Sarah Barry

Life

Sarah Barry was born on January 22, 1930, in Benoit, Bolivar County, Mississippi, and grew up in a Presbyterian family. She graduated from Mississippi State College for Women in 1951. By her own account, she decided to become a missionary when the Korean War broke out during her junior year of college. She studied Christian education at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond and at the Biblical Seminary in New York. She was then commissioned by the Board of World Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and arrived in Korea in 1955.

Assigned to the Gwangju mission station, she traveled through rural areas as an evangelist under the guidance of missionary Florence Root (Yu Hwa-rye). She is reported to have served as principal of the Iil (Neel) Bible School in Gwangju from 1958 to 1959 and as chair of the Southern Presbyterian Korea Mission in 1960. In 1965 she earned a master's degree from George Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University) and returned to Korea. She served with the Southern Presbyterian Korea Mission for twenty-two years, until 1977, when she moved to Chicago with Samuel Lee to continue the ministry there.

Ministry and Accomplishments

In September 1961, together with Samuel Lee (Lee Chang-woo), who was then working with university students at Daein Church in Gwangju, she began University Bible Fellowship (UBF). It started as a small prayer meeting and an English Bible class, but from the mid-1960s it spread to university campuses throughout the country, with Seoul as its center. Barry recalls that her own role gradually diminished as student leaders took on responsibility for the work. Within UBF she served mainly as a Bible study teacher and counselor, and members called her "Mother Barry."

When Samuel Lee died in a fire on January 8, 2002, the leaders at the international headquarters in Chicago unanimously chose Barry as the second general director of UBF worldwide, a decision ratified by the American and Korean boards of directors. She served as general director for about four years before passing the position on to the next generation of leaders.

Influence on the Korean Church

UBF is considered a student mission organization that originated within the Korean church and sends missionaries abroad. According to UBF sources, it sent about 3,000 missionaries between 1970 and 2011, most of them self-supporting lay missionaries who hold regular jobs and earn their own living. A study by Shin Sang-ho and Chung Joon-ki concludes that Barry applied the self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating principles of the Nevius mission policy to campus ministry and extended them into an international movement of lay professional missionaries. UBF, however, was never officially approved or sponsored by the Southern Presbyterian Church, which is why it is sometimes described as an "indigenous" mission organization.

Assessment

UBF and some scholars regard Barry highly as a missionary who sought out Korean leaders and put them forward while she herself supported them from the background. At the same time, UBF, which she founded and led, has drawn persistent criticism. A reform movement within UBF in the early 2000s called for changes in leadership, theological education, and greater financial transparency. Critics have also pointed out that, although it is a mission organization, UBF in practice operates like a church, holding its own Sunday worship services and receiving offerings, which has been a source of conflict with established churches. In North America, its student recruitment activities were banned at several institutions, including the University of Winnipeg in 1989 and the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993. Some former members criticize what they describe as excessive control and authoritarianism. However, the Korean Christian news outlet NewsNJoy reported that UBF's interpretation of Scripture is conservative and that it holds no distinctive doctrines of its own; such criticism has been directed mainly at the organization's methods of operation.