Growing up in Seoul, South Korea, my only early childhood memory of hearing about Jesus was at a nearby church at Christmas time. The people at the church gave away small gifts and candies to neighborhood children, and there I heard the name of Jesus in Christmas carols. At some point, I also heard a few Old Testament stories like the walls of the city of Jericho coming down, though I didn’t know why that happened. Now, I believe God was preparing something in my heart, even way back then.

Like most other families in my home country, our family’s religion was a mixture of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shamanism, which includes worship of ancestors. We were taught respect for elders and how people should respond to the challenges and tragedies that happen in their lives. From a logical perspective, it seems great. But the problem is, it is not the answer people need in life.

My parents tried to teach my sister and me to live the right way, but they had a worldly perspective. My father was a police officer, and he really wanted us to do everything right. He taught us to be honest and to be blameless in our behavior. As a good son, I tried to be diligent at school and study hard the way he wanted me to.

When I was twelve years old, my mother passed away from an illness. Two years later, my father married again to a woman who was a widow. She had a Christian background and my dad worried about the impact of Christianity on me and my older sister. Before they married, he told her, “Don’t talk about Christ to my kids.”

The following year, my sister was invited to a church by some of her friends and she started attending with them. After that, I also started going to church with some friends I met playing basketball. They did not even invite me—I just noticed that they did not come to play on Sundays, so I asked them where they had gone. They told me they went to church, and I decided to go too. That all happened without my stepmother saying anything to us about Christ. Although I did not grasp the message of the Gospel at that time, I established a pattern of attending church regularly and learned more and more about the God of the Bible.

During my high school years, I decided to move away from my family for college. My parents were a little too strict from my perspective, and I felt I could do well on my own without adult guidance. I really wanted to plan my own life. I had an engineering school in mind that was located in Daejeon, which was about ninety miles away. The fact that it was a prestigious school gave me a good excuse to move away from my family.

Once I moved to Daejeon, I was happy to be able to make decisions on my own, and things went well for the first two years. I attended a Baptist church near the college, but the Gospel message continued to go over my head. I could pray “in Jesus’ Name,” but I didn’t really know what that meant. When I prayed, I just listed all my wishes to God through the Name of Jesus. I didn’t understand that the only Son of God gave His life to save all mankind, including me. I still had no idea what it meant to repent and receive forgiveness of sins.

Two years into my college career, my life seemed to fall apart—my relationships, plans for the future, schoolwork—everything came crumbling down at once. I was miserable! The only good thing was that in my distress, I looked to God. In July of that year, the church I had been attending held a youth retreat. One night, the preacher led a few songs and then said, “God wants you to give your heart to Him.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I felt like I had no other options. I knew my own way was not the answer, so I just started to talk to God. Though the preacher’s call had been, “Give your heart to God,” I ended up praying, “I give my life to You, Lord.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but that prayer was life changing. It was a couple years later, after I understood more about Christian doctrines, that I was able to look back and realize, Ah! That was my moment of salvation!

From then on, my life changed drastically. I enthusiastically started attending the Bible studies and prayer meetings at my church, as well as activities with the Christian groups at college. I joined outreach programs and began helping to support missionaries. It brought me such joy to participate in those activities.

Temptations that had been challenging before became easy to resist.

The following year, God allowed a distressing situation at my church to lead me to the experience of sanctification. I was participating in ministry work and conflict came up among the workers. I thought to myself, They’re all saved, so why is there conflict? People started to blame each other and to argue with each other. It got to the point that the team of workers was breaking apart, and my heart broke too.

I couldn’t understand how this situation could happen, but at the same time, I realized that I had the same unholy nature as the people who were fighting. I cried out to God, “Please do something,” and God did do something in my heart. After that, it was a lot easier for me to handle trying situations and ungodly thoughts that would sometimes come—I could just dismiss them from my mind! Temptations that had been challenging before became easy to resist. I was so grateful that I was getting deeper in the things of God. Later on, I realized that moment was when God sanctified me.

