The Korean church in the twentieth century

A century that began with repentance

The lesson Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea ended with a young church that had received the word before the missionaries. In the twentieth century it lived through foreign rule, war, poverty and then rapid growth, and one question runs through it all: how does a church that worships God alone stay faithful within its people's history?

In January 1907 the winter Bible class for men at the Jangdaehyeon church in Pyongyang became the centre of a great movement of repentance. At an evening meeting the congregation prayed aloud together, and then people stood one after another to confess hatred, theft, lies and other sins, many of them weeping. Gil Seon-ju (1869–1935), an elder of the church, is said to have confessed keeping money from the estate of a dying friend who had trusted him with it. Those who confessed sought one another's forgiveness and repaid what they had taken, and the revival spread to other towns and schools.

Jonathan Goforth, a Canadian Presbyterian missionary in China, visited Korea that year. His account traces the revival not to clever methods but to prayer, the study of Scripture and the confession of people deeply convicted of sin Jonathan Goforth, When the Spirit's Fire Swept Korea. They were doing as James says: "confess your sins to each other and pray for each other" (James 5:16). Wesley, on that verse: "We may confess them to any who can pray in faith" Wesley.

Habits formed then still mark Korean churches: early-morning prayer, which Gil Seon-ju is usually said to have begun at Jangdaehyeon; praying aloud together; Bible classes lasting days; and giving from small means, including ‘day offerings’ of time pledged to evangelism. Historians weigh the revival differently. Some think it turned the church's eyes inward just as Korea was losing its independence; others see in it the moral strength and fellowship that surfaced twelve years later in the March First Movement.

A church under colonial rule

Japan annexed Korea in 1910. On 1 March 1919 a declaration of independence was issued in the names of thirty-three national representatives, and demonstrations spread across the country. It proclaimed Korea an independent nation and Koreans a free people, disclaimed any wish merely to blame Japan, and urged that every action be orderly The Korean Declaration of Independence. Sixteen signers are usually counted as Protestants, among them Gil Seon-ju and the Presbyterian elder Yi Seung-hun. Protestants were a small minority, yet churches and Christian schools carried the movement's messages, and many believers were imprisoned. In April, at Jeam-ri, soldiers shut villagers in the church, opened fire and set it ablaze.

In the 1930s the colonial government required schools and churches to join in rites at Shinto shrines, calling them national ceremonies, not religion. Catholic and Methodist leaders had already accepted that account, and some Presbyterian missions closed their schools rather than comply. In September 1938 the twenty-seventh General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, meeting in Pyongyang with police looking on, resolved that shrine worship was a patriotic rite not contrary to Christian doctrine. By accounts of the meeting, no contrary vote was called for. Delegates had been pressed by the police beforehand, and refusal meant closed churches and scattered flocks. Some accepted the government's explanation; others gave way to protect their people.

Some refused to the end. Ju Gi-cheol (1897–1944), pastor of the Sanjeonghyeon church in Pyongyang, was imprisoned again and again from 1938; while he was in prison his presbytery removed him from his ministry, and in 1944 he died there. Those who remember him sum up his path in the words ‘ilsa gago’, resolved to die once. Others, such as Han Sang-dong and Son Yang-won, stayed in prison until liberation, and some died there. They held to the first two commandments:

You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters beneath. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God …

Exodus 20:3-5

The authorities called a bow at the shrine a citizen's courtesy; those who refused saw that the shrines housed gods, and that bowing before them was what this commandment forbids. Wesley shows how far it reaches: "Whatever is loved, feared, delighted in, or depended on, more than God, that we make a god of" Wesley. They held, too, to the Lord's promise to the suffering church in Smyrna: "Be faithful even unto death, and I will give you the crown of life" (Revelation 2:10).

We look back on 1938 not to point a finger. Those who gave way knew fear as we do; which of us can be sure we would have stood firmer? Yet the church does not pretend the resolution was right: after liberation the Assembly withdrew it, and several denominations have publicly confessed it as sin. The Reformed Faith course's lesson Presbyterians in Korea tells of the first presbytery of 1907 and its Twelve Articles, and dates the withdrawal to 1954.

War, division and growth

Liberation in August 1945 brought the division of the peninsula. Under the Communist government in the north the churches were hard pressed, and many believers moved south. In the Korean War (1950–1953) many churches were destroyed and many pastors and believers killed or taken north. Son Yang-won, once imprisoned for refusing the shrines, forgave a young man involved in killing his two sons in the Yeosu–Suncheon rebellion of 1948 and adopted him; in 1950 he was himself killed in the war.

