Bundong 1st church that I have worked for 10 years as a pastor built in 1964, have had the history of 45years, and located in Bun 2 Dong, Kanbuk Gu, Seoul. It is a traditional presbyterian church which has 3000 christians including church school. For ...
Bundong 1st church that I have worked for 10 years as a pastor built in 1964, have had the history of 45years, and located in Bun 2 Dong, Kanbuk Gu, Seoul. It is a traditional presbyterian church which has 3000 christians including church school. For 45years it has been passive and defensive about change since it has local various peculiarity which is located a little way off the center of seoul changed so rapidly. Especially, it organizes some christians whose jobs, life style, salary, and cultural standards are lower as compared with most citizen of the center area of seoul.
The assignment given to me immediately after moving into the office was multimedia ministry: changing the role of the pulpit by using multimedia in services and sermons, educational ministry: preparing the future through teen service, cultural ministry: spreading the gospel to the locals through cultural volunteer work, internet ministry: enlarging missionary network in the information society through the internet and activating communication within the church. In addition to these tasks, I was in charge of a parish that required education, regular visits, evangelism and care. During the ten years of ministry work that required me to handle three different roles, I felt it worth while when I saw the church and its people gradually adjusting to the changes within the church, although in the beginning it faced clashes and lack of understanding and communication. One of the most astounding results were that other churches came to seek guidance from us and we could share the achievements with other Korean churches through a seminar co-held with organizations training professional missionaries.
Especially, the use of multimedia for sermons and worship brought change to the platform. Specifically, it completely renovated the paradigm of worship. Moreover, with teens, newcomers and elders as central parts of the multimedia ministry, it became a representative service of Bundong 1st church with 5 other cultural missionary works.
These changes established a common field between members of the church and developed practical and professional skills and experience. This was possible due to the proclamation of our vision, organization of the committee, education and training of the committee, arranging long-term plans and securing the budget, building a step by step infrastructure, and the introduction of multimedia through the strong will and funding from the head pastor. The use of multimedia was introduced gradually. We enabled the congregation to experience the use of multimedia on certain events and sermons and gradually implemented the system into the Friday night service, Wednesday service, praise and worship and the Sunday service. Now, the church cannot work without the use of multimedia in services, sermons and events.
Multimedia has played the role of the presenter in enabling the service to be lively and provoking the congregation to be able to participate easily during services. Although pastors have differences in their personal tastes and abilities with multimedia worship but the will to use it in its many ways has increased concentration, intelligibility, and participation to improve their sprituality. These specific results can be found through various questionnaires and its analysis in my Sogang University master's thesis and doctoral dissertation.
Korean churches have too many services in a week that cannot be found anywhere else in the world and in past church history. This reality requires services to be renewed so that life saving sermons can be proclaimed endlessly. This requires pastors of the Korean church to use multimedia in searching new ways of preaching in an information society more than other countries. It demands changes from sentences based on logic to stories based on imagination and metaphors, use of words to use of images, logic-based to susceptibility, standardized speaker to an all-round entertainer. Moreover, sermons should be more dynamic rather than passive and should be able to lead the use of multimedia rather than being dragged by it.
This dissertation has been written because it is certain that multimedia has become one form of alternative to the requirements and changes of the adjustment churches are facing in the new information era through analysis of the changes in attitude the congregation showed to the use of multimedia in Bundong 1st church over the past 10 years.