근·현대 한국 기독교 평신도운동의 특징과 전망

Abstract

In Christianity, laity are people who are not priests or pastors. In the Catholic Church, the hierarchy is divided into the Pope, bishop, priest and laity, and in the Protestant Church, it remains divided into ministers, preachers and lay believers. The Catholic Church believes that laymen are not in the lower of the clergy because their viewpoints on laity have been changed since the second Vatican Council. It is also in the position of emphasizing the importance of the role of laymen in the church of modern Protestantism. Despite this changed view, however, clergy and laymen in Korean Christian society is not yet on an equivalent position, at least within the church. In this paper I will take this view and look at the laity movement of modern and contemporary Korean Christianity. The laity movement being mentioned in this paper is not the movement to be led by the clergy, but the movement to be led by the laymen. However, even if there is a clergy involved in the movement, I will try to see it as a layman movement, as long as it is carried out on an equivalent position without distinction between the clergy and the layman. Looking at the existing research achievements of the laity movement, rather than focusing on the historical development or current activities of it, the focus is on the study of the importance of the role of laymen in both Catholicism and Protestantism, and on the study of how to educate and utilize laymen. Therefore, this study is difficult to escape from listing the basic data of the laity movements and needs to be further supplemented by other research. This article will focus on the major aspects of the laity movement and examine its features and prospects. In the end, this article has a basic character for future research and for understanding the relationship between the laity movement and social change. The essence of the laity movement is to discover the identity of Christianity and restore its essence. The laity movement is actually a self-reflection movement and a movement to find out what the Christianity is all about.