The electronic keyboard and acoustic guitar kicked in as the junior minister opened this past Sunday’s service with a public prayer. He spoke in a rapid-fire cadence as the 20 members of the evangelical church tried to keep pace, before rising to recite the Apostle’s Creed, a proclamation of their faith.

This house of worship in central Seoul is one of the tens of thousands of small Protestant chapels across the country that are trying to lure believers away from South Korea’s megachurches. Some, like this one, are doing so by satisfying the longing for a close-knit religious community as well as the craving for a cappuccino.   

The church’s name is Jesus Coffee.

“Churches and cafés have the hardest time surviving in Korea,” said Ahn Min-ho, a 42-year-old ordained minister and certified barista. “Combining the two is mutually beneficial.”

South Korea is divided between Buddhists (15.5 percent), Protestants (19.7 percent), Catholics (7.9 percent), and non-believers. Among the large population of Christians, the model of the combined “café church” has taken off in recent years. These grassroots affairs provide a counterpoint to the massive, hierarchical, institutionalized megachurches in a country where many are distrustful of major institutions, both religious and political. Megachurches have lately been implicated in high-profile corruption scandals; the founder of Seoul’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, which claims a congregation of nearly 800,000 people and is the largest megachurch in the world, was convicted of embezzling $12 million in church money in 2014. In the political realm, former conservative president Park Geun-hye—whose father once served as president as well—was impeached in March for her alleged masterminding of a vast bribery scandal that has landed her in prison.

Customers at Ahn’s café church can peruse a selection of Christian literature while nursing their lattes, which are about a dollar cheaper than at some of the neighborhood’s big-name franchises. A cross-adorned wooden shed in the corner, marked “Prayer Room,” contains a desk with a Bible on top. The sanctuary is located in a windowless room in the back, behind the espresso machine and industrial-strength coffee grinder.  

Ahn told me he welcomes newcomers who, like him, feel Christianity in South Korea has become “too institutionalized.” That seems to be a sentiment shared by many worshipers in their 20s and 30s, who are, according to reports, increasingly leaving their churches amid feelings of disillusionment with organized religion.

And many don’t hold the same political views as older generations.

“Christians over the age of 50 are more likely to vote for the conservatives,” said Ms. Lee, a 40-year-old mother of three who was slowly finishing an iced vanilla latte at Jesus Coffee after the service. “We think differently from them.”

Unlike American evangelicals, who have long been considered a coherent voting bloc, Korean “evangelical voters are not a unified bloc, and the voting patterns are complex, but politicians pay attention because many voters are evangelical,” David Halloran Lumsdaine wrote in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia. Survey data about the impact of religion on voting in previous elections is scarce, but interview data suggest that “Christians’ voting responds more to regional than religious affiliations,” Lumsdaine wrote.

Still, South Korean Protestants have long been reliable supporters of the country’s right wing due to a shared political ideology. The prosperity gospel and staunch opposition to communism are staples for many of Korea’s evangelical preachers, which align them with the agenda of pro-business and anti-North Korea politicians.

For the generation of Koreans who remember a time of war and poverty, these messages still resonate, but for those who have come of age in an era of relative peace and wealth, the prosperity gospel “doesn’t have the same magic appeal,” according to Brother Anthony, a longtime observer of South Korea’s religious movements and a member of the Taizé ecumenical monastic community, which counts both Protestants and Catholics.

Thus, in this election, the nation’s fractured conservative establishment cannot count on the Christian vote. Some of South Korea’s Christians were shocked by the Park Geun Hye scandal, which shed light on her relationship with Choi Tae Min, a cult leader who in the 1970s allegedly told the young Park that he could commune with her assassinated mother. That mentorship led to Park’s friendship with his daughter, Choi Soon Sil, who was later given unlawful access to government documents and was accused of extorting millions of dollars in donations from the country’s largest companies.   

The latest surveys show that Moon Jae In, a former human rights lawyer and candidate from the progressive Minjoo Party, has a strong lead over his nearest contender, Ahn Cheol Soo, a businessman-turned-politician whose centrist party is expected to pick up some of the conservative vote.  

Source: christiandaily.com