2 of 4

But while praising God for the winds of the Spirit, early missionaries were quick to give much of the credit for the amazing growth to a firm foundation of Bible-centered Christian instruction. The preaching and teaching of the pioneers was biblical. They spoke with utter assurance that the Bible was God's Word and that in it was to be found the ultimate meaning of human life and destiny, Therefore the Scriptures were quickly translated into the vernacular and widely distributed. Church leaders were given: regular, intensive training in the Word. Perhaps most important of all,: not just the leaders but all members of the church were systematically organized for Bible study in what was called the Bible Class system.

To ensure that all believers could read the Bible, literacy was widely made a requirement for church membership. In each congregation regular Bible study became as important a part of the church week as the prayer meetings or the Sunday service. Finally, once or twice a year, in the slack seasons, huge Bible Classes or conferences were held in the main mission centers; thousands of laymen and laywomen streamed in from rural villages to spend two weeks, at their own expense, in systematic study of the Word of God.

Out of these Bible classes came the primary agents of the advance of the faith in Korea. Not the foreign missionaries, though they did the first planting. Not even the national church leaders, though they were faithful in the cultivating. But the laymen and laywomen of the Korean church. The most effective evangelism is lay witness.

In many an early Korean church, particularly in the north, personal evangelistic witness was almost as much a requirement of church membership as public profession of faith. "You say you love the Lord Jesus Christ," the pastor would gently say to the candidate, "but how do we know you love him if you do not show it by bringing someone else to him?"

New Christians in Korea, touched with the joy of a personal spiritual experience, and taught by their training in Bible study to speak with an authority and a breadth beyond any individual experience, soon proved to be the best possible channels for spreading the Good News. As laymen, they used natural, local, social patterns of communication, speaking to relatives and friends and fellow workers in their villages. It. was a good example of what modern missiologists call a "people's movement."

The three factors described above—Bible training for the whole church, the cleansing exhilaration of the Spirit, and an emphasis on a personal sharing of the faith with others—combined to set off a spiritual chain explosion in Korea. Dr. Roy Shearer in his book on the growth of Korean Christianity compares it to a spreading fire (Wildfire: Church Growth in Korea, Eerdmans, 1966). In fifteen years from 1895, when suddenly the church in the north began to grow, to 1914, just after the great revival, the Protestant community in Korea increased from only 800 to more, than 167,000.

Not all the factors contributing to church growth in Korea were spiritual and theological or the consequence of sound mission practice. In the providence of God secular and non-theological elements have often furthered the progress of the Gospel. Protestant Christianity came to Korea at a time of total breakdown in the nation's social, political, and religious life. The five hundred-year-old Yi dynasty was tottering to its fall, and Korea was slowly but inexorably losing its independence to the rising empire of Japan.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

January (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51