How Korea embraced Christianity

One key to the rapid growth was the strategy adopted by the young pioneer missionaries, which emphasized developing indigenous leadership: "self-government, self-propagation of the faith, and self-support."

"This encouraged national leaders to take care of their own affairs without foreign control or funding," Dr. Park says. "They practiced it from the beginning, advising but letting the Koreans preach and run the churches."

And the Korean people, in desperate straits, were hungry for what the preachers had to offer. Japan colonized the peninsula from 1905 to 1945, and attempted to "Japanize" the population. In the midst of great suffering, Christianity apparently met people's spiritual needs. While some Koreans were Confucianists or Buddhists, "mostly [they were] shamanists and animists," Eileen says. "People often lived in fear of evil spirits."

The faith also grew rapidly as it became closely identified with the Korean independence movement. Some native Christians were imprisoned by the Japanese for pro-independence activities, including refusing to worship Japan's emperor. Missionaries were seen as supporting the movement. Sam's father was forced to leave the country in 1936 when he refused to send his students to the Shinto shrines.

Sam himself had not intended to become a missionary, he says, yet he got "hooked by the Lord." During a talk he attended while studying in the US, he recalls, the speaker said, "Gentlemen, your watches could tick for 9-1/2 years without numbering the people in China who have never heard the gospel."

That did it. With a Yale doctorate in hand, he headed off as a missionary to China in 1947, and soon faced the Communist revolution. "I stayed too long, was interrogated, detained, and finally given a people's trial," he says. He was thrown out of the country in 1951.

For most of the couple's quarter century in Korea, Sam taught ministry candidates at the Presbyterian College and Seminary in Seoul, where the seminary founded by his father in Pyongyang was reestablished. It has since become one of the largest in the world.

"Presbyterians are to Korea what Baptists are to Texas," he says with a chuckle.

Eileen, who has a master's degree in Christian education, for seven years served as director of the Korea Bible Club Movement, a network of schools for some 50,000 underprivileged children. Even children who worked in factories during the day would come to school at night, she says.

Christian chaplains active in factories and in the Army have been another key element in the Korean "miracle," as are the regular revivals held by churches.

Today, more than 16,000 Korean missionaries are working in countries around the globe. "Korea had a mission movement from the very beginning, with students from among the earliest seminary graduates going to Japan, Mexico, California, and Siberia," Park says.

The Moffetts stay in touch by phone with close Korean friends and still travel there quite often. Eight years ago, they went to North Korea, the home of Sam's childhood. They took food and medical supplies, working with a North Carolina-based group, Christian Friends of Korea. Just last May, they took an unusual and unexpected trip back to the peninsula. The church in Korea asked to rebury Sam's father on the campus of the seminary he founded. "We were a little shocked," he says, "but we realized that was exactly what he would have loved." The couple took his parents' ashes to Korea with them.

Today, although a nonagenarian, Sam is busy working with a colleague on the third volume of his "History of Christianity in Asia." Eileen is archiving the letters of Korean missionaries from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Page: 1 | 2