Twenty three young Koreans from Sam-Mul ('Spring Water' in Korean) Church in Bundang, Korea were kidnapped by members of the Taliban, a Muslim extremist group in Afghanistan, where they were serving as volunteers. The terrorist group demanded money from the Korean government and the release of prisoners from the Afghanistan government in exchange of these young people. They threatened to execute their hostages if their demands were not met. True to their word, they shot and killed the volunteer team leader, Pastor Bai. (At the time of this writing, another hostage was also killed.) The reaction of the Korean public has been mostly negative. Instead ...

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Sunday worship attendance is an essential part of Christian life. You must attend Sunday worship services regularly if you want to see your faith grow. I have read that the percentage of marriages that end in divorce is about the same among Christians as among non-Christians. I have quoted this statistic myself on many occasions, believing it to be true. But I recently learned that there's a twist to this. In the original study, people were categorized as "Christians" if they simply called themselves born-again. When looking at the people who not only claim to be born again but also attend Sunday worship services regularly, the divorce rate is much ...

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A few weeks ago I asked you to call shepherds "brothers" or "sisters" when they stopped serving as shepherds. I wanted to make it clear that the word "shepherd" represents their ministry, not a title. Those of us who are involved in the House Church movement desire to restore the original New Testament churches. Article 6 of our Mission Statement says: "We do not pursue small groups or cell churches, but New Testament prototypical churches." Prototypical churches in the New Testament were like stem cells that developed into various body parts in later stages. They developed into Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, or Pentecostal churches later. Some ...

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Back when I was a layperson, I heard a retired pastor talk about the futility of preaching. What he said stuck in my mind for a long time. He explained, "When I preach, I feel like a man who goes to the roof of a tall building with a bottle of eye drops, opens the cap, and pours the contents out over the edge, hoping that someone with an eye affliction might happen to be walking by below, and get hit with medicine in the eyes and be cured. As a result of this pessimistic view of preaching, when I became a pastor, I regarded preaching as a pastoral duty that I faithfully performed without expecting any real result. So I couldn't believe my eyes when ...

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The President Bush's proposed immigration bill recently failed to pass the Senate. Many Senators, including Bush's fellow Republicans, opposed the bill because they felt that there were too many loopholes that might be exploited. I feel sorry for those illegal immigrants, including some of our church members, who pinned their hopes for legal status on the passage of this bill. If the Senators' primary reason for opposing this bill was too many possible loopholes, I think they made a mistake. Every bill has room for exploitation. No matter how airtight lawmakers try to make a bill, people will always find loopholes to abuse, because human nature is ...

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We will have a church-wide business meeting on July 4 to vote on changing our church's name. We're proposing that the church name be changed in Korean from "Seoul Baptist Church of Houston" to "Houston-Seoul Church" (the name sounds strange in English, but makes sense in Korean). The English name will remain "Seoul Baptist Church of Houston". The reason for the proposal is to help pastors of churches who are considering switching from traditional churches to house churches. The vast majority of churches in Korea belong to Presbyterian denominations. When pastors of those churches try to convert their churches to house churches, many elders are ...

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I recently came across a survey of immigrants in the U.S. The percentage of college graduates among Korean-Americans was considerably lower than for Chinese, Indian, and Filipino-Americans. The average income of Korean-Americans was slightly higher than that of African-Americans and Hispanics, but lower than the average income of other Asian groups. The number of private business owners was very high among Koreans compared to other ethnic groups, but the number of people working for the government was significantly lower. Some Korean-American parents want to raise their children as Koreans, but this is impossible. Let me share my experience. At ...

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