The Korean church that prays at 5am
The dawn prayer movement
At four-thirty in the morning, in churches across South Korea, the lights come on.
The dawn prayer movement — saebyeok gido in Korean — is one of the least-reported and most significant developments in twentieth-century Christianity. It begins in the Japanese occupation period as a form of resistance and spiritual sustenance and becomes so deeply embedded in Korean Christian culture that it shapes every subsequent generation.
Church members rise in the dark and walk or drive to the church building before sunrise. The prayer service begins at five o'clock. It runs for an hour, sometimes two. Then the people go to work.
Every morning. Not occasionally, not during Lent, not as a special event. Every morning.
South Korea in 1900 is less than one percent Christian. By the end of the twentieth century it is over thirty percent Christian — one of the most rapid Christianizations in history. It sends more missionaries per capita than any other country in the world. Its megachurches are the largest congregations on earth.
The scholars who study this growth point to many factors: the social disruption of modernization, the political context of occupation and war, the particular resonance of Christian themes of liberation and hope with Korean history.
And they all note the prayer.
The church that prays before the sun rises is a different church from the one that waits for convenient hours.
“Prayer is the breathing of the soul.”
— Korean Christian saying, c. 20th century
“Early in the night, he rose up and went out, and departed into a desert place, and there prayed.”
Jesus rose before dawn and went to a desolate place to pray. The Korean church built a movement on imitating that practice.
Not as a technique for producing revival. As an expression of what the church actually is — a community whose primary activity is not programming or preaching or service but the sustained orientation of its life toward God.
Patrick prayed a hundred times a day on the hillside. The Moravians prayed for a century nonstop. The Korean church prays before sunrise every morning.
The pattern across Christian history is consistent: the communities that pray most persistently become the communities that go furthest.
What would it mean for your spiritual life to be organized around prayer rather than prayer being fitted into your life?