hello heroes well here we are in lecture 10 this is one of two case studies lecture 11 is one that I hope you will be helping me on because it will be a case study on Brazil you can read about that in the syllabus and be working with your TAs about it and I hope they will be passing along some of what you write about revival in Brazil which has been happening for many years and your role in revival in Brazil as well but I have some exciting news about revival in Korea specifically in South
Korea and I will be drawing from Samuel Moffett again this time the history of Christianity in Asia volume two and you can see the page numbers uh in the material on Moodle for the devotional I would like to share that I visited South Korea many years ago i stayed two nights in an orphanage sleeping on a very hard bed it was either that or a very pokey bed my group eight college students and two 20some people also went to a camp with Korean youth involved with Young Life again the young American men there were four
of us slept on a hard surface otherwise known as concrete we had a very thin kind of quilt that when we laid down went down to almost nothing and our leader who had a great sense of humor said "Isn't this wonderful?" But we did not care because we were there serving the Lord indeed the entire trip in the Philippines Japan and Hong Kong as well as South Korea was a joyous time with young Christians and seeking to reach others for Christ we were seeking to live out Jesus's call to go into all the world and
make disciples as found in Matthew 28 from what I know of you that is what you are doing whether it is in Brazil the United States or somewhere else as you learn of the history of Korea and how the Protestant church in South Korea is on fire for the Lord I hope you will be encouraged to deepen your relationship with the Lord and disciple others in the Christian faith here is the introduction those of you who took church history semester 1 will remember Samuel Moffett and his book history of Christianity in Asia this lecture looks
at history of Christianity in Asia volume two you can read about the Catholicism in Korea which was the first 100 years of Christianity in Korea but because of time constraints we will be focusing primarily on Protestantism in Korea dr moffett's father was a Protestant missionary in Korea and Dr moffett was born in Korea so he brings a special understanding to the history of Korea and I will remind you that Dr moffett was what is called the external reader for my dissertation that looked at the first 30 years of the congregational missionaries and how they emphasized
preaching in both policy and practice he wrote what is called a blurb one of three to endorse my dissertation on the back of the William Kerry publication of my dissertation and so I was honored to have that but Moffett writes on page 309 of volume two all the nations of the universe have received the grace of redemption all the earth is full of bishops and priests why should only this small corner of the earth which we occupy be deprived of the benefits of redemption that was written by Yeung Hun in 1789 a Catholic but I
turn now to the section that Moffett calls Protestants and New Beginnings in Korea 1865 to 1905 it's Moffett page 528 the Korean church has always been one jump ahead of the missionaries that's Archabald Campbell yungqi Ho in 1887 wrote "I was born in a heathen meaning non-Christian land i was brought up in a heathen society i discovered the utter impossibility of living a truly sinless life by any human help i desire to be baptized for the hope that I may God willing live a useful life for myself and my brethren and may when night comes
have no need of seeking salvation at the gate of death as many do again introduction by Moffett on page 528 protestants did not establish permanent missions in Korea until 1884 they were later to attribute the timing of their entry to Providence earlier attempts had failed for after the devastating Japanese invasion of the 16th century the nonchu that is Chinese conquests of the 17th century and western intrusions into Asia in the 19th century Korea had turned against all foreign contacts it was known in the west as the hermit nation but in 1882 the reclusive kingdom signed
its first treaty with the western country the United States so two years later when the first resident Protestant missionary arrived to stay missionaries found themselves called upon to play a significant role in the opening up of Korea to the world they entered a country shaken to its roots by sudden bewildering change and about to be buffeted by four radical transforming revolutions the first was the fall of a decadent 500year monarchy the Ye dynasty between 1864 and 1910 the first phase is the subject of this chapter but looking ahead in the next century history would still
not be kind to the peninsula the second phase was the humiliation of the 35 years of paralyzing Japanese colonialism 1910 to 1945 the third was a change for the bitter a brief period of euphoria as Korea recovered her independence thanks to the defeat of Japan in World War II between 1945 and 1950 but the fourth phase 1950 to 2000 was a volatile mixture of positives and negatives both political and ecclesiastic it brought the crippling trauma of the cruel division of the country into a north and south it saw the growing of the Christian community confronted
