The Biggest Church in the World

Yoido Full Gospel Fellowship is the biggest church in the world. It has over 837,000 members--that's about 200 times the size of my entire hometown, give or take a few hundred! The church building alone takes up a whole city block. Police direct traffic around the building. And when I visited the church last Sunday, I had to arrive about 1/2 hour early just to be guaranteed a seat in the auditorium. There's a special foreigners section for those who are not Korean, and depending on the service (there are 7 per Sunday), you can choose to listen to headsets with translations in nine different languages.

But in my own opinion, the best part about sitting in the foreigners section was the usher who walked up and down the aisles with a sign on a long pole which read "NO PHOTOGRAPHY PLEASE." It may be wrong of me, but at the moment I first saw him, I desperately wanted to take a picture. The church building didn't interest me that much; I just wanted a photograph of the man with that sign!

Yoido is an interesting church. I'm not sure I can quite wrap my brain around it. Imagine church as a sporting event, and you might be able to more accurately describe the experience. TV cameras everywhere, big screens showing the televised worship service, loud applause, ushers in uniform, color-coordinated worship leaders, and...a symphony orchestra!

I wonder if this is what the Hebrews author meant when he talked about "not forsaking our own assembling together...but encouraging one another." Somehow I'm not quite sure it is. I may perhaps have some personal issues with this church's theological assertions and its self-presentation/outreach style, but there's still the nagging voice in the back of my head that tells me this church is about as far away from the early church as it could possibly be.

God uses all different kinds of churches to do his work. That much is for sure. But I wonder about the institutionalization of church and how it affects the way that people perceive God. It makes God seem like a CEO, I think. Or perhaps more like a a government leader. Either way, a little less than accessible by the common human...

I suppose that makes me wonder about what God's church should look like. What does it mean to "assemble together"? And what does it look like when "assemble" and "encourage" intermix?