed,
hands opened upward, for some knees bent, for all hearts captured.
!They hold nothing back, so I hold nothing back. I don’t believe I need to pray louder so that
God can hear. It is more so that I can feel, so I can resonate with the one who reigns, so I can
vibrate with the Victor. It is the way I choose this night to present my body as a living sacrifice
(Romans 12:1) It is a way to obey the first and greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-40).
This is more (and less) than prayer Korean style. This is Love.
!
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!
Day Twelve
!
!
Scene 1
John leaves family I come home to mine
!
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I leave home to get to Korea. You John come home. The trip for you starts in a cemetery
remembering with thanksgiving loved ones planted in the soil of that holy ground. It ends now
on our last day, in a restaurant with your sister. I see the resemblance. I sense a resonance, a
common vibration of the strings of the heart. You are brother and sister twice by Blood.
!Here and at many times during this trip, I sit on holy ground. I step into places where I do
not belong. I wonder how much pain brother and sister have shared and how much joy. Was
your sister with yo,u Joh, when your father carried you on his back across the border from
North to South Korea at five years old? Is she there in the refugee camps with you when you
wonder if and when you will next eat?
!She has the face of someone who has faced such challenges and more. She has the face
of someone who has met those challenges in and through the grace of her Lord and Lover
Jesus.
!You speak in Korean. I listen in English. What does my country and culture give me to help
in this translation? How can I begin to understand what families live through during the Korean
War and now what they have lived into through discipline and discipleship?
!I do not belong here, not in this country, not with this family. I am a foreigner to such faith, a
VISA visitor.
!And I wonder what of this family and faith will I ever be able to take back with me?
!!
!
Scene 2 Honored at Incheon Airport
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!
In his final act of service Song Sung Deacon drives us to the Incheon Airport with John’s
sister in tow. He will take back his natural gas powered Sonata which has served us so well.
We will take with us spiritually gassed memories and motives that will carry us over an ocean
and into a very different culture back home.
!After we arrive at the airport, we wait for seaweed. Before we lift off from Korean soil we
must take with us food from the Korean Sea. John will serve the plant to the “church plant” back
home in Holland where they have a meal after the service every week.
!We hurry up and wait, but we are not alone waiting.
!We are with family, friends and another VIP friend of John’s who is the head security at the
airport. And so, in the final grace undeserved the embarrassment of being searched in O’hare
turns into the honor of being celebrities in Incheon. We are taken to a special line to check in
our luggage. We are given VIP passes to the Sky Club. And we are introduced to some of the
merchants in the airport who give us some special souveneirs of our time in Korea.
!Our host can’t get us First Class tickets (at least not without someone paying several
thousand dollars more). Still, as his final gift we are given bulkhead seats just behind first class
with unlimited leg and prayer room space.
!!
!!
!!
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!
Scene 3
!
!
A traveler dies-A pastor lives
Providentially, I wake up at 5:00 AM Michigan time after sleeping for a brief time on our flight
from Korea to O’hare. We hope to arrive at Ohare airport around 12 noon (the flight actually
arrives a little later). With builkhead boldness I ask Sarah and John if they want to pray together
in our graciously provided “prayer room” space. John has to go to the bathroom, so Sarah and I
pray briefly for God’s purposes to unfold, for us to apply in the United States every possible
lesson we can that we have learned in Korea.
!After the prayer, I sense some more instructions from God. I think the thought that I will
“dress up for prayer” every day. Practically I will cycle my two week supply of outfits I have used
in Korea back in Holland. Everything I do that culturally mimics the Koreans, I suspect will give
me a chance to tell spiritual stories and recapture shaping moments.
!I also sense that I need to decide on some things I am going to do when I get home before I
get home. While I am up in the air, I want my plans to be nailed down. Before I arrive at my
destination I want to know what my itinerary will be. Maybe I just want to have a plan. For
whatever reason, I want at least to define part of what my days back will look like and here is
what I put down on paper...