by an embarrassing explosion of church schisms but through it all there ran inextinguishable sunbursts of unprecedentedly rapid church growth the beginning of which we shall now describe robert J thomas the first Protestant martyr described on Moffett page 529 the first serious attempt to start Protestant work in Korea traces back to the summers of 1865 and 1866 just as the great persecution of Catholics was about to break upon them the pioneer Protestant who led the way was the Welsh congregationalist Robert Germaine Thomas who lived from 1839 until 1866 a prickly independent eager to penetrate unreached parts
of the world for the gospel he was often at odds with the mission board under which he had come to China three years earlier the famous London Missionary Society which had sent Moffett and Livingstone to Africa and Robert Morrison to China city life in Shanghai and the society of its large foreign population bored him he longed to get out and live among the Chinese he said send me to Mongolia he wrote anywhere but Shanghai but before the board could reply it took a year for letters from Shanghai to London and back he took off for
Korea he had uh met two refugees from Korea who said they were Christians had rosaries and saint medals to prove it meaning Catholics they didn't know the difference between Catholic and Protestant quickly he persuaded the agent of the National Bible Society of Scotland and China that is a Protestant group to send him with Chinese Bibles to explore the possibilities of a Protestant mission to send him to the Hermit Kingdom that was in August of 1865 and he managed to spend two and a half months along Korea's west coast dressing in Korean clothes most of the
time and learning Korean with the help of friendly Roman Catholics back in China he discovered he had been reinstated by the London Missionary Society with the tempting offer of an appointment as teacher in charge of the Anglo-Chinese School in Beijing but Korea was too much in his mind and in the fateful year of 1866 he sailed again for Korea this time on the General Sherman named for the general of the Civil War an American schooner loaded with glass and tin plate and learned by the hope of trade with the forbidden kingdom the intruders nose their
way into the mouth of the Taiong River be below the old northern capital Pyang today's Pianyang of North Korea deceived by a combination of exceptionally high tides and a summer flood the ship rounded a bend and came within the sight of the city it never came back down to the sea again not for two years was the outside world able to discover what had happened to its crew of 23 men four westerners 19 Chinese and Malay or Malaysian sailors and one missionary thomas had been told that there were only 11 Catholic missionaries in Korea and
that no Buddhist temples were allowed inside Korea's towns and cities this Korea this convinced him that Korea presented an unusual opportunity for propagating Christianity true or not he could not have come at a worse time the year 1866 was in the time of the great persecution of Catholics described in an earlier chapter later a French gunboat brought back rumors that all aboard the General Sherman were killed the full truth of the affair is difficult to determine on the way up river it appears that a group of Korean Roman Catholics boarded the ship asking for help
and that Thomas tried to comfort them explaining that he was not Catholic like them he was a Christian he gave them some Christian books and a silver coin stamped with the likeness of Queen Victoria they went away convinced that he was secretly a French priest for had he not given them a medal with the image of the Virgin Mary whoops the kind of the story the end of the story was pure tragedy the American ship had intruded into waters forbidden to foreign commerce its officers rashly seized and held a police magistrate sent to warn them
off they arrogantly demanded an audience with the governor the vessel grounded in the mud as the tide went out it set a fire by fire arrows and blazing pineboats which were floated against its sides thomas did not escape all were killed eyewitnesses told different stories of his death some said he died on the ship in the flames but the most widely accepted account is that he was killed by a soldier on the shore to whom he offered a Chinese Bible as the man hesitated before striking him thus died the first Protestant martyr in Korea and
it was almost 20 years before any Protestants again penetrated the closely guarded peninsula here are some earlier Protestant attempts to enter Korea thomas was not the first Protestant in Korea earlier contacts however had been either accidental or peripheral 300 years before some Dutch sailors had been shipwrecked on an island off Korea's southern coast they were Protestants but not missionaries all they wanted was to get out of Korea a more effective Protestant contact was a brief passing landing in 1833 by the inddehaticable Prussian Lutheran Carl Gutsloff of China who came as interpreter on a British trading
vessel when it paused for a week on an island off the west coast he took the opportunity to translate the Lord's Prayer into Korean from the Chinese characters in the text of the Chinese Bible also with the work ethic of a typical Protestant he efered to p he endeavored to persuade the islanders to plant potatoes as an alternative to rice but no traces of his efforts survived in closed Korea it took a Korean to make the first lasting Protestant impact on the country let's look next at the Korean initiative suang Yun Moffet page 531 with
