“The Holy Nation”

Excerpted from Charles Colson’s 1983 book, Loving God

[Colson was President Nixon’s personal advisor and lawyer and was jailed for perjury in the Watergate scandal, but he became a Christian in prison and started a prison ministry, and later became a popular evangelical writer and speaker. In this chapter, Colson outlines four key principles for the church, the fourth of which is Ecumenicism, which I think he takes too far, so I am omitting that fourth point, even though I believe that there should indeed be solidarity among followers of Jesus.]

Though I’ve spoken to large crowds many times, it was electrifying to look out over the more than 10,000 people packed wall-to-wall and be told there were 15,000 more in overflow halls watching on closed-circuit television. And this was only one of six Sunday services!

…

Afterward, I met with Pastor Cho in his study…

“Fantastic church you lead, Pastor,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he waved aside the compliment. “This is not the church. This is only where we all come together once a week. The church is in the home – 10,000 cell groups which meet regularly all around this city.”

My mistake was a natural one. I figured a church so phenomenally successful must be the result of the leader’s charisma and personality, for so often our American churches and parachurch movements grow because of the personality of the pastor or leader. This pattern is merely another Christian adaptation of the celebrity cultism of our society.

But a charismatic leader is not the secret of the vitality and size of the Full Gospel Church in Seoul. Cho is dynamic and brilliant; but the grown of the church resulted from his brokenness, not his strength. Cho has been ill most of his life, has had TB diagnosed in its terminal stages, has suffered a nervous breakdown from fatigue, and has had repeated severe ulcer attacks. The cell concept was developed as necessity because Cho was so weak he couldn’t manage the church; thus, he commissioned elders to take responsibility for the people in each of their neighborhoods….

Those cell groups... evangelized their neighborhoods, provided a way neighbors could help each other, encouraged spiritual discipline, and began to mushroom… [F]rom 1964 to 1973 he never once totalled the membership of the church. When he finally discovered that through the quiet evangelization of the home church the membership had jumped during that time from 8,000 to 23,000, Cho was stunned.

This raises what I believe is the first principle for the church: the body of believers called the church is to grow from inside out in response to the Spirit. Built that way, the church prevails against anything…

Youth for Christ president, Jay Kesler, sometimes quips, “The western church is like a pro football game on Sunday afternoon: 100,000 people sitting in the stands watching 22 men knock their brains out on the field.” Take away the 22 and there is no game. Cho has not allowed that to happen in Seoul. He… has taken his mission “to equip the lay people, so the lay people can carry out the ministry both inside and outside the church.”

...Chaplain of the Senate, Dick Halverson, agrees… “[T]he church’s mandate is clear: she must go to the world... the work of ministry belongs to the one in the pew, not [just] the one in the pulpit.” ...[T]he church comes together on Sunday mornings principally to be prepared to carry out its ministry the rest of the week in every walk of life… The believer’s ministry is being Christ’s person right where he or she is, in the marketplace or the home, every moment of every day… And that is the second principle for the church: it must equip the laity to take the church into the world.

The full Gospel Church has a retreat center called Prayer Mountain where on any given day a thousand or more believers may be found kneeling on straw mats in tiny caves hollowed out of a mountainside… Workers will often take the first half of their two-week vacation at this place for fasting and prayer.

Is it any wonder that, though outnumbered 5 to 1 by Buddhists, the Christian church is the most powerful influence in the Korean culture? …

The third key principle for the church, then is spiritual discipline – fervent prayer and serious study of God’s Word. This is the life or death principle, for churches that neglect the Word and the prayer life quickly wither, but churches that exercise spiritual discipline can be mightily used.

The great revivals have been born in times when Christians were intent on prayer. The lay revival of 1858, which affected the Western world for half a century, began when businessman Jeremiah Lamphier started a weekly prayer meeting with a handful of people in a small room of the Old North Dutch Church in New York City. The group grew… Within a few months, 10,000 people gathered daily at noon for open prayer meetings in New York Streets. In two years, 2,000,000 converts entered American churches.