관평동 성당

History & origins

Gwanpyeong-dong Parish was established on January 10, 2006. A 2019 dedication record from the Diocese of Daejeon explains that the parish was created that January through separation from Bongsan-dong Parish. For many years after its foundation, the community used a prefabricated building as a temporary church while developing the foundations of an independent parish.

One notable strand in the parish's early life was active evangelization and the formation of new Catholics. According to a 2012 record of the Diocese of Daejeon, the parish conducted a sixty-four-day missionary effort, and 350 new members took part in an entrance Mass on July 1. Parishioners prepared to welcome them through prayer, Eucharistic adoration, fasting, and other practices, while emphasizing continued accompaniment through catechesis after their entrance.

The project to build a new church moved into a formal phase when it was publicly launched at Sunday Mass on May 15, 2016. The Catholic Times reported that the parish had been worshipping in a prefabricated temporary church since its foundation, while the diocese records that new construction began in July 2017. After the building work, an entrance Mass was celebrated in 2018, bringing the long period of temporary-church life to an end.

The new church was dedicated on September 28, 2019 in a Mass presided over by the diocesan bishop. The diocese records that the church was designed with motifs of Noah's Ark and a sailboat heading toward heaven, and that parishioners took part in the building effort through a “one pyeong per family” offering campaign and the offering of two million decades of the Rosary, among other practices. The complex consists of a three-story church and a four-story education building, and in the same year the church received the Gold Award in the 21st Daejeon Architecture Awards. The parish's early history thus runs from separation and years in a temporary church through evangelization and a community-supported process of building and dedicating a permanent church.