‘The Gospel is spread only through sacrifice’
In April 1961 Pastor Yonggi Cho from South Korea spent two hours in the cold waters of the River Susaek baptizing new converts, helped by Reverend Hurston, an American Assemblies of God missionary. At the end Cho’s body was shaking, his lips blue. Already weak through over-work and under-eating, his body seized up. His stomach ruptured; pneumonia swept over him. Visited in hospital by Reverend Hurston, Cho clutched his hand and said, ‘I think God is going to take me to heaven.’ He was only 25 years old. His temperature rose to 104, coughing threw him into spasms of pain. Another visitor was the co-founder of his church, Jasil Choi, an older lady in her forties, who would later become his mother in law. She spent hours on her knees under his bed pleading for his life. The church also held all night services of intercession. God heard their prayers, and Yonggi Cho recovered. At one point during his ordeal, Yonggi Cho had whispered to Jasil Choi - ‘The Gospel is spread only through sacrifice’
Conversion: A young girl’s tears
The Gospel was spread to Yonggi Cho himself when he was suffering, through the sacrifice of another. In his teens he was struck by tuberculosis and the doctor told him to prepare to die.
One day, he was visited by a fellow student who boldly came in, sat on his sick bed and told him about Christ. Yonggi Cho, a Buddhist, was irritated: ‘Don’t lie to me! Leave!’ he spluttered to her. She left, but came back the next day. And again he was rude to her. But she sacrificed. She kept on coming back. One day he exploded in anger, ‘I don’t need you telling me what to believe, so stop coming! Don’t you dare come back here again!’ The girl got on her knees and prayed. And wept. Yonggi Cho saw the tears trickling down her cheeks as she called on God to save his soul and heal his body. Deeply moved, in a much softer voice, he said, ‘Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I will believe!’ Hearing this, the girl jumped up from her knees, shouted a huge thank you to heaven, and pressed a Bible into Yonggi Cho’s hands, the first he had ever held. As he read about Jesus’ healing ministry he said, ‘I will be able to live if Jesus cures me. In fact I do believe Jesus will be able to heal me!’
Starting the church: only five at the first meeting
He was healed, and then discipled by a Pentecostal American missionary to Korea, Louis Stevens. After his healing, Yonggi Cho determined to serve Christ and was encouraged to attend the Full Gospel Seminary in Seoul by missionaries. This is where he met Jamil Choi. There was sacrifice as he endured the Spartan living conditions of the college, and suffering when one winter he again caught pneumonia. He was nursed back to health by Jamil Choi, whom he now affectionately called ‘mother’.
Together they started the church which is now the Yoido Full Gospel Church which has around one million members. On May 18th, 1958 there were just five people at the inauguration service of their new church in a slum area of Seoul: Jalil Choi, her three children, and Yonggi Cho. They sang hymns, Yonggi Cho preached, and they prayed. Then one uneducated old lady shuffled in. Now they were six. Yonggi Cho and Jalil Choi persevered: visiting, preaching, praying. There was little response, till the healings began. Then the church grew - to a hundred, by 1961 to four hundred, and then by 1964 there were over two thousand.
Critically ill, again
The Gospel was certainly being spread, but behind the scenes there was sacrifice and suffering. To make ends meet Yonggi Cho worked as an interpreter. He of course led the Sunday services, and also the Wednesday one, and an all night prayer service. He would always have to be up at 4.00 a.m. to lead the early morning prayer service. Sleep was often sacrificed. As once his self respect was: he was so tired one morning he only managed to get his shirt and jacket on. He forget about his trousers and came to lead the meeting wearing his pyjama bottoms. Very rarely in those days did he have two meals, and was often hungry. Once Jalil Choi was given some salted shrimps, but the when she opened the jar it was swarming with maggots. She didn’t throw the jar away, but picked the maggots out. Unfortunately she didn’t get them all out. One survived to get into Yonggi Cho’s bowl.
