Overview of Kwanya Church Ministry, a Street Ministry in Seoul, South Korea

Overview of Kwanya Church Ministry by Myunghee Lim, Chief Servant at Kwanga Church

Near the end of the KNAAM Conference at the Paul Church in Jeon Ju, South Korea, the climax came with a soul-searching message from Myunghee Lim, the Chief Servant at the Kwanya Church Ministry, a street ministry in Seoul, South Korea.  He made us aware of the price tag that is involved in making spiritual and financial breakthroughs in an inner city mission.  There is a cost.  In fact, it costs everything, but the rewards are worth it.

On one occasion, Myunghee got so discouraged at the lack of visible results for what he had invested, that he came to his "give up line," and decided to call it "quits."  He started walking away from the street ministry that he was involved with, and as he was walking, I am not sure if it was a vision or an epiphany, but he saw Jesus walking towards him in sandals and with dust on his feet. 

Jesus asked him where he was going.  He said, "I'm finished!  I can't take any more!  I have had it!  The work is just too hard!"  Jesus looked on him kindly, and said, "Well, I am going to the very people that you are leaving, and if you want to follow Me, you must follow Me back to the very people that you are leaving!"

It was the love of Christ that constrained him to go back in the strength and the power of the Lord,  Through persistance and patient endurance, he began to see results.  The results have become apparent to the degree that one business man, at a later point, gave a gift of $1,000,000.00 towards the Kwangya Church Ministry.

His example of all-out giving has inspired even the street people, and former street people to give.  Myunghee was a part of the leadership team that had to raise some $250,000.00 to cover the costs of bringing the First Nations from across Canada to South Korea, pay 1/2 of their airfares, put them up in hotels, feed them generously, and transport them from one end of South Korea to another, giving them a strategic overview of what God is doing in this nation today.

One former pimp gave $5,000.00 towards the costs of the KNAAM Conference.  People like Myunghee gave even out of their own poverty, like the Macedonians in II Corinthians 8:2, which welled up in rich generosity.  For starters, these Korean ministries to street people do not have any more money than the indigenous peoples of Canada, or of any other region or nation on the face of the earth, but they role model the Kingdom principle of sowing their seed, even in a time of famine.  Then they watch God grow it, increase it, and multiple it for the extension of His Kingdom.

Below are some of the highlights of Myunghee Lim's heartfelt message at the KNAAM Conference in Jeon Ju, South Korea, on Thursday morning of April 25, 2013.

"It is nice to meet with all of you. I would like to share and to magnity the grace of God as I introduce our ministry.  The people who we serve are the people around the Yongdeungpo Train Station.  They are homeless, often living in tiny one-room dwellers.  Many of them are criminals, prostitutes, and people with addictions.

"We need to understand their psychological state, and what the situation is that they are in. Most of them do not have a dream for the future. They are not healthy. They seldom earn money. They are disconnected from their families, and they are people who do not even love themselves. If they should ever spend money, it would be spent on gambling, alcohol, or on prostitutes.

"They are full of negative words and are filled with unfulfilled longing, sadness, and despair. They say, 'God is annoying. The Church is annoying.' They end their lives very lonely in this district. I believe that they are like the abandoned leprosy people in the Bible, or like Mary Magdalene who was possessed by seven demons, or they are icons of sinners such as tax collectors and prostitutes in the time of Jesus. Maybe many of the First Nations in North America are in a similar situation in this sense.

"How can we help them to recover?  I think that they are bread for us (Numbers 14:9) as we bring them the gospel of love. Accordingly, our principles for action are as follows:
1) Give to the point of bankruptcy.
2) Walk around the village together in street evangelism, and do not ask for help.
3) Love the unlovable.
4) Be patient.
5) Do not stop, and never quit. 

I am going to explain three principles in brief:

"First, it is to give to the point of bankruptcy. When contemplating what Jesus did for us, He revealed God Himself as Jesus gave everything for worthless sinners like us to the point that He was sentenced to death, was whipped till his flesh, veins and muscles were exposed.  He was crucified on a cross and abandoned.

"God gave Himself, and became bankrupted in order to provide a way for life to come to us. We gained life by his grace.

"This is how the apostle John put it: 'This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our life for our brothers.'

"We hold on to this word, and we decided to give to the point of bankruptcy, and we continue to do so. We serve three meals a day for 1,200-1,500 people. 16 sacks (20 kilograms each) of rice are consumed per day and we spend $45,000.00 per month on food.

"God has provided everything. A pickpocket leader once told me that it would be a miracle if I could survive in this situation for a year, but I have been doing this ministry in this district for the past 25 years. I praise God who feeds the orphan and the widow through His miracles. Halleluiah!

"There is no one who does not receive our service. Our Kwangya Church has become the church of our village. By now most people have opened their hearts towards the church. Now the time has come for us to harvest. We have 30 people baptized in a year.

"The second principle is that of of circling around the village together. If we look at the ministry of Jesus, He proclaimed the good news of the Kingdom by saying, ‘I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent" (Luke 4:43). 

