Protestant missions and the beginnings of the Korean church

Visitors from the sea: 1832 and 1866

In the summer of 1832 Karl Gützlaff (1803–1851), a German-born Protestant missionary, arrived on a British East India Company ship off the island of Godaedo on the Chungcheong coast and stayed some weeks. The court refused the trade the ship asked for, but he gave Chinese Bibles and tracts to officials and islanders. He was the first Protestant missionary to visit Korea, yet he also sailed the China coast on ships carrying opium, handing out tracts, and later served the British as interpreter in the Opium War. It was an age in which gospel, trade and empire travelled in the same ship.

In August 1866 the American merchant ship General Sherman sailed up the Taedong River towards Pyongyang demanding trade. On board as interpreter was Robert Jermain Thomas (1839–1866), a Welshman with the London Missionary Society, who had come to the west coast the year before and given out Bibles. The armed ship ignored the order to leave, seized a Korean officer and fired on the people, and when it ran aground on a sandbank the people of Pyongyang set it on fire. All on board were killed, Thomas among them. In the same year, in Seoul and Chungcheong, Catholics were dying in the Byeongin persecution.

Korean Protestants remember Thomas as their first martyr, and tell that before he died he handed a Bible to the man who killed him. But the story rests on testimonies gathered decades later, and its details are hard to confirm; and since he was aboard an armed trading ship, some question whether he should be called a martyr.

The word translated in Manchuria, and Sorae

In those years in Manchuria the Scottish Presbyterian missionaries John Ross (1842–1915) and John McIntyre met merchants from Uiju who traded across the border. Men such as Yi Eung-chan, Baek Hong-jun and Seo Sang-ryun taught Ross Korean and translated the Bible with him, and several of them were baptized in Manchuria. Luke and John appeared first, in 1882, and in 1887 the whole New Testament, The Korean New Testament (Ross version), known as Yesu Seonggyo Jeonseo. Coloured by the northwestern speech of the men from Uiju, it was printed in the Korean alphabet, which those who knew no Chinese could read. What it means that the word came before the missionaries is the Theology course's Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea.

Seo Sang-ryun (1848–1926) was a colporteur, carrying the printed Gospels across the border to sell and to share. Once his books were seized and he was arrested at the border; later he settled with his brother Seo Gyeong-jo at Sorae in Jangyeon, Hwanghae, where a company of believers gathered on their own. The Sorae church is usually dated to about 1883, though the year is disputed. Paul quoted the word "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" (Romans 10:15), and Wesley explains the feet as "Their very footsteps; their coming" Wesley. Among the first footsteps that brought the gospel to Korea were those of Koreans who crossed the border.

1884 and 1885: a doctor and two missionaries

After Korea's treaty with the United States in 1882, Horace Allen (1858–1932), a medical missionary of the northern Presbyterians who had been working in China, came to Seoul in September 1884 as physician to the American legation. In the Gapsin coup that December the queen's nephew Min Yeong-ik was badly stabbed, and Allen nursed him back to life with Western medicine over three months. Trusted now by the court, Allen proposed a hospital, and in April 1885 the royal hospital Gwanghyewon opened, soon renamed Jejungwon. In a country where mission was not yet permitted, a hospital was the first open door.

On Easter Day, 5 April 1885, Horace Underwood (1859–1916) of the northern Presbyterians and Henry Appenzeller (1858–1902) of the northern Methodists landed together at Chemulpo Horace G. Underwood, The Call of Korea. Because the country was unsettled after the coup, the Appenzellers went back to Japan for a while and returned in June, while Underwood went up to Seoul, helped at Jejungwon and learned the language. One thinks of Paul crossing to Macedonia:

During the night, Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and pleading with him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” As soon as Paul had seen the vision, we got ready to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Acts 16:9-10

Wesley explains the Macedonian's plea: help "Against Satan, ignorance, and sin" Wesley.

In the autumn of 1887 two churches were founded in the Jeongdong quarter of Seoul. In September Korean believers organised the Saemunan church in the guest room of Underwood's house, and in October the first service of the Chungdong church was held in a Korean house Appenzeller had bought. Schools rose with them: the school Appenzeller opened in 1885 took the name the king gave it, Paichai, and the school Mary Scranton of the Methodists began in 1886 with a single girl took the name the queen gave it, Ewha. Missionaries and Korean translators put Scripture and hymns into the Korean alphabet, and in 1911 the first complete Korean Bible, Old and New Testaments together, was published.

In 1890 John Nevius, a missionary in China, visited Seoul and set out his principle of churches that spread, govern and support themselves John L. Nevius, The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches, and the Presbyterian missionaries adopted it. How it took root with the Bible classes is told in Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea, and how the Presbyterian church grew after it in the Reformed Faith course's Presbyterians in Korea.

Devotion and blind spots, and today

The missionaries' devotion was great. John Heron, a doctor at Jejungwon, caught dysentery caring for patients and died in 1890; he was buried at Yanghwajin, which became the resting place of many missionaries and their families. Yet they had blind spots too. Not a few saw every Korean custom and religion as superstition, treated Koreans for a long time only as pupils, and long kept the running and the money of churches and schools in their own hands. Allen, who became a diplomat, helped an American businessman win the concession for the Unsan gold mine, and that a missionary led the way in such a concession is still criticised.

Even so, much of what made the church grow was the work of Koreans themselves: colporteurs who crossed the border, Bible women who went from house to house bringing the word to women, believers who built their churches with their own hands. Isaiah sang of the feet of those who bring good news:

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”

Isaiah 52:7

The beginning of Korean Protestantism is a story written by the missionaries' devotion and Koreans' faith together. The Korean church today can give thanks for what it received, and take the missionaries' blind spots as a mirror, so that the missionaries it now sends to other lands do not repeat them. The next lesson, The Pyongyang revival of 1907 and Japanese rule, follows this small church through repentance and revival into the years when the nation was lost.

Practice