William Baird

Life

Baird was born on June 16, 1862, in Indiana. He graduated from Hanover College and completed his studies at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1888. Samuel Moffett, a fellow Hanover alumnus, also set out for mission work in Korea at about the same time.

In December 1890 Baird married Annie Laurie Adams. That same year the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterian) appointed him a missionary to Joseon (Korea), and he arrived in Korea in 1891. From 1891 to 1897 he served at the Seoul, Busan, and Daegu mission stations (the regional bases the mission maintained). After moving to Pyongyang in 1897, he devoted himself to educational work for the rest of his career. According to accounts, in 1931 he contracted typhoid fever about a month after attending the opening ceremony of a Soongsil-affiliated school, and he died in Pyongyang.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Mission in the Yeongnam region: His first mission field was Busan. Until about 1896 he itinerated throughout Gyeongsang Province preaching the gospel, and he took the lead in opening a mission station in Daegu.
• Founding of Soongsil Academy: When the mission assigned him to educational work in late 1896, he briefly opened a sarangbang (guest-room) classroom in Seoul. He then went to Pyongyang, where on October 10, 1897, he began Soongsil Academy with thirteen students in the sarangbang of his residence in Sinyang-ri. He is reported to have established an industrial department within the school so that students who could not afford tuition could work while they studied.
• Founding of a union college: In 1906 he joined with the Methodist mission to open a college-level program. The school is commonly called Union Christian College (Hapseong Soongsil College), and Baird served as its first president until 1915.
• His wife, Annie Baird, also served as a missionary alongside him. Their two sons, William Baird Jr. and Richard Baird, later served as Northern Presbyterian missionaries in Korea as well.

Influence on the Korean Church

Soongsil was an interdenominational union institution founded jointly by Presbyterians and Methodists, and it is regarded as one of the birthplaces of modern university education in Korea. Baird held that the purpose of the school's education was to train church leaders. At the 1908 commencement he stated that the school's most important work was to nurture the faith of its students, to establish churches that would spread the gospel, and to raise up leaders. The Soongsil tradition continues today in Soongsil University and Soongsil Middle and High Schools in Seoul.

Assessment

Soongsil institutions and the Christian press regard him as having laid the foundations of Christian education in Korea. Some Christian publications also emphasize that during the Japanese colonial period he viewed education as a means of building up the strength of the Korean people. At the same time, his educational philosophy was distinguished by its view of the school above all as an instrument of evangelism and the training of church leaders. This has sometimes been interpreted as a missionary approach to education that gave priority to religious instruction over the expansion of general education. His life became known chiefly through a biography written in 1968 by his son Richard Baird, which was translated into Korean in 2004 under the title Bae Wi-ryang Baksa-ui Hanguk Seongyo (Dr. Bae Wi-ryang's Mission in Korea).