There was little sleep, little food – and as we have seen there was very serious sickness. After that near death encounter in 1961, Yonggi Cho experienced another breakdown in 1964, again as a result of a baptism service. Though others tried to help him, Yonggi Cho insisted on baptizing three hundred people himself. It was exhausting work, and after the last person had been pulled up, he felt dizzy. Yet he could not rest. That evening he was scheduled to translate for a visiting American preacher. Again others tried to get him to cancel, but he refused. In the middle of translating for this high energy preacher, he collapsed on stage and was rushed to hospital. Here he refused all treatment, and so was discharged. But he did not get better. The next Sunday he tried to preach at his church. He lasted for eight minutes. Then he fainted. He asked God if his prayers of faith for his own healing were being heard. This is what he said he heard from God: ‘Son, I will heal you, but it is going to take ten years.’
Phenomenal growth: cell groups, women, and hats
And so it was. He suffered, not just for a few weeks or months, but for years. Every morning when he woke up he had to check his heart was not beating too fast. For a year he was practically bedridden. He would sometimes make it to the church, but had to be helped up onto the platform. He wouldn’t preach though, he would listen to another, usually Reverend Hurston. And yet while he was suffering, the church grew. Two crucial innovations for his church were born from Yonggi Cho’s sick bed. The first was the need to divide his large church, then over two thousand, into cell groups. These would both pastor church members, and reach out to unbelieving neighbours. The second was to allow men, and women, to lead the cells. Both initiatives met with some resistance in the wider church, and again the support of Jalil Choi proved crucial. She mobilised the women, and launched the first twenty cell groups across the city. Across his church there was an expectation for women to be submissive to men. This was the accepted norm in Korean culture, and there was of course the Scriptural instruction that allows no woman to have authority over men (I Timothy 2:12). To deal with the inevitable opposition, Yonggi Cho insisted that all women wear hats as a sign of their submission to him as the pastor.
The cell groups were incredibly successful. Members were looked after, and also challenged to reach out. Then as the cell grew, it would split into two new groups. And so they multiplied, and on Sunday all the members came to services throughout the day at the church. The success is easily seen in the church membership numbers: 2,000 in 1964; 8,000 in 1968. From all the books and seminars on cell groups it is easy to think this success is about a system which can just be copied. It’s not. The reality of the success is about sickness and suffering. During the birth and the launch of the cell groups, Yonggi Cho was a critically ill man. Doctors had told him to leave the ministry. And even as he slowly got better, he would often feel, in his own words, ‘on the brink of death.’ Behind the success was not a clever man, but a broken man. As he wrote in his autobiography – ‘God uses people only to the extent they are broken.’
Building a church for ten thousand: bury me in the debris!
Sacrifice and suffering were also behind the new sanctuary Yonggi Cho built for ten thousand worshippers. By 1968 it was clear his present church building in the city centre could no longer accommodate the entire congregation, however many services they held on Sunday. Inspired by a dream from a church member, and an awareness of the mayor of Seoul’s development plans, Yonggi Cho set about purchasing land on Yeouido Island, which at that time was little more than a wasteland cut off from the main city by the River Han. The financial pressure was intense. The budget was for two million dollars plus, and there was only a thousand dollars spare in the church accounts. The foundation and massive steel frames were put in, but then the funds dried up, the steel began to rust, and Yonggi Cho became desperate till he was crying out to God – ‘Just bury me in the debris!’ God’s calm voice came back with, ‘Offer me what you own.’ That meant his house. When he mentioned this to his wife, she didn’t speak to him for a week. However when she prayed and thought about losing her house, she felt excited. So the sacrifice happened. They sold their house and put the money towards the new church building. And the suffering began. The Chos and their three young sons moved into a nearly finished flat near the new church site with no electricity or running water. The average temperature in January in Seoul is 3.5 degrees centigrade below freezing. So the family huddled together, fighting the cold and looking out onto the abandoned church building site. For there was no instant answer to the Chos’ sacrifice from God: just another cold Korean winter.
