My blood type is AB. Many Koreans believe that people with AB blood types are eccentric and can't get along with other ABs. My wife also has an AB blood type. But we've been happy together for 38 years. Young Koreans especially seem to believe in a correlation between blood type and personality. They talk as if someone's blood type explains everything about their personality, attributing everything they do to their blood type. Korea and Japan are the only two countries in the world where people believe in this blood type - personality connection. In the U.S, it's ...

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Many of our church members had never set foot in a church before they came to Houston and accepted Jesus at ours. They tend to be temporary residents of Houston, here as students, overseas workers, or medical school faculty members on exchange programs. They typically return to Korea after a year or two. Shepherds must help these people find home churches in Korea when they go back. Otherwise their commitments will weaken and their faith wither. What criteria do we use to find "good" churches? I would look for three things in a church. First, does the church have small ...

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I received Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and Lord when I was 30. I remember after that happened, I felt like I was walking on a cloud. I felt like I could love everybody and that I wouldn't commit a single sin ever again. A year later, after the excitement faded, I found myself being the same person I was before my conversion. Sinful desires still lurked in me and old sinful habits were still at work, so much so that I even doubted my salvation. I kept asking myself, "Am I really saved? Am I really a child of God?" I was so discouraged that I became physically ...

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"On Death and Dying", the classic book by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first published in 1969, describes five stages people go through when they're dying. The first stage is denial. They can't believe that they're going to die. So they pretend that everything is normal. They're offended when people even vaguely suggest that they might die. The second stage is anger. When they recognize that their denial cannot continue, they get angry. Their anger may be directed toward people or circumstances that they think led to their situation. They frequently get angry at God for not ...

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Our Shepherds and their spouses are required to sign a pledge each year where they promise to fulfill their duties by doing things such as pray and read the Bible regularly and attend all required meetings. Below the line for their signatures, there is another line for me to sign, where I pledge to pray for them once a week. We recently changed the wording "once a week" to "once every two weeks". We now have more than 170 house churches. I've felt that my prayers have become perfunctory because there are so many to pray for each week. So I decided to pray for half each ...

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The goal of the House Church movement is to restore the New Testament church. Throughout history, when the church declined and hit bottom, God raised up zealous people to restore the New Testament church. However, the renewed church eventually loses its vigor and restarts a cycle of decline. Strong church renewal movements exhibit two common characteristics: the people involved are active in evangelism and they expect God's presence in their lives. Conversely, there are also two common characteristics when these movements lose their power: the people involved lose ...

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Important U.S. and South Korean government agencies were attacked by cyber-terrorists a few days ago, leaving their servers inoperative for a brief period of time. I had a similar experience a couple years ago. My computer was infected with a virus and rendered useless so I had to buy a new one. At the time, I wondered, "Why would anyone want to destroy other people's computers by spreading viruses when they don't get any benefit out of it themselves?" I think I now know the answer: people can't stand the idea that their lives are meaningless, that it doesn't make any ...

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