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Dr Billy Jang Hwan Kim, a South Korean Baptist pastor likely to be elected president of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), has called for Baptists to play a greater role in solving ethnic and religious conflicts, particularly those involving Christians.

On January 8, unless there is a last minute challenge, the eighteenth Baptist World Congress, meeting in Melbourne, will officially elect Dr Kim, a 64-year-old broadcaster and pastor, as its president. He will be the first Korean to be elected to the post, which he will hold for the next five years, until the 2005 congress of the BWA, which represents 80 percent of the world's Baptists.

His church, the Korea Baptist Convention, is a relatively small organization within South Korea, with about 600,000 members in a total population of 42 million. The main Protestant churches in South Korea are the Presbyterian and Methodist churches.

Dr Kim's election was recommended last July by the BWA's general council, meeting in Dresden, Germany, and he is the sole candidate who will be presented to the congress January8. In theory he could be challenged from the floor of the meeting, but this is highly unlikely to occur.

Many of the BWA president's duties are ceremonial, but he—all presidents thus far have been males—plays a key role in directing the organization, in representing it in meetings with government leaders, and in speaking out on issues of justice and human rights.

Asked, during an interview with Ecumenical News International (ENI), about his main focus as president, Dr Kim said he wanted to promote the unity of Baptists around the world, particularly their role in helping to solve ethnic and religious conflicts. He singled out violence in Indonesia and in India where members of other faith groups have attacked Christians. In Indonesia hundreds of church buildings have been destroyed in recent months.

Dr Kim expressed general concern for Christian minorities, especially Baptists, in developing countries, pointing out that in Western countries Baptists had a strong presence—"no one can touch them"—but that in many developing countries, Baptists were vulnerable.

A Christian of conservative views, with a strong belief in the importance of scripture and preaching as the keys to Christian family life, Dr Kim is known in Korea as a charismatic preacher, highly successful evangelist and as chaplain to the Korean national police force. The church where he is senior pastor, the Central Baptist Church in Suwon, South Korea, attracts a total of about 10,000 people to its six services each Sunday.

He is also director of the Far East Broadcasting Company, a Christian network of five radio stations that broadcast the Gospel to Christians in Korea as well as to ethnic Koreans in neighboring China, Russia and Japan. A particular service to Korean-speaking Christians in China, provided by one of Dr Kim's radio stations, is a daily half-hour reading of the Bible in Korean. The reading is slowed down to enable Korean speakers to write down the text, as they do not have Bibles. "If the readings are too fast, we get letters saying slow down'," Dr Kim said.

In Billy Kim, the BWA is choosing as its president someone who believes in finding strong and effective solutions to the problems faced by Baptists. He told ENI that not so long ago some Koreans were criticizing Baptists, saying that because of their belief in baptism by immersion they were in fact a sect. He decided to take action to fight this prejudice and devised a plan to baptize 10,000 people at the same time. Local Baptist pastors told him that they would never be able to find 10,000 people who wanted to be baptized, so he asked them all to stop baptizing converts for a year. The numbers of those seeking baptism quickly built up, and in 1990, during the sixteenth Baptist World Congress, held in South Korea, more than 10 000 people were baptized by immersion in the Han River in Seoul. National television covered the event and helped end prejudice against baptism by immersion and against Baptists.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44