History of the Baptists in Korea

Background

Baptists are a denomination that administers baptism by immersion to those who have professed faith and places strong emphasis on the autonomy of the local church. The Baptist movement in Korea began not through a denominational mission board but through the work of an individual missionary. Malcolm Fenwick, an independent missionary from Canada who worked without affiliation with any denomination, arrived in Korea on December 8, 1889. The Korea Baptist Convention regards this date as the beginning of the Baptist movement in Korea. Fenwick evangelized without formal theological training and later returned to his home country to study. He came back in 1896 and led the Corean Itinerant Mission from its base in Wonsan. He is said to have adopted Baptist convictions through his close relationship with the Reverend Gordon of the Clarendon Street Baptist Church in Boston. The Ella Thing Memorial Mission, affiliated with that church, began sending missionaries such as Mr. and Mrs. Pauling in 1895, and they founded the first Baptist churches in Gongju, Ganggyeong, and Chilsan in South Chungcheong Province.

Development

• 1901 When the Ella Thing Memorial Mission withdrew nearly all of its missionaries because of financial difficulties, Fenwick took over its mission fields in the Chungcheong and North Jeolla regions. Through Fenwick's itinerant evangelism, thirty-one churches were established in Chungcheong Province and in the northern parts of Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces.
• 1906 On October 6, Fenwick convened a conference of workers in Ganggyeong and organized the Korea Christian Church (Daehan Gidokgyohoe). It had a centralized structure in which Fenwick, as gammok (the supreme leader governing the entire denomination), appointed and dispatched church officers. The denomination devoted itself to missions in Manchuria, Jiandao, Siberia, and Mongolia.
• 1921 When the Japanese colonial authorities forced the church to drop the word Daehan ("Korea"), it changed its name to the East Asia Christian Church (Donga Gidokgyohoe). It was renamed again as Donga Gidokdae in 1933 and as Donga Gidokgyo (East Asia Christianity) in 1940.
• 1935 Fenwick died in Wonsan.
• 1944 The denomination had consistently refused to take part in Shinto shrine worship. Some thirty of its leaders were arrested in Wonsan, and Pastor Jeon Chi-gyu died in prison. On May 10, the Japanese authorities ordered the denomination dissolved and confiscated its property.
• 1946 In February, meetings to rebuild the denomination were held in Chilsan and Ganggyeong, and the gammok-centered system was replaced with a congregational form of church polity. In protest, about ten churches in the Yecheon area of North Gyeongsang Province broke away to form the Daehan Gidokgyo (Korea Christianity).
• 1949 At the Thirty-ninth General Assembly, held in Ganggyeong, the denomination changed its name to the Korea Christian Baptist Convention (Daehan Gidokgyo Chimnyehoe) and entered into partnership with the Southern Baptist Convention of the United States. Some sources date this partnership to the Fortieth General Assembly in 1950.
• 1959 Conflict between the convention's then president, Pastor Ahn Dae-byeok, and Southern Baptist missionaries split the denomination in two.
• 1968 In April, the two bodies reunited. In 1976, the denomination adopted the name Korea Baptist Convention.

Outcomes and Influence

After Korea's liberation in 1945, the Baptists lost nearly all of their strength in North Korea and Manchuria, including their headquarters in Wonsan, and rebuilt in South Korea. The Southern Baptist Convention carried out medical and relief work during the Korean War and, after the war, introduced American approaches to education and missions. Baptists trace the origins of Korea Baptist Theological University to the Bible institute Fenwick founded in Gongju in 1903. In addition, under the division of mission territories with the Southern Presbyterians during the Japanese colonial period, the Baptists took primary responsibility for Chungcheong Province; as a result, the Chungcheong region remains an important Baptist stronghold today.

Assessment

Baptists regard the dissolution of the East Asia Christian Church after its steadfast refusal of Shinto shrine worship as a heritage of faith to be preserved, and they cite it as the only instance in Korean church history in which a denomination was ordered dissolved. However, because most of the denomination's records were burned at the time of its dissolution, source material is scarce. For this reason, the prevailing view has long been that clear evidence of anti-Japanese activity in the East Asia Christian Church is difficult to find. More recently, studies drawing on records of the Japanese Government-General of Korea have begun to reassess the church's anti-Japanese character.

Views also differ on the shift in the denomination's polity from Fenwick's gammok system to congregational government, and on the process by which a denomination that had developed independently allied itself with the Southern Baptist Convention. Some see these changes as having laid the foundation for postwar reconstruction and growth. Others contend that they created tensions over the denomination's identity and leadership, as shown by the opposition of the established leaders Fenwick had trained, which ultimately led to the 1959 schism.