Nevius Mission Policy

Background

The Presbyterian missionaries who arrived in Korea during the early period of Protestant missions were mostly young people in their twenties and reportedly had little missionary experience. Opinions on mission methods were divided even within the mission. Horace Underwood pursued a more active approach, while Horace Allen and John Heron reportedly favored a more cautious and traditional one.

Underwood reportedly learned of Nevius's methods through John Ross, who was working in Manchuria, and studied Nevius's writings. John Livingston Nevius (1829–1893) was a missionary of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterian) who worked for about forty years in the Shandong region of China, beginning in 1854. In the mid-1880s he published his mission methods in The Chinese Recorder, a missionary journal in China. Until then, it had been common for foreign missions to build chapels and pay the salaries of local workers. Nevius argued instead for establishing indigenous churches that would stand on the strength of local believers from the very beginning. His ideas were grounded in the "three-self principle" previously advanced by Henry Venn in Britain and Rufus Anderson in the United States.

Development

• 1890: Underwood and other Presbyterian missionaries in Korea invited Nevius and his wife to Seoul. Nevius stayed for about two weeks, presenting his missionary experience and methods. The visit is generally dated to June, though some sources place it in May.
• 1891: Under Underwood's leadership, the Korea Mission of the Northern Presbyterian Church incorporated these methods into the mission's rules and adopted them as official policy.
• January 1893: Missionaries of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian churches organized the Council of Missions Holding the Presbyterian Form of Government. The mission principles adopted at its first meeting included elements of the Nevius policy, such as a self-supporting church.
• The policy subsequently spread to other Presbyterian missions and became the defining mission principle of Korean Presbyterianism. The Southern Presbyterian missionaries who worked in the Honam region are also regarded as having followed these principles.

Main Features

The summary given by the missionary Charles Allen Clark (Korean name Kwak An-ryeon) in his doctoral dissertation is widely cited.

• Itinerant evangelism: Missionaries personally travel through various areas to evangelize.
• Centrality of the Bible: The Bible is placed at the center of all work.
• Self-propagation: Every believer is both a learner and a teacher of others, so that the gospel spreads through the believers themselves.
• Self-government: Each group is led by an unpaid leader known as a yeongsu (領袖). Circuits comprising several groups are overseen by paid josa (助師, "helpers"—local workers who assisted the missionaries).
• Self-support: Believers worship in chapels they have provided themselves, and pastors' stipends are not paid from foreign funds.
• Systematic Bible study: All believers engage in Bible study under the guidance of the yeongsu and josa, while leaders gather separately for training. This study took place at the congregational, regional, and national levels.

Results and Influence

Nevius's methods never took root in China itself. In Korea, however, they were adopted and became the basic framework of the Presbyterian Church. Korean leaders took charge of church affairs from an early stage, and a tradition of self-support developed in which believers built their own chapels and supported their own workers. The tradition of emphasizing Bible study groups is also linked to this policy. The rapid church growth of the early 1900s, centered in Pyongyang and other northern regions, is also frequently explained in connection with this policy (→ Growth of the Korean Church). At the Dongnohoe (Independent Presbytery), the first presbytery of the Korean Presbyterian Church, organized in September 1907, Koreans served as officers, including vice-moderator and clerk. The Methodist missions, by contrast, are regarded as having differed from the Presbyterians in mission strategy.

Assessment

In The Call of Korea (1908), Underwood summarized the core of the policy as self-government, self-support, and self-propagation. Clark held that the policy's true emphasis lay in Bible study.

Scholarly perspectives on the policy have shifted over time. Early studies focused on the formation and growth of the church and generally assessed the policy positively. After the indigenization debates, as scholars increasingly viewed Korean church history from the perspective of national history, critical assessments became more common. It has been noted, however, that both approaches share the premise that the policy shaped the formation of the Korean church. Some in Reformed circles have also critically examined the theological character of the policy.