The Gospel Project Is Still Shaping The Korean Church

Susan Narjala

When The Gospel Project was introduced in South Korea in 2017, the team behind the launch received several worried phone calls from pastors across the country. The pastors were in slight panic: part of the curriculum for students included questions—but there were no specific guided answers to those questions.

In the Korean Christian education landscape, the concept of students expressing their individual thoughts on a text was unconventional. The pastors found themselves unsure about how to handle this new idea and hence the flurry of phone calls to the publishers. This threw a curveball at the editing team in Korea too, but they encouraged the pastors to create an atmosphere for open conversation.

Thanks to this unusual format that The Gospel Project introduced, these students gained a deeper understanding of not just Bible doctrine but also how it applied to their everyday lives.

“These students had the opportunity to ponder on the material and they started to absorb the text both intellectually and emotionally. This was one of the biggest successes of The Gospel Project as these teens discovered their identity and purpose in Christ, ” says June Park, Lifeway’s South East Asia Sales Representative. June was closely involved in bringing The Gospel Project to Korea.

In 2015, June and a colleague spent two months at Lifeway’s headquarters in Nashville as part of their work with Turanno, Korea’s largest Christian publishing company. They explored Lifeway’s rich and varied Bible curriculum and found that The Gospel Project best suited the Korean church. Little did June think that eight years later The Gospel Project would still be actively used by churches of different denominations across Korea.

Once the proposal for The Gospel Project was approved by Turanno in 2015, a team of editors rolled up their sleeves and got to work translating and contextualizing it for the Korean audience.

“Lifeway was extremely generous in helping us and sent us all the material we needed, including videos of songs without voiceovers so we could contextualize it to Korean churches,” recalls June.

In November 2016, The Gospel Project was introduced to pastors, and early the following year, churches across Korea dipped their toes, somewhat apprehensively, into the curriculum.

While the Korean church was steeped in doctrine, there was previously no curriculum which was entirely Jesus centered. June remembers that in the beginning the team received questions like, “How can you bring Christ centeredness into every story? How can we stick to one curriculum for three years? How can we cover the whole Bible chronologically?”

But over time, The Gospel Project helped transform the way the Korean church engaged with the Bible. In fact, today, The Gospel Project seems to have impacted other churches’ curriculum as well as there is a shift from theme-based studies to focus on the centrality of Jesus throughout the Bible.

While at first only the adult and student curriculum was launched, the need to reach the youngest members of the church became apparent. The Gospel Project was then translated for the kids ministry as well and this led to people across generations studying the same passages of the Bible at the same time.

June and the team are encouraged by the feedback they receive from pastors and also from congregation members. Parents share with them that for the first time they are learning the Bible together with their children. In a culture where teaching for parents and children often takes places in silos even within the church, The Gospel Project equips parents to serve as mentors in their children’s faith walk.

“The Gospel Project helps the whole family get close to Jesus,” says June, pointing to how parents step out of their comfort zone and use the leaders’ kits to teach their children. Instead of simply telling them Bible stories, the curriculum helps parents connect the dots to Jesus and the gospel. Parents are excited that the material is structured such that their children were not just exposed to sound doctrine but also to the gospel message and they have repeated opportunities to accept Jesus as their Savior.

Thanks to the songs, activities and stories, the children are as eager as the parents to gather at church on Saturday to dive into the Bible and the 99 doctrines that The Gospel Project presents. “I’m am thankful that families can come together and be one unit while studying Scripture,” comments June. The work that began eight years ago continues to bear fruit in the next generation.