During college I also joined a team to visit members of the underground church in China. In that group was my future wife, Jeeyae. She was a member of the Apostolic Faith Church, but she was attending a seminary and was participating in the outreach program as part of her studies. She invited me to visit the Apostolic Faith church in Daejeon, which was her home church and where her parents attended. There was a small youth group there, and I enjoyed being with them.

After visiting several times, eventually I came across the doctrinal books and testimony tracts published by the church. I’d never seen doctrinal explanations written so clearly before. I thought back over my spiritual journey and could see that I had experienced everything they taught: conviction, godly sorrow for sin, repentance, salvation, and sanctification. Everything was exactly what had happened to me! I understood how I had been helpless and hopeless on my own, but then God saved me, and later He made me holy. I really loved the way the Gospel was presented with clear doctrinal structure, because I had never seen such complete teaching anywhere else. It was wonderful!  

That year, I decided to become part of the Apostolic Faith and soon Jeeyae and I became engaged. I had not been home very much since leaving for college, but around this time I returned to let my dad know that I would not be participating in family worship with him ever again. It was a very difficult conversation because I knew my dad would be hurt by my decision. He felt that my birth mother’s illness had happened because he had not honored his older brother’s spirit well after that brother passed away. So, after my mother passed away, our family faithfully went to the Buddhist temple every year on the anniversary of her death to worship our ancestors’ spirits through Buddha. It was very important to my father that we all go and serve my mother’s spirit correctly. After I was saved, I joined my family at the temple once, but I felt the spiritual warfare between the two beliefs and knew I could not continue going.

During that trip home I told my dad, “From now on, I want to worship my own way.” He asked me what I was going to do on the anniversary of my mom’s passing and I told him, “I will do a service with my God on that day.” He was not happy. He said, “Why are you going to do that? Your mom passed away because of spiritual faults. I don’t want anybody in my house to get sick again and die.” Then I told him, “Dad, there is Someone greater than those spirits, and He is God. And through the Name of Christ, He can help us. I will ask Him for the health of our entire family.”

Finally, my dad agreed. God helped me to step away from our family traditions in a way that was still respectful of my father. Every year since then, on the anniversary of my mother’s passing, our family holds a godly remembrance for her. And although my father was initially very opposed to Christianity, over the years we have seen his heart softening.

Jeeyae and I married on March 14 of 2009 and our first child was born the following year. At that time, I was seeking God for the baptism of the Holy Ghost. I had not heard of that experience until I read in the church’s literature that it comes after salvation and sanctification, and it gives divine power. I thought, If there is some good thing God has reserved for me, then why not seek for it? So, I started praying for the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

One night in 2010, my wife and I were praying by a couch in our home while our son was sleeping in the other room. Suddenly, as I was praising the Lord, God touched my heart and baptized me with the Holy Spirit, and I spoke in a different language. It was a wonderful experience. After that, I found it was easier to work for the Lord as a Sunday school teacher and in other ways. In time, my pastor asked if I felt called to be a minister. I let him know that from the year I was saved, I’d had a subtle feeling that God might want me to be a minister of His, so I said yes and began preaching.

God gave us a daughter in 2011 and we became a family of four. Then in 2014, I completed my doctorate in Computer Science and began applying for jobs. God directed us to move to the United States, and we settled in East Lansing, Michigan, where I taught as a professor at Michigan State University. That was a challenging time because there was no Apostolic Faith Church nearby—the closest one was in Chicago, Illinois, which was over three hours away by car. We attended there as often as possible and the church family was wonderful to us, but we longed to live close enough to be fully involved at church. In 2018, we were so happy when I got a new job in Seattle, Washington, and we could be part of the Apostolic Faith Church there.

Through everything, God was with me and my family and has added to our testimony piece by piece. I am so grateful to God for what He has done for us, and I want to continue to serve Him for the rest of my life.

Taiwoo Park is a minister of the Apostolic Faith Church in Seattle, Washington.