Coming down the mountain

TO UNDERSTAND Pentecostalism’s changing face in a country where it is thriving, take two snapshots of religious practice in Seoul. The first shows a once-common form of prayer that is now in decline, the second a style of worship that has grown hugely in popularity.

Start one night by joining a reverent band of 30 worshippers in the freezing darkness of a mountainside south of Seoul. These hardy faithful come to Mount Cheonggye once a week, arriving around 9pm and staying until midnight. Prayers, they say, work better in the dark, though points of light appear as some follow lyrics on phones. Each sits alone on the damp forest floor, praying loudly or singing softly, occasionally exclaiming.

The practice of praying on high ground began in the 1950s, after the division of the peninsula and a war which sent Pyongyang’s once-lively Protestant community fleeing south. Back in the 1980s, says the group’s leader, Kim Hyon-min, up to 30,000 people would pray, often for the country, on Samgak mountain north of Seoul. But this sort of service has lost its appeal, as some Koreans have switched to glitzier Pentecostal churches and others have fallen away altogether. This is one of the few mountainsides still open to late-night prayer near Seoul, says Mr Kim. Sometimes a few hundred come on a Friday, but that hardly matches the old days when “this mountainside was packed, [and] it was difficult to find a spot”.

People are not as hungry as before, financially or materially, says Mr Kim. “We are blessed by God but…we have moved away from God. When the first Christians came down from Pyongyang they had nothing and experienced God’s blessing. Now we have it all.” Only the toughest continue to worship in high places: “We follow what Jesus did, he prayed…on the mountain. So we do, too.”

Next, visit the Yoido Full Gospel Church, which has come a long way since 1958, when it was started by David Yonggi Cho in his mother-in-law’s living room. It claims over 700,000 members, including daughter churches and online followers. Its main building holds 12,000—enough to make a big noise. Members seem untroubled by the founder’s suspended three-year jail sentence 2014 for a scam in which church officials were urged to buy overpriced shares from his son.

Even on a weekday morning, the basement lobby is nicely full for an hour-long act of prayer. Elderly men hand service sheets to worshippers, mostly middle-aged women. A minister and some worshippers speak in strange tongues, raising their arms to the sky, some crying. Then crooners with microphones lead the congregation in song. Lyrics appear on screens flanking a colossal wooden cross. Most hymns laud the Holy Spirit; cameras swerve to the strongest singers.

An elder, Chang Ing-won, prays for the country’s president and protection from North Korea’s nuclear arms. Other dangers to be averted include Islamist terrorists—and homosexuals. Another pastor explains his country’s prosperity and North Korea’s poverty with reference to the story in Genesis of how Joseph helped Egypt avert famine. Then he recalls Jeong Jae-hoon, an emigrant to America who became boss of an aerospace company, and used divine help to solve engineering problems. The service is translated into English, Japanese and Chinese; at weekends, 17 languages are available.

For an aspiring urban community, this style of worship allows people to bring their yearnings and celebrate their achievements. In the wealthy Seoul suburb of Gangnam, there are megachurches for higher earners; Yoido represents an intermediate step on the ladder of success.

In one respect, the two congregations, one on a deserted mountain, the other in a crowded church, are similar. Among the people they dislike are shamans, practitioners of folk religion. Some see a paradox there; shamanism and Korean Pentecostalism both invoke invisible forces and believe in clairvoyance; Korean shamanists also practise night prayer on shelter-less peaks. But Mr Kim, the night-vigil leader, says commonality does not imply friendship: “They have their own mountains.”

Some sociologists see things differently. As Kim Sung-gun of Seowon University puts it, Korean Pentecostalism has managed to appeal to both the middle class and the poor: the former with its happy mix of Christianity with modernity and the latter with its resemblance to shamanism. If he is right, this was clearly a winning recipe.

Read more on Pentecostalism around the world, and Pentecostalism in Brazil.