It’s the kind of news that shakes people to the core: 23 missionaries from a Presbyterian church in South Korea kidnapped by the Taliban along a highway in Afghanistan. The news of the abductions, the killings of two of the captives in July, and finally their release on the promise of no future Korean mission work in Afghanistan, have made the world increasingly aware of the role Korea plays in international evangelism.
The short version is this: Although only about a quarter of Koreans are Christian, the faith has taken deep root in Korea, with rapid growth in churches seen in the last 50 years. Many believers rise before dawn, coming by the thousands to weekday prayer services as early as 4:30 a.m.
As Korean Christianity has grown, South Korea has become a leader in what some call the “majority-world” evangelistic movement, in which mostly southern hemisphere churches send missionaries around the globe. And the Koreans have ventured into places in which preaching the gospel overtly can be dangerous, including Muslim-dominated countries such as Afghanistan.
Despite the risks, South Korean churches have continued to send missionaries — in 2006, more than 16,600 missionaries went to 173 countries, making Korea second only to the United States in the number of missionaries sent internationally. Samuel Kang of the Korean World Mission Association has said the group hopes to send 100,000 missionaries by 2030.
This year, Korean Christians are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Great Revival in 1907 in Pyongyong when the embers of a Christian movement tended by the early missionaries from the West burst into flame. Some are praying for a new burst of revival today, and for a healing of the divisions between North and South Korea.
In 1907, the Protestant missionaries gathered together to pray, “and I can only say that the Holy Spirit came upon them,” said Insik Kim, coordinator for Asia and the Pacific for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “They began to repent, not just silently. With the Korean congregations and pastors gathered together in a revival meeting, these missionaries began to confess their sins in detail. And the whole congregation then began a public confession of sin in Korea, and public prayers. Guess what? Ever since 1907, every 10 years, the Korean church has doubled its membership.”
Koreans have been committed to evangelism since the early influences of Christianity in the country — Catholics bringing the gospel to Korea in 1784 and Protestants in the 1880s.
“The Korean church began its world mission … from the very beginning,” Kim said, sending evangelists to northern China and to Russia. There was “a very strong emphasis on personal evangelism, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ in other countries,” as the missionaries to Korea themselves had done.
Since the church group was abducted in Afghanistan in July, however, public criticism has rung out regarding the risks being taken by the Korean missionaries and the congregations sending them. The captives in Afghanistan are a delegation of young volunteers, mostly women, sent by Saemmul Presbyterian Church, just south of Seoul, on a short-term trip to provide medical assistance and to work with children.
This is not the first time Koreans on mission trips have encountered trouble. In 2004, eight Korean missionaries in Iraq were kidnapped, but later released. In a separate incident that year, a young man who had gone to Iraq intending to do mission work was beheaded. And in 2006, more than 1,000 Christians from Korea who had traveled to Afghanistan on tourist visas to attend a peace festival in Kabul, and who some suspected of evangelizing, were deported.
A July 23 editorial in the Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo, for example, stated that “religious groups should realize once and for all that dangerous missionary and volunteer activities in Islamic countries including Afghanistan not only harm Korea’s national objectives, but also put other Koreans under a tremendous amount of duress.”
The Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea (PROK) has sent out an urgent appeal to its ecumenical partners, asking for prayer for the hostages and beseeching the global community to “work for true peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan.”
Following the kidnappings, some Korean churches are quietly bringing their missionaries home. But the energy of Korean Christianity will be hard to contain, as evidenced by their growth and influence in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), to cite just one example. In early 1970, the PC(USA) had roughly 20 Korean congregations. By 2005, that number had jumped to about 400 Korean congregations with 50,000 members.
In the weeks since the church volunteers were captured, “all Christians are of one mind, praying for the release of the hostages,” Kim said. “Of course there is room for reflection and criticism. If you were to ask me would I do the same with the PC(USA) church, no, I would not” — he would not recommend taking such risk. “But I do wish for our church to have such a crystal-clear commitment, faith commitment, and love for Jesus Christ.”
Some of the seeds for the growth of Christianity in Korea were planted by early missionaries, including H. G. Underwood, a Presbyterian, who arrived in 1885, and Horace N. Allen, an elder and physician who preceded Underwood and won respect by healing Prince Min of an injury and initiating the training of nurses.
Key early missionaries sent by the Presbyterian Church included Samuel A. Moffett, who founded schools for children and a seminary; William Baird, who helped create a Christian college that’s now Soongsil University; and Samuel Moore, who worked to counteract the caste system then in place in Korea.
From the beginning of the 20th century onward, the Christians’ faith sustained them “in spite of very difficult situations historically under Japanese rule and the Communist rule in the north and the military dictatorship in the south,” said Syngman Rhee, a former PC(USA) General Assembly moderator who fled as a teenager from North Korea, and directs the Asian American Ministry and Mission Center at Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond.
And faith, for many, became linked both theologically and politically to a desire for freedom and liberation.
Many were persecuted, imprisoned, even martyred, “and that really strengthened the people’s faith,” Rhee said.
“Their faith and trust in God has meant so much, not only for their survival but looking forward to the new day of freedom. The gospel has become such a powerful instrument for the Korean people,” and Christianity played an important role in the nationalistic movement, in seeking freedom from Japanese dominance.
With the difficulties of World War II, the division of Korea and the suffering flowing from the Korean War in the early 1950s, Christians provided aid through relief organizations such as Church World Service.
That produced “a deep sense of gratitude” among Koreans for the assistance they were given, Rhee said.
With the burst of economic development in the 1960s, “they began to express their gratitude” and their faith through mission work in Asia and around the world. “It is an expression of returning what they have received from God,” Rhee said. “I have found all over the world Korean missionaries” spreading the gospel.
Many are going to the part of the world known as the “10/40 window” — from 10 to 40 degrees north of the equator, including large concentrations of population that are not Christian. Among evangelistic groups around the globe, this is considered fertile, albeit sometimes risky, ground for mission work.
But among many Korean Christians, the commitment to personal evangelism runs very deep.
Kim, who was baptized when he was a senior in high school, recalled that he was asked in his baptismal vows a question that American Presbyterians usually are not: “In your lifetime, would you pledge to lead someone to Christ?”
While not all Korean Presbyterians achieve that, many take the vow very seriously, “because after all, it is not only a pledge to human beings, but also to God,” Kim said.
As an example of how dedicated many Korean Christians are to evangelism, Kim told of a pastor from Seoul, Insik Rim, who planned a special season in which all members of the church would be encouraged to attend worship and to bring others with them.
Rim told of one couple that had not completed high school — he worked as a shoe repairman and she as a stylist in a hair salon. Despite their lack of education and limited means, “they prayed that God would give them wisdom to use their work opportunity to reach out,” Kim said.
The wife worked six days a week. For five of those days, she charged clients the typical rate to color or style their hair. On the sixth day, she offered her services for free, asking only that customers who came on that day consider attending worship at her church.
“The word got around, and a lot of people came, because she was a good stylist,” Kim said.
Her husband took the same approach, offering free shoe repair on the sixth day, inviting those who came on that day to visit his church.
On the Sunday on which the couple had asked their customers to consider attending worship, at first no one showed up. But about 10 minutes before the service began, a bus pulled up and more than 80 of their customers got off.
So why do churches in Korea grow?
Why are Korean volunteers willing to go to places in the world where they are not always welcome, in order to spread the gospel?
It is, Kim said, because of the faith and dedication of people like this.
