Only weeks after the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization concluded in Incheon, South Korea, the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) is about to announce plans to hold its next General Assembly in Seoul from Oct. 27-31, 2025.

Even before the official announcement ceremony scheduled for this Friday, however, the news has been met with criticism by several Christian groups in the country who have called for the plans to be put on hold.

According to reporting by Korean Christian media, the groups have taken issue with what they described as secretive planning, which excluded the representative Christian member bodies in South Korea that the WEA used to work with. They also point to long-standing unresolved theological concerns among Korean churches about some of WEA's leaders, which they say must be resolved before planning for a General Assembly can begin.

Concerns about months of discussions behind-the-scenes

According Christian Today Korea (CT-K), the Rev. Junghyun "John" Oh, senior pastor of SaRang Church in Seoul, is expected to lead the preparations for the next WEA GA with support from Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Pentecostal church in the world.

In a note to Christian media on Sunday, SaRang announced a thanksgiving worship service to mark the launch of the "2025 WEA Seoul General Assembly Organizing Committee" to be held this Friday, with Yoido's Senior Pastor Younghoon Lee delivering the sermon.

The official announcement and ceremony follow what CT-K describes as months of "behind-the-scenes negotiations" between the WEA and SaRang.

Initially, Bp Efraim Tendero, former secretary general and current global ambassador of the WEA, together with then-Secretary General Thomas Schirrmacher met with Lee to see if Yoido would host the WEA GA in South Korea. When these discussions failed to lead to an agreement, the two WEA leaders reportedly approached Rev. Oh of SaRang with a request to provide "a venue and financial support," which was met with a favorable response.

CT-K points out, however, that the decision to work with a local church without the involvement of its national member body did not follow WEA's regular procedure and could open it up for criticism.

As a global association, the WEA is comprised of nine regional and 143 national Evangelical Alliances, with international denominations and ministries as affiliate members. National membership with the WEA is usually reserved for a single representative Evangelical association made up of denominations, churches or ministries. Individual churches and national denominations cannot directly be part of the WEA, according to its bylaws.

In the case of South Korea, the Christian Council of Korea (CCK) became WEA's member Alliance in 2009. A few years later, internal divisions led to the formation of the Communion of Churches in Korea (CCIK), which was officially recognized as WEA's member body in 2022. (It was the division within the national member body that led WEA to cancel its General Assembly that was planned in Korea in 2014.) Additionally, the Korea Evangelical Fellowship (KEF) has been a long-time affiliated member of the WEA.

However, CT-K reports that "sources indicate that neither CCK, CCIK, nor KEF have held official discussions with the WEA on hosting the assembly, and that talks were exclusively between certain WEA leaders and SaRang Church." It cautions that excluding these organizations from such major decisions could lead to "significant backlash."

Some have reportedly also been critical toward Rev. Oh's "premature decision" to push ahead with the hosting of the WEA GA given the prolonged transitional leadership in the WEA and questions surrounding the financial support expected from the Korean church.

After Schirrmacher resigned from his role as secretary general on March 31, citing health reasons, the WEA announced that the chair of its International Council, Goodwill Shana, would take over leadership of the WEA as executive chair for an interim period "not exceeding six months."

On Sept. 18, however, the WEA announced that Shana would continue in his double-role as board chair and acting secretary general/CEO for more than one year longer, up until the GA in October 2025. Meanwhile, the WEA has yet to announce the search for a new secretary general.

"The uncertainty surrounding the WEA's leadership and the financial strain raise further questions about the feasibility of hosting the event," CT-K reports, adding that Rev. Oh's term as senior pastor of SaRang is set to end within a year after the proposed GA.

Resolving theological concerns before hosting the General Assembly

At least since some WEA leaders, including Schirrmacher, participated in the World Council of Churches' General Assembly in Busan in 2013, there have been concerns among the largely conservative Korean Evangelical churches about what they perceived to be WEA tendencies toward liberal theology.

SaRang's own denomination HapDong, the largest denomination in South Korea and rooted in the Presbyterian tradition, has previously criticized Schirrmacher and other WEA leaders for alleged religious pluralism. While there have been moves within HapDong to officially reject WEA's perceived liberal tendencies, CT-K reported that the denomination's General Assembly in 2021 adopted a proposal to "withhold a decision on WEA until its stance becomes clearer, and to avoid unnecessary disputes."

But it cautioned that "hosting the WEA assembly might reignite dormant controversies within the denomination regarding WEA."

CT-K also noted that the next HapDong General Assembly is due just before the planned WEA GA. Therefore, if the denomination bans any participation in the WEA, the fallout could become complicated for both the WEA and the Korean church.

Mere hours after the CT-K article, a group of 1,000 pastors, elders and professors published a full-page advertising in Kukmin Daily, a Korean church newspaper, on Monday morning, with a statement titled "Reasons Why the Korean Presbyterian Church HapDong Cannot Engage with the WEA."

Authored by leaders from HapDong-affiliated Kwangshin Theological Seminary, the statement outlined the issues they consider incompatible with the Reformed faith. They specifically pointed to WEA's close proximity to the pope and the World Council of Churches as well as its engagement with Muslim leaders which they view as potential sign of religious pluralism.

A few hours later, still on Monday, CCK President the Rev. Seo-young Jeong also went public with his opposition to the WEA GA, saying the planned event risks increasing division among the Korean churches.

The strongly worded statement called for all the preparations to be put on hold until the concerns about WEA's theology and allegations of religious pluralism can be addressed.

"When the CCK previously attempted to host the WEA General Assembly [in 2014], the WEA sought a united Korean church for the assembly, not one marked by division. With the WEA's pluralistic tendencies now even more pronounced, hosting the WEA Assembly in a way that risks further church discord is undesirable, and we cannot stand by and watch as division deepens," Jeong said.

Christian Daily International reached out to the WEA and to Schirrmacher for comment but has yet to receive a response.

Originally published at Christian Daily International