A broken rice bowl and $50,000
But with the spring came sacrificial giving from church members. One woman cut her long hair, sold it to a wig shop, and gave the money to the church. An old woman had no money, but tried to give her bowl and spoon to the collection. Yonggi Cho asked how she would eat, she said she would put her rice on a strawboard and use her fingers. Seeing this, a business man was convicted. There and then he offered $12,000 for that woman’s bowl and spoon. Someone else put a broken bowl into the offering, and Yonggi Cho did not know what to do with it. He left it on his desk where an American missionary friend saw it, and asked if he could have it as a precious symbol of how Korean Christians gave sacrificially. Indeed it was – and more. A few months later Yonggi Cho received a letter from a friend of the missionary, an American Korean Christian, who wanted to do something for his homeland. He wrote, ‘When I saw the rice bowl I was deeply touched and decided to give an offering to build God’s church. Please accept this small token of my appreciation. Please use the $50,000 toward the building of the church.’ Many other sacrificial gifts now flowed to the building fund, and on September 23rd, 1973 18,000 people witnessed the inauguration of the new sanctuary. Hundreds of thousands more have been pouring into the church for the last thirty years. Shortly after this he established the Fasting Prayer Mountain for retreats which can accommodate up to 10,000 guests at one time. As well as pasturing the largest church in the world, Yonggi Cho was in much demand as an international speaker. And he was also writing many books, in English and in Korean. In 1976 he launched Church Growth International (CGI) a ministry for training Christians in the lessons he had learned. The church, the prayer mountain, and many other ministries all thrive today.
The most important lesson
Yonggi Cho indeed has many lessons to teach us. There is his passionate, but orderly style of preaching. Watch him on Youtube, he is a brilliant communicator. There is the emphasis on prayer. His habit is to get up at 4.00 a.m. for private intercession. And his church has always had early morning and through the night prayer meetings. There is an expectation for God to heal physically. There is his insistence on believers having ‘fellowship with the Holy Spirit.’ There is his teaching on the importance of faith, empowered by confession. He urges people to visualize what they believe God is birthing in their hearts in prayer, and to proclaim this out loud in accordance with Romans 10:10. And no doubt there are many more lessons. But surely the most profound, easy to understand, but hard to follow, is the simple truth he whispered to Jalil Choi when nearly dying as a virtually unknown twenty five year old: ‘The Gospel is spread only through sacrifice.’
Tom Hawksley
Quotes taken from Yonggi Cho’s autobiography, ‘Ministering Hope For Fifty Years’.
In April 1961 Pastor Yonggi Cho from South Korea spent two hours in the cold waters of the River Susaek baptizing new converts, helped by Reverend Hurston, an American Assemblies of God missionary. At the end Cho’s body was shaking, his lips blue. Already weak through over-work and under-eating, his body seized up. His stomach ruptured; pneumonia swept over him. Visited in hospital by Reverend Hurston, Cho clutched his hand and said, ‘I think God is going to take me to heaven.’ He was only 25 years old. His temperature rose to 104, coughing threw him into spasms of pain. Another visitor was the co-founder of his church, Jasil Choi, an older lady in her forties, who would later become his mother in law. She spent hours on her knees under his bed pleading for his life. The church also held all night services of intercession. God heard their prayers, and Yonggi Cho recovered. At one point during his ordeal, Yonggi Cho had whispered to Jasil Choi - ‘The Gospel is spread only through sacrifice’
Conversion: A young girl’s tears
The Gospel was spread to Yonggi Cho himself when he was suffering, through the sacrifice of another. In his teens he was struck by tuberculosis and the doctor told him to prepare to die.
One day, he was visited by a fellow student who boldly came in, sat on his sick bed and told him about Christ. Yonggi Cho, a Buddhist, was irritated: ‘Don’t lie to me! Leave!’ he spluttered to her. She left, but came back the next day. And again he was rude to her. But she sacrificed. She kept on coming back. One day he exploded in anger, ‘I don’t need you telling me what to believe, so stop coming! Don’t you dare come back here again!’ The girl got on her knees and prayed. And wept. Yonggi Cho saw the tears trickling down her cheeks as she called on God to save his soul and heal his body. Deeply moved, in a much softer voice, he said, ‘Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I will believe!’ Hearing this, the girl jumped up from her knees, shouted a huge thank you to heaven, and pressed a Bible into Yonggi Cho’s hands, the first he had ever held. As he read about Jesus’ healing ministry he said, ‘I will be able to live if Jesus cures me. In fact I do believe Jesus will be able to heal me!’
