The Korean Pentecost

Korean Protestantism was barely twenty years old in 1907 and already unusual. The first resident missionaries had arrived in the mid-1880s, and they had worked on a plan that made Korean churches pay for themselves, govern themselves, and evangelize their own neighbors from the start. Every winter the churches held Bible conferences — weeks of study for ordinary farmers and shopkeepers who walked in from the country carrying their own rice. It was a church built on Scripture and lay leadership before it was ever a church built on a revival.

The country around it was coming apart. Japan had defeated Russia in 1905 and forced a protectorate treaty on Korea the same year; the Korean emperor would be pushed off the throne in 1907 and the country annexed outright in 1910. People had every reason to be angry, frightened, and looking for someone to blame. That is the room the Spirit walked into.

The first crack came four years earlier and it came in a missionary. In August 1903, at a small prayer and Bible study meeting in Wonsan, a Canadian doctor named Robert A. Hardie stood up in front of Korean believers and confessed his own pride, coldness, and failure as a missionary. Confessing to the people he had been sent to teach was not something missionaries did. Korean witnesses said afterward that it was the first time they had seen a foreigner repent.

Through 1906 the missionaries in Pyongyang kept meeting to pray, sharpened by reports of what God had done in Wales in 1904 and among the Khasi hills of India. They asked for the same thing and got very little at first. The January 1907 Bible conference opened with somewhere around a thousand to fifteen hundred men in the Jangdaehyŏn church, and the first evenings were heavy and flat.

On the evening of Monday, January 14, it broke. Graham Lee was leading, and after inviting a few men to pray he said simply that they should all pray — and the whole assembly prayed aloud at once, a wave of audible voices that Korean churches still practice today and still call by name. Then a man stood and confessed a sin in front of his neighbors, and another, and it did not stop. William Blair, who was there, wrote that men fell to the floor beating the ground and that he was frightened by what he could feel in the room.

The confessions were specific, which is what made them terrible: theft, hatred, adultery, one man naming a death he had caused. Restitution followed within days — money returned, property carried back, enemies sought out in their own houses. Missionaries recorded church elders confessing to hating the foreigners, and foreigners confessing to despising the Koreans. Our account of all this comes from the men who were in the building, chiefly Blair's The Korea Pentecost, written a few years later; there is no neutral transcript, and there never was.

One of the men who led the confessing became the century's most important Korean pastor. Kil Sŏn-ju had come out of Korean folk religion and Taoist ascetic practice, was losing his sight, and had already made a habit of praying before dawn. He was ordained in September 1907 among the first seven Korean Presbyterian ministers, and the daybreak prayer meeting he modeled is now standard in Korean churches on every continent. In 1919 he signed the Korean declaration of independence and went to prison for it.

The fruit outran the meetings. Mission counts show Korean Protestant membership multiplying several times over in the years that followed — society figures, not audited ones, but the direction is not in doubt — and in 1909–10 the churches launched a nationwide campaign they called the Million Souls movement. More lasting than the numbers were the habits: daybreak prayer, whole-church Bible study, tithing, and congregations run by their own people. Those habits, not the emotion, are what carried the church through what came next.

Not everyone reads it the same way. Some Korean historians have argued that the missionaries welcomed a revival of personal repentance partly because it steered Korean anger away from politics at a moment when Japan was taking the country, and that the 1907 meetings helped make the church quiet. It is a fair question and the page should not dodge it. It is also true that Kil Sŏn-ju went from that revival to a prison cell for signing an independence declaration, and that the church which learned to confess in 1907 produced most of the Christians who refused to bow at Shinto shrines in the 1930s.

The title of Blair's later book says the rest: The Korean Pentecost and the Sufferings Which Followed. Occupation, war, and division came, and Pyongyang — once called the Jerusalem of the East for its churches — became the capital of a state that closed them. The revival did not spare the Korean church anything. It equipped it for everything.