The Presbyterian church divided more than once, each party giving its reasons. In 1952, after the Assembly of 1951 had refused to seat delegates who backed the Goryeo seminary, the Kosin church, gathered around that seminary and those released from prison, went its own way, calling for clear repentance for shrine worship and a purified church; the Assembly's side said it was guarding order and unity. In 1953 the Kijang church formed around Kim Jae-jun and the Chosun Theological Seminary, defending the freedom to study Scripture critically; their opponents said they were defending Scripture's inerrancy and the Westminster Confession. In 1959 Hapdong and Tonghap parted over membership in the World Council of Churches, among other issues: Hapdong judged that the WCC leaned toward liberal theology, while Tonghap held that fellowship with the worldwide church betrayed nothing of the gospel. See also Why are there so many churches and denominations?

From the 1960s to the 1990s, as Korea industrialised, the church grew remarkably. Great rallies such as Billy Graham's Seoul crusade of 1973 drew vast crowds, and in the census of the mid-1990s about one Korean in five said they were Protestant. The Yoido Full Gospel Church, begun in a tent in 1958, came to be called the largest single congregation in the world. Under David Yonggi Cho it stressed the fullness of the Spirit, healing, cell groups and prayer, and from John's greeting, "I pray that in every way you may prosper and enjoy good health, as your soul also prospers" (3 John 1:2), it preached a ‘threefold blessing’. Many say this brought hope to people impoverished by war; others feared it might put blessing before the cross. See The Pentecostal and charismatic movements.

The Korean church was early a sending church. In 1907 the first presbytery sent one of its first ministers to Jeju Island, and a few years later Korean missionaries went to Shandong in China. From the 1980s their numbers grew steeply; in the 2010s mission agencies counted more than twenty thousand Korean missionaries abroad. See Is Christianity a Western religion?

Minjung theology and evangelical questions

Growth came with dictatorship and hard labour. In November 1970 Jeon Tae-il, a young garment worker in Seoul, set himself on fire, crying out that the labour laws be kept, and some theologians asked whether the church had stood with those who suffered. From such questions came minjung theology in the 1970s, whose leading voices were Suh Nam-dong (1918–1984) and Ahn Byung-mu (1922–1996). Both opposed the Yushin regime, and in the mid-1970s both lost their university posts and were imprisoned.

‘Minjung’ means the people: those oppressed politically, exploited economically and pushed to society's margins. Minjung theology sees these suffering people as the subject of history Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History. Ahn noticed that Mark calls the crowd around Jesus the ochlos (ὄχλος): the poor, the sick and those branded sinners, whose side, he held, Jesus took without conditions. He called Jesus' life and death the ‘Jesus event’ and said that this event happens again in the sufferings of the people today. Suh spoke of two stories flowing into one: the Bible's story of the people, from the exodus to Jesus, and the Korean people's story, heavy with ‘han’, the pent-up grief of the oppressed. For them the exodus showed the God who said, "I have heard them crying out because of their oppressors" (Exodus 3:7).

Evangelicals granted that this theology made the church look again at poor neighbours it easily forgets, but they asked questions. Who is the subject of history and salvation: the people, or God acting in grace? Scripture says that "Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous" (1 Peter 3:18); can the people's suffering, however real, be identified with that cross? In Mark itself Jesus calls the crowds to "Repent and believe in the gospel!" (Mark 1:15), and poor and rich alike have sinned. And can the people's experience stand beside Scripture as revelation? Evangelicals were learning too: in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 they expressed penitence for neglecting social responsibility The Lausanne Covenant (see Evangelicalism and world mission).

Today's map and what remains

Since about 2000 the Korean church has faced new questions. Surveys show more young people leaving the church or professing no religion, and as leaders' wrongdoing and church quarrels became public, much of society's trust was lost. At the same time many churches and believers seek renewal in Scripture and prayer, small communities, honest finances, and service to migrants and those who have fled North Korea. That chapter is still being written.

In Korea's twentieth century the church can see both how good God was to it and where it failed him. The century began not with numbers but with tears of confession and hunger for the word, and in its darkest years some kept the first commandment to the death. If, as Wesley said, whatever we love and depend on more than God becomes our god, what tests us today may be not a shrine but money, success or the size of a church. To a church that had left its first love the Lord said, "Repent and perform the deeds you did at first" (Revelation 2:5). With this lesson the course reaches our own day, and the faith handed down to us is in our churches' hands.

Practice