Starting the church: only five at the first meeting
He was healed, and then discipled by a Pentecostal American missionary to Korea, Louis Stevens. After his healing, Yonggi Cho determined to serve Christ and was encouraged to attend the Full Gospel Seminary in Seoul by missionaries. This is where he met Jamil Choi. There was sacrifice as he endured the Spartan living conditions of the college, and suffering when one winter he again caught pneumonia. He was nursed back to health by Jamil Choi, whom he now affectionately called ‘mother’.
Together they started the church which is now the Yoido Full Gospel Church which has around one million members. On May 18th, 1958 there were just five people at the inauguration service of their new church in a slum area of Seoul: Jalil Choi, her three children, and Yonggi Cho. They sang hymns, Yonggi Cho preached, and they prayed. Then one uneducated old lady shuffled in. Now they were six. Yonggi Cho and Jalil Choi persevered: visiting, preaching, praying. There was little response, till the healings began. Then the church grew - to a hundred, by 1961 to four hundred, and then by 1964 there were over two thousand.
Critically ill, again
The Gospel was certainly being spread, but behind the scenes there was sacrifice and suffering. To make ends meet Yonggi Cho worked as an interpreter. He of course led the Sunday services, and also the Wednesday one, and an all night prayer service. He would always have to be up at 4.00 a.m. to lead the early morning prayer service. Sleep was often sacrificed. As once his self respect was: he was so tired one morning he only managed to get his shirt and jacket on. He forget about his trousers and came to lead the meeting wearing his pyjama bottoms. Very rarely in those days did he have two meals, and was often hungry. Once Jalil Choi was given some salted shrimps, but the when she opened the jar it was swarming with maggots. She didn’t throw the jar away, but picked the maggots out. Unfortunately she didn’t get them all out. One survived to get into Yonggi Cho’s bowl.
There was little sleep, little food – and as we have seen there was very serious sickness. After that near death encounter in 1961, Yonggi Cho experienced another breakdown in 1964, again as a result of a baptism service. Though others tried to help him, Yonggi Cho insisted on baptizing three hundred people himself. It was exhausting work, and after the last person had been pulled up, he felt dizzy. Yet he could not rest. That evening he was scheduled to translate for a visiting American preacher. Again others tried to get him to cancel, but he refused. In the middle of translating for this high energy preacher, he collapsed on stage and was rushed to hospital. Here he refused all treatment, and so was discharged. But he did not get better. The next Sunday he tried to preach at his church. He lasted for eight minutes. Then he fainted. He asked God if his prayers of faith for his own healing were being heard. This is what he said he heard from God: ‘Son, I will heal you, but it is going to take ten years.’
Phenomenal growth: cell groups, women, and hats
And so it was. He suffered, not just for a few weeks or months, but for years. Every morning when he woke up he had to check his heart was not beating too fast. For a year he was practically bedridden. He would sometimes make it to the church, but had to be helped up onto the platform. He wouldn’t preach though, he would listen to another, usually Reverend Hurston. And yet while he was suffering, the church grew. Two crucial innovations for his church were born from Yonggi Cho’s sick bed. The first was the need to divide his large church, then over two thousand, into cell groups. These would both pastor church members, and reach out to unbelieving neighbours. The second was to allow men, and women, to lead the cells. Both initiatives met with some resistance in the wider church, and again the support of Jalil Choi proved crucial. She mobilised the women, and launched the first twenty cell groups across the city. Across his church there was an expectation for women to be submissive to men. This was the accepted norm in Korean culture, and there was of course the Scriptural instruction that allows no woman to have authority over men (I Timothy 2:12). To deal with the inevitable opposition, Yonggi Cho insisted that all women wear hats as a sign of their submission to him as the pastor.
The cell groups were incredibly successful. Members were looked after, and also challenged to reach out. Then as the cell grew, it would split into two new groups. And so they multiplied, and on Sunday all the members came to services throughout the day at the church. The success is easily seen in the church membership numbers: 2,000 in 1964; 8,000 in 1968. From all the books and seminars on cell groups it is easy to think this success is about a system which can just be copied. It’s not. The reality of the success is about sickness and suffering. During the birth and the launch of the cell groups, Yonggi Cho was a critically ill man. Doctors had told him to leave the ministry. And even as he slowly got better, he would often feel, in his own words, ‘on the brink of death.’ Behind the success was not a clever man, but a broken man. As he wrote in his autobiography – ‘God uses people only to the extent they are broken.’
