We often hear, “Once a marine, always a marine.” This expression does not mean that a marine, once he joins the Marine Corps, does not ever get discharged but stays there until he or she dies. This means that once a marine, he or she embodies the spirit of the marine corps. I think this truism is perfect for Shepherds of house churches; “Once a Shepherd, always a shepherd.” House church is the matter of spirit. If people understand and adapt house church as a program, I am sorry to say that they inevitably fail. These people wonder why they do not bear fruits when they have adapted house churches, rearranging Sunday service, and adapting life ...

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3 strand prayer is in full swing right now. Looking at the lines of cars rushing toward the church in the cold around 5 AM in the morning, I think about how we are a blessed congregation and church. I guess the pastor next to my church had a chance to come in to work early one day (American pastors don’t pray early in the morning, so they normally start work at 8 in the morning), and he asked what we were doing so early in the morning, marveling at the crowd. This year, we had about 100 more in attendance than the last year on the first day. On the second day the attendance went down a bit, but we are consistently over 700 in attendance, increas...

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In this new year of 2014, there will be several new efforts or changes in our church. I would like to share some of them with you. The Parenting Bible Classes for Infant/Kindergarten and Elementary Age will disappear and instead will be replaced by Parenting Seminars from the spring quarter. There are many who do not have a chance to attend Parenting bible classes due to their short term nature with us, or some members missed taking the Parenting bible classes in time to be helpful after taking other requisite classes. To help with this situation, we decided to change to the seminar format that will be required for all members and this will start ...

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Looking back this year, I am grateful to God’s grace for plenty of fruits in our church this year. First of all, we have been blessed to see many souls saved through our ministry. 170 people received Jesus as their Savior, and 162 people received baptism. I am truly grateful when I think about the joy of Mokjas, other people around them, and especially God when these people received Jesus and baptism. Up to last Sunday, 250 new people enrolled in our church, but we don’t have big difference in Sunday attendance because many of these new people stay for a short sojourn. But Sunday attendance seems to grow a little bit; we had about 1000 people ...

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Last Saturday, we had a youth parent meeting to hear about the progress on the youth house churches over the past one and half years and of its future plans. Many parents filled out a survey before the meeting and have attended the meeting as well, so I can tell that many of the parents are interested in the youth ministry at our church. According to the survey taken by the parents, there were two main concerns. First, even though youth house church is a great way to develop leadership skills for the shepherds through serving and they get necessary training and support from their zone leaders when needed, for those members who are not shepherds ...

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We finished the expository sermons on Romans in the beginning of December, almost 1 year after we started this. Sermons from a single book have an advantage that we can cover the whole book, but I feel that one year was too long. One thing that was disappointing for me was that the House Church bible studies did not follow the scriptures used for the sermons. As Romans contain difficult content and if the worshippers had pre-read the verses and had a time to think about them, it could have been easier to listen to the sermon. As a note, the practice of studying the verses to be used in the Sunday sermon during the weekly House Church was stopped ...

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Our 24th wedding anniversary passed recently. Since we dated about seven years prior to getting married, we’ve known each other for 31 years. We entered into marriage without knowing God and without any thoughts or plans about the marriage. I have to say it has been God’s grace that we lived together without much problems. However, since I did not know God at that time, I consider it somewhat lucky that I had the 7 years of dating to think about what kind of husband and family I wanted to have. When the time comes, many people prepare for marriage and determine the readiness of marriage based on their financial situation or their ability to live ...

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