the Protestants as with the Catholics a century earlier intentional permanent mission in Korea began with a Korean not a foreign missionary and it began with that Korean risking his life to carry portions of the Bible in the Korean language into his own tightly closed homeland his name was Su Seang Yun who lived from 1848 until 1926 and the Bible portion he brought with him was the Gospel of Luke which had just been translated into Korean by Scottish missionaries across the border in Manuria there were then a reported 12,000 Korean Catholics and no Korean Protestants in
the country's population of about 10.5 million people suang Yun was a Jen Singh peddler who like several other such traders crossing the Chinese border found help at the Scottish mission in Muen or Shenyang when their goods were stolen or when they fell sick two of the Presbyterian missionaries there John Ross and John McIntyre began to employ some of the better educated among them to help them in a project which Ross had undertaken a translation of the New Testament for the large number of Koreans living along the border on both sides of the Yalu River some
became Christians as they read and translated and that happens around the world when people read the gospels in their own tongue the first convert was Lee Yi in 1876 who became the first known baptized Korean Protestant but it was Su Seang Yun baptized two years later who was better known in Korea as the pioneer Korean evangelist after assisting in the translation of the Gospel of Luke in 1883 Sue Mary Sue carried copies of the printed text back to his home village in Korea's West Coast just north of the 38th parallel with Luke as his textbook
he gathered a group of believers into a house church and that small Christian fellowship in the village Sarai without the benefit of ordained leadership but eager to practice their newfound faith is justly called the cradle of Korean Protestant Christianity this was a whole year before the arrival of the first resident western missionaries later in 1889 when the first clergyman missionary Horus G underwood visited the far north on the Korean side of the Yalu River he found 33 men ready for baptism who had in large part been converted and instructed by Su Seang Yun and his
brother and next Moffett looks at the American missionaries arrival about a year after Sue planted the church in his home village the first resident American missionary Dr horus N allen MD 1858 until 1932 made his way from China to Korea like the martyr RJ Thomas but with happier results korea was changing after a century of hunting down and persecuting Catholics but the first decade of Protestant foreign missions 1884 until 1894 was shadowed by the everpresent danger of a return to hostility and intermittent outbursts against foreigners dr allen was a tall balding red-haired Presbyterian medical doctor
from Akran Ohio and I might say that Dr moffett and his father were also Presbyterians but Dr allen found it difficult to work with his missionary colleagues in China and hoped to find more freedom of action in a Korea as yet unclaimed by any Protestants despite the country's ban on foreign missionaries he negotiated an arrangement with the recently opened American Legation to serve as its medical officer a brilliant man and active Christian but not overly enthusiastic either about medicine or missions Allan resigned from the Korea Med Presbyterian mission after only three years in anguish over
shattered relationship with missionary colleagues invited to move into a career as a diplomat in the American Legation and Soul that of United States State Minister to Korea as missionary and then diplomat he not only opened the door into closed Korea for Protestant missions but also gave Korea its first western hospital and was a major factor in bringing steam railroads street cars and waterworks to the country organized Protestant mission in Korea began with Allen's Hospital only about three months after his arrival a brief bloody attempted coup by young reformers came close to overthrowing the ruling political
conservatives the conservative leader Prince Minyong Ick a nephew of the queen was attacked by assassins dr allan was rushed across the city from the legation in a sedan chair that's where we get the word a sedan for cars from to save the dying man the prince amazingly recovered and the king rewarded the missionary physician by granting him permission to open a royal hospital the first legally permitted public building under Christian control in Korea a colleague wrote of Dr for Allan in 1914 that it is impossible to write a history of Korean Christianity and omit his
name from the beginning medical work remained critically important three of the first five Protestant missionaries in Korea were doctors the first Protestant clergyman on Easter Sunday 1885 four months after Dr allen's dramatic medical rescue of the prince the first Protestant clergymen arrived in Korea a Presbyterian and a Methodist the Presbyterian Horus G underwood 1859 to 1916 a bachelor was a vigorous evangelist and linguist destined to found the most prestigious Christian university in Korea now Yansai University his brother John of Underwood typewriter fame is said to have remarked "Horus went to Korea to make Christians i
stayed home to help him by making typewriters it was his typewriter business that generously supported him by by the early generously supported some of the earliest Presbyterian work in Korea the Methodist Henry G appenzellar 1858 until 1902 cameth his wife and the couple were temporarily sent back to Japan korea was not yet open to foreign women outside the western legations while Dr allen was winning a foothold for Protestants by his medical schools the foreign Roman Catholic priests not yet fully recovered from the shocks of a whole century of persecution were still masking their public presence
