Saturday, March 28, 2009

Yoido Full Gospel Church

A few weeks ago Lauren and I went to check out Yoido Church. Yoido Church claims to be one of the largest, if not THE largest Christian church in the world. It was quite an experience to say the least.

According to the "very reliable" source, wikipedia (follow link to the entry regarding Yoido Church), the church (as of 2007) has 830,000 members.

After entering the building and being escorted to one of the many "foreigners" sections we were shown our seats. In the back of the pew in front of us were headsets hooked to a small device listing 7 different channels: English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese. I scrolled through a few of them, and sure enough, somewhere in the church someone was listening and translating into a microphone most of the languages. On the church's website, it lists which of it's dozens of services to go to in order to hear specific languages. From looking around I estimated that they must have seating for 30,000 people at once (according to wikipedia, the real figure is 26,000).

Overall, we enjoyed the service and did feel the presence of God. It was a bit overwhelming, but definitely worth going.




2 comments:

Truth said...

Wow, what an experience!

Kathleen said...

Looks like you are finally settling in. Good going! When we lived in Germany it was fun to go to different churches and listen to the services in the native language. How's the music, does everyone sing in their own language????? Enjoy it all!
Gram