Korean Baptists

I've attended Baptist churches all my life. For the past year I've had the extraordinary opportunity to be a regular attender at a Baptist church in Korea.

My church in Korea doesn't make a point of catering to foreigners. It doesn't even offer English-language services. On almost every Sunday, I'm the only non-Korean in the house. Mine is a garden-variety—though perhaps extraordinarily loving—local Baptist church in Pohang, an industrial seaport city.

At the risk of overgeneralizing from my experiences with a single assembly, and appreciating that even among Baptist churches in the same country practices may vary widely, I'd like to catalog here some Korean church practices that differ from those I'm used to, or that otherwise impress me. These are mere curiosities, mind you, not at all matters of faith or doctrine.

In no particular order:

1.  On entering the church sanctuary and taking a seat, the Korean bows and prays for a moment before chatting with others.

2.  No offering plate is passed. Tithes and offerings are placed in a box with a slotted lid just outside the sanctuary entrance. I consider this extraordinary even though my church in northern Kentucky has the same system. It's anomalous in Kentucky.

3.  About fifteen minutes into the worship service, someone brings forward all the offerings (enclosed in envelopes) to the pastor, who dedicates them to God in prayer. The interesting thing here is that, without mentioning money amounts, the pastor explicitly names each contributor.

4.  Corporate prayer in the Korean church is sometimes the sort I'm used to: a single person leading prayer while everyone else remains silent, except for occasional amens. But sometimes it is something quite different: everyone praying out loud at once, the whole sanctuary abuzz. I haven't yet determined which occasions or circumstances call for one approach over the other.

5.  There's another interesting thing related to corporate prayer. In America, as soon as the person leading prayer says, "Amen," all heads are unbowed and every eye pops open. The praying is over, just like that. But it's often not so in Korean church. The tension of prayer often is not released all at once, on cue. Rather it's gradually, person by person, that people cease praying, unbow their heads, open their eyes. In particular, the amen at the end of the benediction is not the buzzer signifying the end of church—or the firing of the starter's pistol for the race to the parking lot—that it is, often, in American churches. Many people keep praying.

6.  After the morning worship service, everyone eats lunch together. The whole church. A full meal. Every Sunday.

7.  After the lunch and fellowship break (about 90 minutes long) there's afternoon worship. Many small groups, organized according to age and sex, exist in the church family, and each week a different group plays a leading role in the afternoon service: singing songs, performing plays or pantomimes, sharing Scripture, and so forth. This is not in lieu of a standard worship service. Congregational singing and a full-length sermon are included in the afternoon session.

8.  When the afternoon service is concluded, many small groups hold their weekly meetings, either in the church building or in members' homes.

9.  In further consideration of 6, 7, and 8: If you attend Sunday school in the morning, your small-group meeting in late afternoon, and everything in between, you're looking at a very full Sunday indeed: a near-total devotion of Sunday to church. Although there's no Sunday evening service at my church in Pohang, I daresay the Korean faithful are spending more of their Sundays in church than American Baptists are.

10.  The standard greeting/response at my Korean church is this:

A:  "Hallelujah!"
B:  "Amen!"

This dialog is repeated many times per service, pastor with congregation, individual with individual.

11.  Almost everyone carries a zippered Bible with a built-in hymnal—a full-length songbook included in the same binding, after Revelation. The same was true at a Korean Presbyterian church I used to visit in Cincinnati.