Pastor urges higher church function in selling household values

By Jung Min-ho

For Christians, having kids is meant to be felt as a useful present from God. However that’s not the case for a lot of younger individuals in at the moment’s world through which kids are sometimes perceived as obstacles to skilled ambitions or materials success.

To assist such individuals discover the enjoyment solely kids can carry and restore Christian household values, religion leaders and church buildings ought to play a higher function, stated Lee Younger-hoon, senior pastor of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the most important Protestant church on this planet.

“After creating the world, the primary command God gave was to ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ That is the desire of God and the mission of His church,” Lee advised The Korea Instances in an announcement on the event of the Aug. 29 roundtable dialogue on the nation’s demographic disaster.

A household will not be merely a conglomeration of people that share the identical area and bloodlines. In keeping with the Bible, it’s the foundational establishment of society and a small church of kinds, the place Christian virtues are taught and shared, he stated.

Citing Psalm 127:3, which declares, “Kids are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him,” Lee urged church buildings to accentuate their efforts to deal with the regarding pattern of declining and delayed childbirth. He referred to as on church buildings to supply each religious and sensible assist to households in want.

“Providing monetary assist for these in want is a method of training God’s will,” Lee stated. “This might assist create an setting the place kids could be appropriately nurtured by wholesome households.”

In recent times, Lee has been actively selling the advantages of getting and elevating kids, notably in gentle of Korea’s declining fertility price, which reached a document low of 0.72 final 12 months.

For that effort, he was given a Moran Medal, the second-highest Order of Civil Advantage, by the federal government on July 11.

As a part of the marketing campaign, his church has to date provided greater than 5.4 billion received ($4 million) in childbirth subsidies to five,016 congregants since 2012. Because the starting of this 12 months, the quantity for every household has doubled: 2 million received for the primary new child, 3 million received for the second, 5 million received for the third and 10 million received for the fourth and onward.