Give Us This Day Our Daily Church Service

Korea is famous all over the world for it's large population of Christians. More than half of the nation that professes any sort of religious preference says that they are Christian, and my family falls into that demographic. This family attends a Presbyterian church down the street from where we live, but Korean church is no walk in the Garden of Eden for any foreigner.

For instance, if given a multiple choice question in which the question was which of the following is a church in Seoul and the answer choices were photos, an American would never get it right. Churches in Seoul are on the scale of some sort of epic office building, maybe for like AT&T, except this is for placing calls to God. These churches aren't just occasional either. They're lined up all the way down the road. I know there are 27 million Christians in this place, bit the worship halls aren't any larger than the good sized churches in America. What gives? What are they using all that other space for???

I'm having difficulty deciding whether the services here are the hardest I've ever had to sit through or the easiest. I'm leaning toward hardest. One would think that this would be so easy since I don't understand what's going on so it can't be obnoxious, but I don't understand anything! After an hour and a half of constant flowing sounds that you don't comprehend, I'm desperate for something I get to be talked at me, even if it is sermon. In that way, it's the hardest church I've ever sat through. The hymns at the beginning aren't bad though. It's kind of like karaoke. There's a big screen on the wall that has the words, Mickey Mouse Club style.

This family goes to church almost every day of the week! Wed-Fri night and three times on Sunday. When they started offering me young adult services and all male services, I broke down. "Listen, first of all we go to church only once a week maybe in America, and second of all I'm not getting anything out of this. Every extra service I attend is another hour and a half that I sit there in a coma on a pew. I'm not about to start going to extra services alone." Since that discussion they've toned my attendance back to just Sunday mornings, which is fine because that's the only one where the whole family attends. I don't want to just sit at home alone, but there's no need to torture myself with words I can't comprehend and uncomfortable chairs.