A New Direction for the Church
Nearly twenty years ago, there was an interview with David Yonggi Cho, founding pastor of the largest Protestant church in the world, Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea with 800,000 members. Pastor Cho encouraged churches to skip over the older idea of starting new churches with physical buildings and go directly to the next generation strategy of using the Internet to connect a decentralized network of groups and people. He even suggested that many new people watched worship over the Internet. This was almost twenty years ago. My wife, Joy, and I were in Korea about that time. We visited Yoido Full Gospel Church as well as Kwang Lim, the largest Methodist Church in the world with 85,000 members. We also heard them speak about the potential of using the Internet to connect people for church. The initial motivation for these Korean congregations, however, was simply not enough physical space for the huge number of persons with whom they connected. Today, the Internet