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Next week, South Koreans will commemorate their liberation from Japan and the subsequent founding of the Korean nation. As much as any other civil holiday, Liberation Day, celebrated on August 15, symbolizes the Korean peninsula's self-determination and political strength. Yet without the Protestant church, it's worth wondering if Korean independence would ever have been achieved.

Indeed, the tie between Korea's church and its freedom movement makes for one of the most remarkable stories in modern missions.

When Protestant missionaries first arrived in the "hermit nation" in the mid-1880s, Korea was still heavily influenced by its historic patron and former occupier, China. Educated Koreans spoke and wrote Chinese alone. Although a 15th-century Korean king had invented an alphabet for Korea's indigenous language, Hangul, it was rarely used. Many considered Hangul to be the language of children and illiterates.

One of the missionaries' earliest decisions was to translate the Bible into Hangul. Throughout the 1890s, Korean colporteurs worked with missionaries to distribute Scripture portions throughout the country. These Scriptures were highly contextualized, using Korean spiritual terms infused with new, Christian meanings. By the time Japan colonized Korea in 1910, the British and Foreign Bible Society alone had distributed more than one million Scripture portions.

As the first piece of Hangul literature, the Korean Bible proved to be a thorn in the side of imperial Japan. It sparked a "Hangul movement," leading to the publication of newspapers, poems, and novels in the indigenous tongue. Throughout Japanese occupation, the Koreans' desire for independence became closely linked with their desire to use their own language. As one student of Korean nationalism, Vernon Blake Killingsworth, has written, "The Bible did more than just sustain hope; for Christians and non-Christians alike, the Hangul Scriptures served as a symbol of Korean culture."

Sometimes the Hangul Scriptures were directly cited in cries for revolution. Sun Chu Kil, for example, believed the Book of Revelation predicted an apocalypse that would end Japanese rule. He contrasted the kingdom of Satan (a country under foreign domination) with the kingdom of God (a free and peaceful county). In 1919, Kil's teaching helped inspire Korea's March First Movement, a series of independence demonstrations that lasted for three months and mobilized nearly two million Koreans.

Other missionary decisions further strengthened Korea's church to stand for independence, particularly the widespread adoption of the Nevius methods.

A veteran missionary to China, John L. Nevius had long promoted a mission strategy based on the "three-self" principles of Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson, 19th-century home-office leaders who argued that native churches should be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. Although Nevius's methods were rejected by his mission, they caught the attention of the young Western missionaries in Korea whom he visited in 1890. As a result, these missionaries sought to create independent, indigenous churches from the beginning, stressing especially the importance of self-support.

Since Nevius believed that evangelism was best done within the context of everyday life, Korean believers evangelized friends and family members while remaining in their vocations. Lay ministers oversaw Korean congregations until the members could afford to support them. As the Korean church grew, it began investing in home and foreign missions—another Nevius principle. By 1897, the native-led Seoul Presbyterian Church was already sending out members for evangelistic work and paying their expenses.

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49