Pastor Lee Tae-geun, the president of the Assemblies of God of Korea made a surprise appearance at the people’s rally held at Gwanghwamun on the January 18th. Pastor Young-hoon Lee, the senior pastor of Yoido Full Gospel Church, is its representative president.
Prior to the speech of Pastor Lee Tae-geun, pastor Jeon Kwang-hoon, the chairman of the Christian Council of Korea, proclaimed once again that pastor Lee Young-hoon decided to join the patriotic movement.
Pastor Jeon said, “Pastor Lee Young-hoon told me that he had joined the visit to North Korea and professed that he was middle of the road in politics, because he had been threatened by the senior secretary of the Blue House. When I met him in person, I found him even more conservative than I am. So I asked him why he was behaving like that and he said, 'I have had a hard time because this government has been harassing me.'”
He said, “So I told him that he would be OK, because even in the worst case scenario, he might be sentenced only to 2-month imprisonment. But pastor Lee said that Yoido Full Gospel Church has about 3,000 elders and ordained deacons, who run small and medium-sized businesses. The Blue House threatened him by saying that all these businesses would be subject to tax investigations.”
“When I first heard him, I doubted my ears but now I truly believe in his word from my experience, as the police are even calling all the pastors participating in this rally to investigate them,” he said, “Recently reading a newspaper article titled, ‘South Korea led by Jusa-pa (people who follow the official state ideology of North Korea and the political system based on it)’, he was so shocked to realize that the communization of Korean Peninsula is becoming real that he has proclaimed he would be committed to protecting the nation. Today a list with 750,000 signatures of the church members has been brought here and he also said that he would bring as many as 700,000 members of the church to the Independence Movement Day rally on March 1st”.
