한국대형교회의 ‘사사화’에 관한 재해석: - 새로운 패러다임의 관점에서

Abstract

Protestantism is the second largest religion in Korea with almost nine million followers or nearly 20 percent of the country’s 50 million people. That is, about one in every five South Korean is Protestant. Its growth had been particularly pronounced from the early 1960s to the end of the 1980s, the period of the country’s remarkable industrialization and modernization. Since the early 1960s, when Korea’s Protestants scarcely topped the one million mark, the number of Protestant Christians increased faster than in any other country, nearly doubling every decade. The remarkable growth of Korean Protestantism, however, has not been without problems. These problems have been discussed in terms of ‘privatization’ derived from secularization thesis. As this paper shows, one of the most glaring problems has been the structure of the church in which the senior pastor has too much power, with the role of church elders largely relegated to that of supportive role rather than supervisory or monitoring role. Another problem has been an over-emphasis on church growth has bred the perception that bigger is better, leading many churches to devote practically all of their resources to achieving growth of church members. Other problems of the church include the lack of transparency in financial matters, cronyism between church and state, and the senior pastorship being passed down to the son. This paper tries to show how the ‘privatization’ phenomena of Korean mega-churches can reinterpreted as a mixture of religious privatization and de-privatization, secularization and de-secularization, and private and public religion in terms of the new paradigm of the sociology of religion.