"According to this word, we share the good news with people around the villages. In the beginning, some disrupters took away our microphone and blocked our way. However, we continued the evangelism by proclaiming 'repent and believe in Jesus,' even in fear.

"Gradually I was known as a prophet to the drunkards, and the people in the village considered me as a godly man. One day, a sister who used to be a shaman asked me to hold a worship service for the opening day of her bar. In the service, I asked her to kneel down and I blessed her business by saying, 'Whether it is successful or bankrupted, it is the will of God.' A year later the bar was bankrupted. However, the sister continues to attend the church and participates often in the street evangelism. God’s grace is amazing. Hallelujah!

"We share the good news at the station waiting room every Tuesday at midnight. One day, a homeless person approached me and said, 'Myunghee, why are you bothering us? Why don’t you just give us bread and leave like other pastors? Instead, you make noise and bother our sleeping.'

"I explained the reason why I share the good news, saying, 'Yes, I want to just drop the bread and leave as well. But I know I will ruin your life that way, as it will grow your dependency more and more, and you then become mean-spirited that others never do enough for you.  A man will live only if he meets God. Therefore I came here to bring the good news of salvation to you people.' Then he bowed, and said 'thank you.'

"We have a worship service and evangelism every Friday night in front of the train station. People, sometimes, complain about the loud sound to the police station, then policemen come and ask us to turn down the volume.  As this situation became repetitive, the police chief asked me to come to his office. He warned me not to do evangelism in front of the station.

"I told him 'Please look at me. Who am I?' and he answered, 'You are a pastor.' Then I asked him, 'Do you know what a pastor does?' He did not answer, and kept silent. I said, 'A pastor is a person who is anointed by God in order to proclaim the good news. Therefore I will continue to share the gospel in front of the station. You can fine me or put me into prison. However, I will continue to proclaim the gospel when I get out of the prison. Therefore, you will not be able to stop me from proclaiming the gospel.'

"Then, the chief said to me, 'Yes it is right. We are told to be a witness in the power of the Spirit to the ends of the earth. I am a deacon too.” He became very cooperative since then.

"Later I had a chance to have a meal with a new police chief, and I asked him about the ministry of our Kwangya Church. He said to me, 'The spirituality of the Kwangya Church gives life to this district.' He told me this even though he was not a Christian. Halleluiah! I praise the Almighty God. I encourage you to share the gospel boldly. The Lord will be with us to the very end of the age.

"A third principle of our ministry is to love the unlovable.  In other words, it is to put love in action even in the midst of hatred.  I think one of the most difficult things in the world is to love someone unconditionally.

"The divorce rate in Korea has jumped to 47%, ranking #2 among the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. If it is not easy for even lovers to love each other, it is even more challenging to love people who curse us, and who give us hardship.

"When I contemplate and meditate on the love of God, I think of a love that loves the unloveable again. God never stops loving us who endlessly rebel against Him. God has told us what His love is like through the love Hosea showed to his unfaithful wife Gomer.

"The apostle John described the love of Jesus this way: 'Having loved His own who were in the world, He now showed them the full extent of his love, and loved them unto the end”  (John 13:1).

"We call this love 'loving once again in midst of hatred.' Some curse us even after they are fed by us. Some write bad words on the wall. They continue to be served by us, but do not attend church services. Our intense love does not arouse any response from them, yet we still have to love them.

"I was born on an island. If you go to the ocean, you can see that wave after wave hits the rock which does not show any response. Waves come and go, touching the same rock. One day the rock will have a hole from this endless touch of waves. This is how the power of love works with wave after wave..

"There was a trouble maker who went to jail twenty-seven times, and was hospitalized  twenty-five times for alcohol addiction treatments in our shelter. He dropped out of school after he bit his teacher in his high school, and has spent twenty years in jail, and became addicted to alcohol to the point that his praying mom had to give up.

"He started to make trouble in our shelter. He drank 150-160 bottles of drink at a time and broke the door and fought with others. All our staff wanted to send him out. Even my wife was convincing me to kick him out. However, I did not give up on him. Once he was almost unconscious after throwing up, I came to him and gave an IV while praying, 'Lord, please give mercy on this poor man.' He felt like the blood of Jesus was ministered to him and he recovered. 

"Hundreds of patients at psychiatric hospitals are dying due to lack of love.  What we need in this era of time is love.  I want to challenge you to love the unlovable.  Love does not expect anything in return, but keeps right on loving.  Hallelujah!

"I want to make a conclusion. A ministry of giving has no end. Evangelism becomes more challenging. Loving someone makes you exhausted. You can be mocked. All that you have built may collapse suddenly. There may be no immediate outward results, but we need to carry on.

"We have built a shelter for the homeless without money and debt. We have been doing our ministry for twenty-five years in a place where survival for a year is considered to be a miracle. A countless number of people have changed in a place where one transformation of a life is considered to be a miracle.  Halleluiah!

"A miracle occurs if you carry on your ministry with a resolution that you would want to die doing the ministry. I pray the power of God be upon all of your ministries. Halleluiah!"