Luce Colloquium of Korean Christianity 'KOREAN CHRISTIAN WORLD MISSION: The Missionary Movement of the Korean Church.'
By Timothy Kiho Park, Ph..D. Director of Korean Studies & Associate Professor of Asian Mission Fuller Theological Seminary School of Intercultural Studies
Friday, November 17, 2006
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
10367 Bunche Hall, UCLA
The Korean Church has been a missionary church almost from the beginning. Today, the Korean Church has become one of the largest missionary-sending churches. The Korean Church, however, has both strengths and weaknesses in their missionary work. The church will play important roles in the 21st century world mission should the church correct their problems and use their resources wisely. The paper deals with 1) Brief Mission History of the Korean Church, 2) Current Status of the Korean Mission, 3) Strengths and Weaknesses of the Korean Mission, and 4) Suggestions to the Korean Church.
The New York Times wrote, ¢®¡ÆSouth Korea has rapidly become the world's second largest source of Christian missionaries. . . . it is second only to the United States and ahead of Britain. The Koreans have joined their Western counterparts in more than 160 countries [180 as of February 2006], from the Middle East to Africa, from Central to East Asia. Imbued with the fervor of the born again, they have become known for aggressively going to - and sometimes being expelled from - the hardest-to-evangelize corners of the world.¢®¡¾ (Norimitsu Onishe, ¢®¡ÆKorean Missionaries Carrying Word to Hard-to-Sway Places,¢®¡¾ New York Times (Internet Editon), November 1, 2004)
Christianity Today predicted that the Korean Church will be the number one missionary-sending church sooner or later by saying that ¢®¡ÆSouth Korea sends more missionaries than any country but the U.S. And it won't be long before it's number one.¢®¡¾ (Rob Moll, ¢®¡ÆMissions Incredible,¢®¡¾ Christianity Today, February 24, 2006).
The Korea World Missions Association (KWMA) has released recently a statistics of the Korean mission. The number of Korean missionaries as of February 2006 is 14,086 in 180 countries (about 19,000 according to non-official counts). Leaders of the Korean churches and missions made a resolution to send one million tent-making missionaries by 2020 and 100,000 missionaries by 2030. (Sung Sam Kang, ¢®¡ÆThe Statistics of the Korean Church Mission and Future Ministry,¢®¡¾ Kidok Shinmun, February 15, 2006.)
Cost: Free
Special Instructions
Open to the Public
For more information please contact
Sejung Kim
Tel: 310-825-3284
koreanstudies@international.ucla.edu
http://international.ucla.edu/korea/
Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies
