War, division and growth

Liberation and division

When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, the pastors and believers who had been held in prison came out. But liberation soon became division: Soviet troops entered the peninsula north of the thirty-eighth parallel, American troops the south. Under Japanese rule the Protestant churches had been strongest in the north, around Pyongyang.

There, as the communists took power, the churches came under growing pressure. In 1946 the authorities sought to bind Christians into the Korean Christian Federation they had set up, and pastors who would not join were imprisoned or disappeared; the Catholic bishop of Pyongyang, Hong Yong-ho, was arrested in 1949 and never heard of again.

Many Christians came south in search of freedom to worship. In December 1945 the pastor Han Kyung-chik began holding services in Seoul with refugees from the north, and that congregation became the Youngnak church. What became of those who stayed in the north is still not fully known.

The church in the war

On 25 June 1950 the North Korean army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and until the armistice of July 1953 the front swept up and down the peninsula. Vast numbers died, families were scattered, and many churches were destroyed. Pastors and believers were killed on both sides of the front, and many pastors and priests were taken north. In the autumn of 1950, as the communist forces withdrew, many died for their faith, among them Mun Jun-gyeong, a Holiness evangelist on the island of Jeungdo, and members of the Yeomsan church at Yeonggwang. In Busan, crowded with refugees, believers from the north and from Seoul met for worship in tents and shacks and longed for home.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

Psalm 137:1

Son Yang-won (1902–1950), a pastor who served the leprosy patients of the Aeyangwon colony near Yeosu, had been in prison until liberation for refusing the shrines. In October 1948, in the Yeosu–Suncheon rebellion, his two sons Dong-in and Dong-sin were killed by leftist students. Son pleaded for the life of the young man who had killed them, and, as An Yong-jun's life of him, The Atomic Bomb of Love (1949), tells, he forgave him and adopted him as his son. In September 1950 he would not flee but stayed with his people at Aeyangwon, and he was killed by the retreating communist forces. He was living out the Lord's word:

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

Matthew 5:44

Chrysostom counts the steps by which this command leads us up, and ends: "the seventh, to love him; the eighth, to do him good; the ninth, to pray for him" Chrysostom.

Division and growth

After liberation the Presbyterian church divided again and again. Kosin went its own way in 1952 over repentance for the shrines, Kijang in 1953 over the doctrine of Scripture, and in 1959 Hapdong and Tonghap parted over joining the World Council of Churches, among other questions. What each was trying to guard is told in Presbyterians in Korea. Paul urged believers "to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3), and Wesley says what that bond is: "The bond of peace is love" Wesley.

From the 1960s, as Korea industrialised and people crowded into the cities, the church grew greatly. The lights of the churches came on before every dawn, and those who fasted and prayed gathered at prayer houses on the mountains. Billy Graham's crusade of 1973 and Campus Crusade's Explo 74 in August 1974 filled the Yoido plaza in Seoul, and great churches such as the Yoido Full Gospel Church arose. The Catholic Church grew greatly in the same years. From the 1980s the Korean church became a church that sends missionaries across the world.

Korean evangelicals were among those at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne in July 1974. Its Lausanne Covenant put evangelism first among the church's tasks while confessing social responsibility as a Christian duty as well The Lausanne Covenant.

Under the Yushin system and the military governments that followed, the churches took different roads. Churches of the National Council of Churches in Korea and Catholics such as the Catholic Priests' Association for Justice spoke out for human rights and democracy, and some were imprisoned; minjung theology grew from there Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History. Many evangelical churches held that the church's first work is preaching the gospel and prayer and kept out of politics, a choice shaped also by the fears of those who had fled communism. In June 1987 Myeongdong Cathedral in Seoul gave shelter to demonstrators, and that year evangelicals founded the Christian Ethics Movement of Korea to call the church to integrity and social responsibility.

The light and shadow of growth

The Korean church's growth sprang from the prayers of ordinary believers on their knees before dawn and from gifts given out of poverty. Yet growth brought its temptations: pride in numbers and buildings, wrongdoing over money, and quarrels and splits over positions in the church. Jesus said, "Watch out! Guard yourselves against every form of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15), and Matthew Henry writes, "Covetousness is a sin we need constantly to be warned against" Matthew Henry.

This is not someone else's story. Some forgave their enemies over the wounds of war, and some in the same church turned away from one another. We have inherited both, and before both the church gives thanks and repents. How these years look in the light of theology is in the Theology course's The Korean church in the twentieth century. The next lesson, The world church today, is the last of this course: the world church today, its centre moved south and east.

Practice