“They are more worried about us than we are about them.” These words of self-reproach are often heard in open prayers during Sunday services or revival sessions at retreat centers held by members of Christian churches. “They” of course means the outside world, which is the common subject of Christians’ pleas to God for protection from all kinds of evil.

Secular matters that are often mentioned in church services, in both individual and collective prayers by the clergy as well as congregants, include national reunification, relief of the underprivileged, peace on the domestic political front, judgment of the evil regime in North Korea and an end to threats of war.

In prayers for social purification, detailed targets are chosen in accordance with the main concerns of the times, such as violent crime, homosexuality, corruption among officials, political retaliation by those in power and so on. In most churches, these prayers on “external” matters usually follow a time of repentance in which confessions of one’s own sins are made vocally or silently.

With Protestants and Catholics together accounting for more than a quarter of Korea’s total population, we churchgoers feel it our duty to pray for the goodness of our society by asking God to rid the world of all elements of evil, assuming that we are already cleaner than the rest of the world. This of course is from the faith in God’s pardon and justification, but is also based on our confidence in living by his teachings.

Yet, churchgoers today find themselves getting weaker in their “holier than thou” conviction, as they watch what’s going on in the Christian community, particularly in the “megachurches” here. Created during the evangelical boom in the 1970s and ’80s, the biggest churches boasting memberships in the tens of thousands are rather contributing to the feared decline of Christianity in Korea in the 21st century, as they are invariably involved in internal disputes.

The hereditary handover of pulpit places from father to son, incessantly practiced in larger churches, is the top cause of humiliation we have in the face of of nonbelievers. Myungsung Church in eastern Seoul, the largest in Korea’s Presbyterian denomination with a registered congregation of 100,000, has just completed the process of “HSC” or hereditary succession of church as critics have termed it, from father the Rev. Kim Sam-hwan to son Kim Ha-na.

The junior Kim, 44, has a rich academic background with degrees from Massachusetts State University (B.A.), Princeton Theological Seminary (Th.M.) and Drew University (Ph.D.) of the United States in addition to M.Div. from the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, and is known to be of a smart but humble character. In the ordaining ceremony, he said he did not think he was the right person to lead the church, but that he believed God would help him perform his mission well.

A large majority of the Myungsung congregation welcomed him when he made his first sermon as the senior pastor of the megachurch on Sunday. They ignored a relatively small number of believers demonstrating in front of the chapel with signs denouncing the father-to-son succession of the ministry and demanded its cancellation. They claimed hereditary turnover was against the church law.

It was in its 2013 general assembly that the Presbyterian Church of Korea-Tonghap (Unity) passed a revision to its charter to ban succession of a ministry to the spouse or direct descendant of a retiring pastor. Soon after the legislative action, Rev. Kim Sam-hwan declared he would not seek to turn his church over to his son, but he later went back on that vow and preparations began this year for his succession by Rev. Kim Ha-na.

Researchers found that as many as 137 churches in Korea, 106 of them in the Seoul area including six megachurches with Sunday turnouts of over 5,000 each, practiced HSC during the past decade through direct father-to-son succession or in various other ways designed to mitigate criticism. Emmanuel Methodist Church had an interim pastor for nine months between founding pastor Kim Kuk-do’s retirement in February 2013 and the succession by his son in November. The senior Kim’s two brothers also passed their churches to their sons.

Church A establishes church B for a son of its pastor with full financial support and sharing a part of its congregation. Upon the pastor’s retirement, the two churches merge and the son becomes the senior pastor of the unified church. The pastors of churches C and D are close friends. Church C invites the son of church D’s pastor to succeed its retiring pastor and church D does the same for the son of church C’s pastor in what is termed “cross HSC.” More common is branching out a new church to award it to the son of a large church’s pastor.

In all these examples of HSC, there are significant moves of internal opposition, but the majority supports the transition by bloodline, as the congregants who still respect the retiring pastor feel comfortable with his son in the pulpit ensuring a familiar style of ministry. Opponents eventually leave the church or are virtually expelled.

Then, why do the retiring pastors, who were so well respected through their long ministry after opening churches from scratch and bringing so many people to the houses of gospel, risk so much criticism from inside and outside the church community by passing the baton to their offspring?

Is it God’s order? No.

Is it the best way to convey the mission and ministerial philosophy to the next generation? No.

Or is it an effort not to expose certain matters in church operation, financial or otherwise, that are undesirable to be open to the eyes from the outside? I do not know.

The core problem is the misguided idea of privatizing churches, regarding the large congregation as the followers of the founding pastor rather than Jesus Christ and the huge church properties as the pastor’s own. Similar patterns exist in other areas of our society, such as industrial conglomerates and private educational institutions where hereditary succession of leadership is more common than not.

But, hereditary succession of ministry is worse for no other reason than that God owns the church and it belongs to no mortal being, as all Christian pastors most importantly point out in their sermons.


By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik, a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald, is an elder at Somang Presbyterian Church in Seoul. – Ed.