Why So Many Megachurches in Korea?

David Yonggi Cho was born Buddhist. When he was 17, he became gravely ill from tuberculosis but subsequently recovered. Attributing his healing to the God of Christianity, he became a Christian. After working as an interpreter for an American missionary and later for a Korean healing evangelist, he attended the Korean Assemblies of God Bible School. In 1958 he and his future mother-in-law founded a small church that grew to 300 in three years. It kept growing and by 1968, worship attendance was more than 10,000. In the years to come, South Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church became the world’s largest-attendance congregation. Thousands of Christian leaders from North America, Africa, Europe and Australia trekked there to understand better the new thing the Holy Spirit seemed to be doing.

Korea is about the land mass of Kentucky. Yet it’s home to five of the world’s 20 largest congregations, including the world’s largest Assembly of God, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist congregations, plus dozens of other churches that each draw more than 2,000 worshipers weekly. But Korean churches didn’t start setting size records until the 1960s. Keep reading