Seventeen years ago, as he tells it, a young Korean named Yonggi Cho was waiting to die of tuberculosis when a girl gave him a Bible. He converted to Christianity and his tuberculosis was promptly checked, though not cured. Ordered out of his Buddhist parents' home for renouncing their faith, Cho huddled in his shabby lodgings one night, praying for a full recovery. "Suddenly the room was filled with light," he recalls. "I looked about me and saw two feet. I did not know who he was until I saw the crown of thorns piercing his temple, the blood streaming down. My lips and tongue began to speak in a strange language."
Now a robust 38, the Rev. Yonggi Cho has just finished playing host to thousands of other Christians at his 10,000-seat Full Gospel Central Church on Seoul's Yoido Island. For five days, Pentecostalists from 50 countries jammed his church for the morning sessions of the tenth triennial Pentecostal World Conference. The Seoul meeting was essentially a gathering of such "classical" Pentecostal denominations as the Assemblies of God, churches that grew out of a turn-of-the-century burst of religious enthusiasm for a direct experience of God through the Holy Spirit. Now numbering a claimed 20 million adherents worldwide, the "classicals" at the Korean conference were joined by enthusiasts from more recent Pentecostal flowerings. Many neo-Pentecostals from Presbyterian, Anglican and other mainstream churches also attended, and a sprinkling of Catholic priests in Roman collars represented the burgeoning Catholic Charismatic movement (TIME, June 18).
The choice of Korea for the conference site was no mere geographical courtesy. While Pentecostalism is spreading like a spiritual wildfire around the world, its progress in Asia is particularly remarkable. Much of the boom has been in Korea, where only 90 years ago the penalty for being a Christian was death.
Pentecostal missionaries were later than others in proselytizing Korea. Even so, when the first Assemblies of God missionary arrived from the U.S. in 1952, there were already longstanding groups of Christians who practiced such Pentecostal "charisms" as healing and glossolalia—the prayerful or prophetic "speaking in tongues."
Pastor Cho estimates that as many as 1,000,000 out of the 4,000,000 Korean Christians have since received the "baptism in the Holy Spirit"—the inner, direct experience of the Holy Spirit's blessing that Pentecostalists regard as a necessary condition for a full spiritual life. Korea's growing Christian fervor is not only Pentecostalist, though.
In May a Billy Graham crusade in Seoul drew an estimated 1,000,000 people to the final rally—possibly the largest revival gathering in history.