Youth Culture and Church music

Abstract

South Korea is the one of the countries that has strong Christian throughout the modern history. Korean Christianity is not only in terms of number (22.5% Protestant and 10% Catholic) but also strong fervor in Christian faith among congregation. According to statistics, 78% of Korean Christians go to church every week which is different from Europeans and American Christians who claim to be Christians but not regular church attenders. However, the South Korean Christianity is recently facing a challenge in two folds. The number of Christian population is dropping off as Korean Christians became a target of social criticism due to abuse of power among Christian leadership as well as political social power shared by Christians in the society in general. Another challenge is that Korean Christianity is gendered and generational. Majority of church members are women, and senior and middle aged groups. This may be the similar situation in other countries, but generation gap in Korean church is more radical because of its own cultural tradition. Majority of teenagers leave their churches in order to concentrate on the entrance exam to colleges because education is very important and going to college is competitive in Korea. These young people do not come back to churches after getting into colleges which make a huge generational gap in church congregations. In most churches, there are hardly youth services because of dropping number of youth Christians in Korean churches. Korean churches make every effort to attract young people into the churches. The common strategy for youth ministry is adopting popular culture into services in order to attract young people. Contemporary Christian music (CCM) and worship dance are common practice in youth service in Korean churches. This may not be different from countries in all over the world. This study will look into the use of CCM in liturgy and its effect on youth ministry from the comparative perspectives. More importantly, this study is an attempt to examine youth ministry from the view of congregation and how young people feel about their faith and contemporary patterns of liturgy. This study conducted empirical research on young people’s evaluation of their church services and music. Survey of youth congregation in their ages of 20s was conducted in ten largest churches in South Korea. These mega churches are able to maintain viable members of young people and to practice particular services for these young people. This empirical study is useful because the assumption of youth ministry in that young people are fond of CCM, Jesus rock, praise and worship opposing to traditional church music is questioned by numerous researches. Some studies found that stereotyping of youth culture and youth ministry is in fact a stereotype of previous generation. Based on the result of its own empirical study, this paper will discuss the sentiments of youth congregation in the larger meaning of youth culture in general and self-identity and spirituality in Christian faith in particular