It is impossible to capture all that occurred during our mission trip to serve Lord’s Grace Church in Seoul, Korea in a few works!
When Pastor Songwhan Kang and I attended the Pastors College in 2008-2009, Lord’s Grace Church (and Trinity Grace Church!) did not exist. Now, there is a thriving church there and we have a dear partnership with them than spans many years.
The trip had two primary focuses:
To help Lord’s Grace Church host an adult, Bible conference entitled Don’t Waste Your Life for its members and visitors.
To host an English camp focused on the story of Jonah for the children, from elementary to high school age.
In addition to the Conference and the English Camp, we had the joy of worshipping with Lord’s Grace Church on Sunday!
THE DON’T WASTE YOUR LIFE CONFERENCE
The conference was entitled Don’t Waste Your Life. It was a study of the book of Ecclesiastes and its implications for how to live in this world.
Perhaps the most powerful moment for me occurred Friday night. After I preached on friendship from Ecclesiastes 4, Pastor Songwhan encouraged the church to apply the message together. It was a powerful moment. He led the church to respond prayerfully. One single lady was surrounded by women who re-committed their desire to be a good friend to her and weep with her after being abandoned. Numerous couples repented to one another and asked for help to be true friends to one another. Songhwan led the church in singing a traditional blessing song to one another, in which they prayed for one another and asked God to bless one another.
Below are some pictures of the conference.
THE ENGLISH CAMP
The English camp focused on the story of Jonah and on God’s salvation. It included all the things we’ve come to love about vacation bible schools: Bible, crafts, games, skits, and more.
There were many highlights to the English camp, but the most encouraging was the effect of walking through a gospel tract and carefully explaining the gospel with the high schoolers. Several of them came to saving faith!
Read the testimony from Bess Trew to learn more.
Lord’s Grace Church in Seoul is my second favorite church. It’s amazing how a group of people 6,999 miles away can feel so much like family and I want to encourage you all that you are a part of that! Your prayers, your generosity in financially supporting us, and your investment in this body directly correlate to the sweet fruit we were able to see overseas.
Being in leadership of a ministry as my full-time job, I was looking forward to being more in the background on a trip like this. I wanted to serve the church, love the kids, and not end up on stage. It didn’t go exactly as I had hoped. What I thought were just swollen ankles from a 14-hour flight quickly became a complete inability to walk and multiple trips to the hospital where I ended up in a boot, unable to use even my arms by the last day, and in a wheelchair. Suddenly on this serving mission trip, I was being deadlifted in and out of vans and carried up flights of stairs by four men at a time, including my own Pastors—Servanthood at its finest. But I was reminded of something very sweet in the midst of this: I don’t think God is primarily interested in what we can do for Him. I don’t think He was exaggerating when He said our best works were as filthy rags. And even though my prideful flesh has an awful time swallowing that, I don’t think it’s something the Lord despises; I think He designed it that way—for us to be completely dependent on Him at all times and in all ways. We’re always fully dependent, but sometimes we are simply more aware of it than others, and if we let that awareness lead to intimacy with our Creator, any pain or untimely setback becomes infinitely worth it.
There was also a part of this trip that I will treasure for the rest of my life and am so thankful to get to share it with you all today. On the second day of the English camp, the high schoolers were learning how to share their testimonies. There was a wonderful and succinct prompt for discussion that covered one’s life before knowing Christ, recognizing their need for a savior, understanding the gospel, repenting and believing, and how one’s life looks different after knowing Christ. Most of the group I was with had similar answers to the first prompt: knowing their selfishness, quickness to anger, and one in particular articulating that growing up he saw God as more of an angry taskmaster than a Father. When I asked them when they knew they needed to be saved, one of them said she wanted to be saved but knew she wasn’t “there yet” and asked me to be praying for her. Another said very confidently that he believed salvation was a process, that we are always learning and growing and will hopefully learn or do enough someday to merit salvation. The other two emphatically agreed with him. It brought me so much joy to share with them the gospel of grace. The only one where our God and Savior does ask for full surrender, but requires nothing in the form of payment. There is nothing we can do to earn forgiveness, it was bought for us with the precious blood of Christ. What’s left for us is simply to repent and believe. All three of them seemed kind of stunned and if you remember meeting Suah when she visited a few months ago, she was one of them. With tears in her eyes, she said, “Wow, I am going to go home and pray tonight” and the other two nodded. Essentially I got to say “What are you waiting for?” and all four of us knelt down and I had the glorious privilege of watching these precious young people give their lives to the King. I’ve been walking with Jesus for half my life now and it is never lost on me, but especially a few weeks ago seeing their eyes light up with disbelief in the best way—the “is that really it..there’s nothing I have to earn?”—is really amazing. The same God that saved me in Mississippi is the same one saving them now in Seoul, Korea.
So the Lord didn’t need me there. The Holy Spirit had been moving in these kids’ lives long before we got there, and He’s continuing to move long after we’ve left. (I also know that the young man who gave His life to Jesus that day spent the entire trip talking with Tim Wilson. He did much planting and I just got to watch the harvest.) Jesus doesn’t need anything for us to receive salvation and He doesn’t need anything from us to tell people about it years later. His blood and His Spirit are more powerful than my personal witness. But I do think He enjoys letting us watch Him work.
Below are some pictures of the English camp.
THANK YOU!
This trip would not have been possible without your financial support and would not have been fruitful without your prayerful support. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I wish you could all meet the folks of Lord’s Grace Church! One day, when the separation between language is no longer, I trust you will hear stories about how God was at work in this partnership between our church in rural Tennessee and Lord’s Grace Church in Seoul, Korea!