5:00 AM in church with informal clothes.
6:00 AM at home reading/praying with Jeannette.
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prayer meetings with congregation
!In a curious7:00
kingdom connection, I also read on the plane my final chronologically
sequenced scripture reading from our congregational daily devotional. It comes from I
Chronicles 10 The Philistines pressed hard after Saul and his sons, and they killed his sons
Jonathan, Abindab and Malki-Shue (v.2)…They buried their bones under the great tree in
Jabesh, and they fasted seven days.
!After I read, I reflect.
!I believe this is a pre-Korea word about my past (namely that “the old Jonathan” died). I will
return home to Holland a very different person. And I know I will need to pray the grace of God
into the lives of those closest to me who will see and have to adjust to those changes. I will lose
some of my former life before I find it again in new surroundings.
!I also believe this may be a word about future practice (they fasted seven days). I am
thinking of the pastor at the retreat center who fasted for seven days without water. And I am
struck with the reality that I can do more. I pray “Lord I am open to a more radical living out of
your call on my life.” Yet, I know that as I head back home, I will need to listen for new
instructions closely every day and that those instructions will come in English not Korean.
!
As our plane touches down, I realize with both grief and joy that I will never have
another trip like this in my lifetime...And I wonder and now perhaps you wonder with
me..
!
1) Will there be a prayer meeting every morning at New Community-Fourth?
!
2) Will there be a prayer mountain somewhere in the city of Holland?
!
3) And will I ever finish this book?
!
Jonathan,
!
Allow me to share some on both of our behalf.
This book was longer. Twelve Days in Korea and then there was Twelve Days Back. I
have, sitting next to me on my desk, a manila folder with two triangular clipped bundles.
Twelve Days in Korea.
Twelve Days Back,
!
We began the whole process meeting on your front porch, Jonathan. We were next
door neighbors then.
Now, you are in Holland, Michigan. I am in Waco, Texas. We Skype about the book.
We talk book titles. I joke about a “tapestory.” You love the play on words. I laugh. It’s
ridiculous. I tell you that I am thinking that the tapestry image has been worn down and
worn out. Like salt that loses its saltiness--a metaphor is a spice. To use sparingly!
But then I am thinking, from two sides: Twelve Days in Korea. Twelve Days Back.
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You said earlier, Jonathan, that to experience God is to know Cause, not Effect. I am
still turning that in my mind--a stonemill grinding and grinding.
Cause, not Effect.
I turn, then, to what I thought the book would say originally.
I experienced this in Korea,
and now this
and this
and even this
is happening in Holland, Michigan.
We were aiming for the story!
But would you agree, Jonathan, that instead we got the history? We got the roots,
the deep-down water squelching roots.
When I read this work, I am seeing Cause, and as a writer--as someone who just
tries to place himself in creative space every day--I work within process. Final products are,
to me, for businesses and consumers.
When I look back on Twelve Days in Korea and Twelve Days Back, I see process and
cause in Korea, and I see a squinting of the eyes for Effect in Twelve Days Back. I believe
that in a moment, God could place a new heart in each of us. Instead, I see that His work is
a process to renew. Restore. Resuscitate. Revitalize. Reconstruct. Resurrect. Replenish.
Reimagine. Reawaken. Maybe this is why you slept poorly in Korea. Maybe this is why
Korean pastors sleep four hours. They’ve been reawakened!
And maybe Korea is the handwriting, the scribing and then the Twelve Days Back is
the typing, the flurry of Effect.
I’m not sure. What I do know is that I feel a thread from Waco to Holland, and I see
the thread stretching from Holland to Incheon to the East Sea to Heavenly Horse Prayer
Mountain. So whatever He is doing, I think we attest to the Cause: that He who is knitting
it,
is really knitting it. Truly.
!
Like a tapestry? A tapestory?
Something like that Something like this. Something like, in my favorite way,
it’s His hand on the pen..
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