Building a church for ten thousand: bury me in the debris!
Sacrifice and suffering were also behind the new sanctuary Yonggi Cho built for ten thousand worshippers. By 1968 it was clear his present church building in the city centre could no longer accommodate the entire congregation, however many services they held on Sunday. Inspired by a dream from a church member, and an awareness of the mayor of Seoul’s development plans, Yonggi Cho set about purchasing land on Yeouido Island, which at that time was little more than a wasteland cut off from the main city by the River Han. The financial pressure was intense. The budget was for two million dollars plus, and there was only a thousand dollars spare in the church accounts. The foundation and massive steel frames were put in, but then the funds dried up, the steel began to rust, and Yonggi Cho became desperate till he was crying out to God – ‘Just bury me in the debris!’ God’s calm voice came back with, ‘Offer me what you own.’ That meant his house. When he mentioned this to his wife, she didn’t speak to him for a week. However when she prayed and thought about losing her house, she felt excited. So the sacrifice happened. They sold their house and put the money towards the new church building. And the suffering began. The Chos and their three young sons moved into a nearly finished flat near the new church site with no electricity or running water. The average temperature in January in Seoul is 3.5 degrees centigrade below freezing. So the family huddled together, fighting the cold and looking out onto the abandoned church building site. For there was no instant answer to the Chos’ sacrifice from God: just another cold Korean winter.
A broken rice bowl and $50,000
But with the spring came sacrificial giving from church members. One woman cut her long hair, sold it to a wig shop, and gave the money to the church. An old woman had no money, but tried to give her bowl and spoon to the collection. Yonggi Cho asked how she would eat, she said she would put her rice on a strawboard and use her fingers. Seeing this, a business man was convicted. There and then he offered $12,000 for that woman’s bowl and spoon. Someone else put a broken bowl into the offering, and Yonggi Cho did not know what to do with it. He left it on his desk where an American missionary friend saw it, and asked if he could have it as a precious symbol of how Korean Christians gave sacrificially. Indeed it was – and more. A few months later Yonggi Cho received a letter from a friend of the missionary, an American Korean Christian, who wanted to do something for his homeland. He wrote, ‘When I saw the rice bowl I was deeply touched and decided to give an offering to build God’s church. Please accept this small token of my appreciation. Please use the $50,000 toward the building of the church.’ Many other sacrificial gifts now flowed to the building fund, and on September 23rd, 1973 18,000 people witnessed the inauguration of the new sanctuary. Hundreds of thousands more have been pouring into the church for the last thirty years. Shortly after this he established the Fasting Prayer Mountain for retreats which can accommodate up to 10,000 guests at one time. As well as pasturing the largest church in the world, Yonggi Cho was in much demand as an international speaker. And he was also writing many books, in English and in Korean. In 1976 he launched Church Growth International (CGI) a ministry for training Christians in the lessons he had learned. The church, the prayer mountain, and many other ministries all thrive today.
The most important lesson
Yonggi Cho indeed has many lessons to teach us. There is his passionate, but orderly style of preaching. Watch him on Youtube, he is a brilliant communicator. There is the emphasis on prayer. His habit is to get up at 4.00 a.m. for private intercession. And his church has always had early morning and through the night prayer meetings. There is an expectation for God to heal physically. There is his insistence on believers having ‘fellowship with the Holy Spirit.’ There is his teaching on the importance of faith, empowered by confession. He urges people to visualize what they believe God is birthing in their hearts in prayer, and to proclaim this out loud in accordance with Romans 10:10. And no doubt there are many more lessons. But surely the most profound, easy to understand, but hard to follow, is the simple truth he whispered to Jalil Choi when nearly dying as a virtually unknown twenty five year old: ‘The Gospel is spread only through sacrifice.’
Tom Hawksley
Quotes taken from Yonggi Cho’s autobiography, ‘Ministering Hope For Fifty Years’.
Thanks for this invaluable information. If more people would read and apply stories like these instead of the local news this world would be saved, healed, and delivered overnight.
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