by dressing in Korean clothes the Protestants were also uneasily aware that the edict prohibiting propagation of foreign religion had not been withdrawn and were undecided about how far to test the law allan who was usually impatient and sometimes irassable was nevertheless sensitive to the intricacies of international diplomacy he urged his missionary colleagues to be cautious and the American diplomatic community fully agreed but Underwood was so eager to evangelize that with some hesitation he ecumenically hired a Catholic Korean teacher as a tutor and was the first of the Protestant missionaries to acquire the ability to use
the language fluently within little more than a year in July 1886 he had baptized his first Korean convert no or rorow Tossa by way of contrast in China the pioneer Protestant Robert Morrison had toiled for seven years without a convert oppenzel the Methodist also chafed at Allen's advice to go slow and dismissed his caution as an exaggerated fear that simply to try to start the work would it just one year after landing in 1885 he baptized the first Methodist convert a Japanese resident in Korea the next year he baptized the first woman in Korea to
be baptized by a Protestant missionary incidentally the baptism of women in Korea presented an unexpected problem as an incident occurring a few years later illustrates when the Methodist Dr wb Scranton who was also an ordained minister was the f for the first time asked to baptize a Korean woman it stands as a unique event a minor triumph of missionary ingenuity in adapting Christian church practice to a native culture church services by then were customarily divided with men on one side of a long central curtain and women on the other the problem was how could a
male evangelist publicly baptize a female Korean in a culture that forbade physical contact between the sexes after the age of seven outside the family dr stratton was up to the challenge he cut a hole in the curtain asked the woman to put her head against the hole and baptized the top of her head thankful that she was not a Baptist map Methodists in 1886 reported one probationer 100 adherence and one hospital overflowing the first two organized churches in Korea opened in 1887 only a few months apart one was Presbyterian one Methodist and for the next
hundred years and more the Presbyterians and the Methodists formed the foundational infrastructure for a Protestant advance to Korea that had no equal anywhere else in Asia first church in Korea was the headline in a church publication announcing that the Presbyterian pioneer HG Underwood had ordained two elders and organized a Presbyterian church with 14 members in 1887 a month later HG Aleneller organized the First Korean Methodist Church evidence of multiple conversions does not begin to appear on the chart until 1895 that is to say immediately following the close of the SinoJapanese War but Japan occupied Korea
from 1889 1895 excuse me until the end of World War II in 1945 after 1945 North and South Korea were established there were very few com Christians under communist rule on the other hand the church exploded in numbers in South Korea very large churches developed with prayer mountains but before I talk about after World War II there's something I would like to share during the J Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula which was terrible the uh Japanese in their schools taught in Japanese they taught that Japanese culture was terrible and Japanese culture was wonderful i
did not learn about this by reading a book i learned about it from a dear couple Howard and Sue U they were members of my church north of Bakersfield California for many years my last year or so uh they were not able to attend anymore but as children they experienced the oppression of the Japanese and they were the ones who told me about it and uh it was terrible and then when I believe in 1950 the North Koreans with Chinese help Chinese communist help attacked South Korea including the city of Seoul howard hid in an
upstairs area of a home and then eventually Howard escaped by bicycle and joined the South Korean army and also the United Nations troops that were fighting against the evil uh communist uh army and you might remember when the Winter Olympic Games were held in South Korea and it was all so wonderful but Howard had to march across the Korean Peninsula in the wintertime not dressed very well and not with very good footwear but the Lord helped him to survive and they eventually married in Southern California and I saw a picture in a newspaper of Sue's
beautiful wedding dress they have five wonderful adult children all of their children's first names begin with an S and they all have uh Bible names like Samuel and other names and some of them have children including three delightful granddaughters that wear uh beautiful dresses all the same every time I see them the last time I saw them was around a Christmas time where they sang songs and it was delightful so I'm so grateful that they both survived both the Japanese occupation and then the Korean conflict or war so I return now to what Wikipedia says
about the practice of Christianity in Korea it is uh marginal in North Korea but significant in South Korea where it revolves around Protestantism and Cathol Catholicism accounting for 8.6 million Protestants and 5.8 million members i will share uh more um I'd like to do now though a contrast of two men one a Vietnamese man one a Korean man there was a door man in Boston who was going to college he worked as a doorman in a hotel near Tmont Baptist where people returned to a hotel they never gave him a tip about Jesus and there
