A Heavy ‘Latter Rain’ Is Expected in Asia

Korean Pentecostals target 10 million Japanese for revival.

Known as the “Land of the Morning Calm,” South Korea is anything but calm on Sunday morning. As the sun is making its entrance, thousands of Koreans are making their way to “megachurches” throughout the capital city of Seoul—500,000 to the Yoido Full Gospel Central Church alone—bringing some area transportation to a standstill.

It is a phenomenon that has been scrutinized by missiologists and church-growth experts alike, and one that an increasing number feel may soon characterize the whole of Asia.

An Open Door?

Leading this optimistic chorus are Pentecostals, and for good reason. It is their churches that are bursting at the seams not only in South Korea, but in such distant lands as Malaysia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka as well. Empowered with Holy Spirit teaching and emboldened by heavy doses of “signs and wonders,” Assemblies of God, Full Gospel, and Holiness pastors are confidently bracing themselves for what they expect will be a torrential, continentwide “latter rain.”

Addressing a recent multinational gathering of Pentecostal pastors eager to learn the methodology of his church-growth success, Yoido Full Gospel Central Church pastor Paul Yonggi Cho said it would be “no problem” for his congregation to grow to a million members by the end of the decade. He has challenged each of his church’s almost 50,000 cell groups (neighborhood Bible study and support groups) to lead six people to Christ during the next year. Some of Cho’s parishioners, however, have already surpassed that goal, with one woman reportedly leading more than 400 people to Christ in the last year alone. Comments Cho: “Korean Christians are soul-winning people.” “Cho is a phenomenon,” says Wesley Hurst, Far East field director for the Assemblies of God division of foreign missions, “but within the framework of what God is doing in Asia. The continent has been preparing for this day, and its cities are ready for revival.”

Hammering home that point was evangelist Oral Roberts, a guest speaker at Cho’s church-growth conference. With a series of addresses reminiscent in style and substance of his early messages as a youthful Oklahoma evangelist, Roberts, who was introduced as Cho’s “spiritual father,” exhorted his listeners to call down the powers of heaven and turn the Devil on his heel. “The door to Asia that was closed to the apostle Paul,” Roberts said, “is now open.”

Target Japan

For Cho, who has seen his Seoul congregation give birth to eight satellite churches, each with a membership in the thousands, the nation of Japan will pose a critical test of that openness, and of his own style of “power evangelism.” With a population that is less than 1 percent Christian (about 200,000 Christians in a country of more than 120 million), Japan is “the toughest nut to crack,” Hurst says. Cho has set a goal of 10 million Japanese Christians. And to underscore the seriousness of that commitment, he began his 1986 church-growth conference in Japan’s industrial capital of Osaka. “Cho understands he can never impact Japan like Japanese pastors can impact Japan,” Hurst says. Still, Cho was instrumental in starting a Japanese church that now has 5,000 members.

More than 500 Japanese pastors attended the conference, a number made doubly impressive by the fact that prejudicial hatred between Japanese and Koreans runs high. The pastors heard Cho, Roberts, and others from nations as disparate as Norway and Australia discuss their “power encounters” with God, leading hundreds, and more often than not, thousands, to Christ.

Signs and wonders, usually in the form of healings, are an expected prerequisite to revival and therefore crucial to the Pentecostal “game plan” for Asia. Not surprisingly, then, miracles were presented as everyday possibilities for those baptized in the Spirit and confident of his goodness and power.

“To be sure,” commented one theologian on the controversial nature of this approach, “more theological substance is needed. But God is here in spite of the imperfections.”

Added Hurst: “Such an emphasis may not give you a complete understanding of the faith. But it is enough to move the curious listener to a place where he or she seeks that fuller understanding.”

Indeed, that message seemed to underscore events at the conference’s closing session, an evangelistic crusade in Osaka’s Festival Hall. In what some described later as a logical culmination of all the praise and power that had keynoted the previous two days of meetings, more than 300 Japanese rushed the stage and surrounded Roberts following his altar call and prayers for healing.

“A demonstration of God’s power had to happen!” Hurst said after the meeting. “I don’t know of any meeting here in Japan where there was such an overwhelming response to an invitation [to trust Christ].”

Whether this evangelistic approach, with its focus on supernatural healings and speaking in tongues, can move the staid Japanese away from their spiritual lethargy remains to be seen. But it is clear that Asian Pentecostals, and most notably their leader, Paul Yonggi Cho, think it will. And they are eager to reap a spiritual harvest.

Says Cho confidently: “Japan is on the brink of revival.”

By Harold B. Smith in Osaka, Japan.

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