The moment
On 18 May 1958 Cho Yong-gi and Choi Ja-shil, later his mother-in-law, held a first service in Choi's living room in a poor district of north-western Seoul, with five people present; within a year the congregation met in a tent in her yard. In a city recovering from war the church grew fast, moved in 1973 to Yeouido island on the Han River, and became the largest single congregation in the world, with more than 700,000 members by the early 1990s. Cho retired in 2008, and in 2014 a court gave him a suspended sentence for causing the church a loss through share purchases from his son.
People: Cho Yong-gi (David Yonggi Cho), Choi Ja-shil