was a house boy in Korea where an American GI took an interest in him and promised to provide him eight years of education in the United States the house boy went to the United States he became a Christian he led the GI to Christ and the Korean returned to become a world Christian leader the Vietnamese man we know as Hochi Min what if someone had tipped him off about Jesus instead he remained a communist and conquered Vietnam and became a world atheistic communist leader i'm not sure if you have if I have time to read
the article about Billy Kim the Christian leader but I encourage you to read it um Billy Kim asks "How much are you willing to give to save a man's soul?" God puts a premium on a man's soul above everything else in the world and returning to South Korea there are prayer mountains and I give you one example and they talk about Isaiah 586 and I provide you with another article about South Korean missionaries who were willing to go everywhere every time there's never a convenient time to be a missionary and when there was war going
on in Afghanistan these a these South Koreans were willing to be missionaries in Afghanistan where they were taken captive the release of the hostages was secured with the South Korean promise to withdraw its 200 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2007 although the South Korean government offered no statement a Taliban spokesman claimed that the militant group also received a ransom of 20 million in exchange for the safety of the captured missionaries now whether they should have gone is one thing but they believed that these 23 missionaries were obeying God's call and there's another article
on South Korea's great missionary movement God's sovereignty and our obedience and there is the prioritization of prayer and obedience there is a Korean church tradition to go to the church at 5:00 a.m to worship and pray before going to work that's too much for me but how about you and it's through these dawn prayers that God has called many Koreans into missionary service god has not called me to do that but he has called me to ask you about it if God leads even if it seems irrational they are willing to go even without knowing
where to go as Abraham did korean missionaries believe God will take care of them for it is he who has called and sent them the ban on overseas travel was lifted after successfully hosting the 1988 Soul Olympics the Korean government allowed Koreans to travel overseas freely as long as they had no criminal record any Korean could get a passport and go abroad at will this became a landmark turning point and from this time on Korean missionaries expanded their engagement throughout the world god has opened closed doors on the mission field just as the Korean mission
force was ramping up its effort God opened two mission fields to receive these ready missionaries when Gorbachev declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990 the door for missionary work opened wide to the countries in Central Asia that had become independent from the Soviet Union in God's providence there were already 500,000 ethnic Koreans who had been taken to various countries in Central Asia by Stalin in 1937 they made a good contact point for missionaries these third generation ethnic Koreans were the people prepared by God through whom Korean missionaries could enjoy the revival of missionary
work in the Islamic countries in Central Asia and you remember the missionaries the the Christians in Mongolia koreans are passionate people if God leads even if it seems irrational they are willing to go without even knowing exactly where to go so you can see in this very important article how Korean churches are emphasizing short-term overseas service and how ministers are on the move and how sending churches are owning the task i am a baby boomer okay but God uh because of my various medical things issues is keeping me where I am but calling younger people
like you um and others to consider the mission field god is bringing people from around the world to where I live Zimbabwe and Spain i invited someone in the grocery store to come to my church today that's how God is using me but you can see in this article how with Koreans God is calling baby boomers to become silver missionaries and also you can look at the statistics that Moffett uses and I use this to wrap up my discussion of the case study of the Korean church in uh 1900 you had 42,700 Christians in 2000
you had 19,100,000 Christians in 1900 there were 36,000 um uh Roman Catholics in 2000 you had 3,700,000 in 1900 you had 19,000 mostly Methodists and Presbyterians in 2000 you had 16 million 700,000 you had Presbyterian Methodists and one of my Catholic cousins remember we agree that Jesus is Lord he's now taking a bachelor's degree from Cal Baptist in Riverside in Levvenet it's an engineering degree but he enjoyed church history so much at Cal Baptist that he's taking a course in Puritan history and you know what he married a Baptist Korean okay so you got to
love it god has a sense of humor he also talks about marginal Christians being 800,000 maybe those are cult people but you've got a lot of Baptists now in South Korea but the point is and I'll emphasize it again in the Brazilian case study and in the wrapup in lecture 12 that the Korean church is living out Acts chapter 29 and may you my heroes do the same god bless
