You speak-ee Engrish?

Fervent About God and World Cup Soccer

Corey Kilgannon in the Times: The message at yesterday's lively service at the Full Gospel New York Church in Flushing, Queens, was essentially, Know Christ through soccer — specifically, World Cup soccer.

"We support Christ and we love soccer," said the Rev. Ben Hur, an assistant pastor.

About 700 fervent fans in red T-shirts streamed into the church yesterday to watch South Korea take on Switzerland on two large screens in a cavernous worship space. Mr. Hur, 46, led them in a pre-kickoff prayer in Korean. Then, traditional Korean drummers stoked the cheers, and Promise to Praise, a female dance troupe, gyrated to songs praising both Jesus in heaven and South Korea on the field.

Actually, yesterday's service was more like a full evangelical production with soccer as its basis.

Mr. Hur and the other pastors at the church are big soccer fans, and in their quest for new missionary methods, they have organized the viewings of games in this year's tournament in the hope of drawing new members to the church, and to Christ. Some of the games have drawn more than 1,000 fans, they said.

"All the world is watching the World Cup, and God will use this opportunity to grow his kingdom," Mr. Hur said in English. "I prayed that God will use this opportunity to accelerate the evangelism around the world."

That's... odd. Hur's living in America; don't we usually assume Americans speak English?

Why does the Times reporter (or copy desk) put that in? It does say earlier in the article Hur spoke to the congregation in Korean--but are bilingual Americans such a foreign concept to the Times that they need to specify yeah, this guy also speaks English?

It's especially puzzling because the parenthetical comes after his second presumably-English quote, which runs in the standard style, with no aside.

Without the Times' guidance, do I assume Hur's first quote was in Hebrew?

Photo of congregation by Patrick Andrade in the Times.