Churches & Such

I've been trying to go to a church service each Sunday when possible. Since I'm in Seoul a lot on weekends, I've had a chance to check out three different churches. The first was Yewon Church, recommended by a Korean friend and my favorite of the three. It's a fairly large church, and they had English translation available via headset. Translations were also available in a couple other languages, Japanese, Chinese, etc. Everybody was extremely nice, I got offered to go to lunch twice and was given a rose for being a visitor. Much like World Vision Church in Daejeon, world evangelism is a huge emphasis. They also had an international service later in the day but I didn't have time to go. 

The second church was Chungmu Presbyterian Church. This is one of Daniel's friends, Joong Hyun's church. It is one of the oldest church buildings still standing in Seoul. It was a nice service but being a smaller church there was nobody to translate for us. Almost all of the hymns were familiar though.

The last church I visited in Seoul was Onnuri Community Church. This is a massive church, theres a huge auditorium where 6 services are held each Sunday. The 11:30am service I went to was completely full so I sat in the overflow seating. They also have several foreign language services including English. The building itself is several stories tall with Sunday School rooms, multiple cafes, meeting rooms, bookstores, etc. (The two pictures below are 'borrowed' from the internet)

And while we're on religion...two bonus stories.

(1) I was waiting on a bus back to my dorm in Daejeon when a young lady walks up and asks where I'm from in broken English. After telling her I'm from the US, she replies "Oh, I'm looking for Russian." So I tell her, in Russian, that I'm also originally from Russia, but grew up in the states. Turns out, she's a Jehovah's Witness and taught herself Russian (she was fluent) so that she could evangelize to Russians in Korea. I had to catch the bus so we didn't talk long, but I did end up with some literature.

(2) On campus at KAIST, I get approached again by a young lady with a 7 question survey for 'Elohim Academy (always beware of false pretenses). It was clear that this was a religious group but I went along just to see what they were about. After the questionnaire, I get roped into watching a 5 minute video, and then some more talking. Turns out these folks were from the World Mission Society Church of God. We had a nice long discussion about 'God the Mother' and how celebrating Christmas and going to church on Sunday instead of Saturday is wrong. I followed along mainly to keep them from talking to other people (I had 5 of them occupied at one point). But it was also fascinating how they twisted so many passages of scripture. As soon as their misinterpretations were challenged, they started getting upset so I decided to end our talk. After I got back to a computer, I looked them up. It turns out they believe a bunch of other crazy stuff and it seems an awful lot like a cult to me. Maybe I'll go visit them this Saturday. Just kidding.