I went to a great baseball game on Sunday -- in Seoul, South Korea. As my son Luke had told me, baseball is getting bigger and bigger in Korea, and several Korean players have now come to play in Major League Baseball here in the U.S. The Doosan Bears are the best team in South Korea, and they do play very good baseball, but what I most enjoyed was the amazing singing in the stands, with fans harmonizing to beautiful team songs. I've never heard that at an MLB game.

But the number of fans on hand, 26,000, was smaller than the membership of the Myungsung Church, where I'd preached that Sunday morning; it has 100,000 members! And the singing was powerful there too.

What had brought me to Korea was a unique "Global Forum for the Future of World Christianity." Held on Jeju Island, off the coast of South Korea, the conference was hosted by three of the largest megachurches in South Korea (and the world), including Myungsung Church. That means this Korean conference of evangelical and Pentecostal leaders from around the world was financially independent from American evangelicalism's money and political ideology. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, who attended and wrote about the gathering for Sojourners, pointed out that for the first time in 1,000 years, more Christians are found in the global South than in the North. The center of Christianity has dramatically shifted, and that means the agenda was very different from the Northern and Western agendas of the older white evangelicals in America and the issues they think most important. Korea could play a particular and convening role as a bridge between the churches of the global North and South.