Mabel Francis
KOREA AND JAPAN:
A CONTRAST IN RECEPTIVITY
One of the great puzzles of mission history relates to the contrast between Korea and Japan (or Korea and other Asian countries) in the growth of the Christian faith. Church growth in Korea has been the subject of many studies—not so with church growth in Japan. The world’s largest church is located in Korea, as is a rapidly expanding overseas missions movement. Why has one Asian culture been receptive to the Christian faith and another been so closed to what is considered a Western religion?
Korea was known as the “Hermit Kingdom” for good reason. “In part this related to the simple fact that few Americans knew anything about Korea prior to 1880,” writes Everett Hunt. “Even after that date it is unlikely that many Americans could accurately pinpoint Korea’s place on the map, to say nothing of describing any of Korea’s cultural distinctives.”The New York Times described Korea as “the only country on the globe which is now closed to the rest of the world.”1 But that all began to change after 1880—especially after American missionaries began to take residence in that once-closed country. Indeed, Korea is one of the few areas of the world where virtually all of the pioneer nineteenth-century missionaries were Americans.
Protestant mission boards didn’t enter Japan until the late 1850s, and even then the progress was painfully slow. Korea remained without resident Protestant missionaries even longer, with the first missionary, R. J. Thomas, not arriving until 1865, and then not to put down roots. He visited again the following year on board an American vessel, but his life and the lives of the crew were taken when the ship was burned by Koreans who felt threatened by American power and presence.
When resident missionaries did arrive in Korea in 1884, the political situation, though still unstable, served them well. King Kojong welcomed medical and educational work, and the early missionaries were moderately compliant with his ban on preaching and evangelizing. But the king was by no means tenaciously protecting Korea’s religion. “The Koreans offer the spectacle,” wrote Elliot Griffis in 1888, “of a nation without a religion waiting for one.” He was overstating the case, but there was some truth in what he said. “Confucianism had become more a rigid code for the legal and ceremonial conduct of government,” according to Hunt, and Buddhism had been “out of favor” for centuries. Shamanism was widely practiced but was not a unifying force in society. “Thus,” continues Hunt, “while the encounter between Christianity and other religions has often been a central issue in the introduction of Christianity in other nations, in the Korea of 1885 it was almost no issue at all.”2
Protestant missionary work to Korea began in earnest in the 1880s, and within a relatively short time there was a receptive response—unlike the hostility the Roman Catholics had faced barely two decades earlier. One of the reasons for this may have been the Protestants’ use of the Korean term Hananim for God, avoiding the imported Chinese term that the Catholics used. “The choice of Hananim,” according to Don Richardson, “could not have been more providential for Protestant missions in Korea! Preaching like houses afire in cities, towns, villages or in the countryside, Protestant missionaries began by affirming Korean belief in Hananim. Building upon this residual witness, Protestants masterfully disarmed the Korean people’s natural antipathy toward bowing before some foreign deity.”3
Besides encouraging the Koreans to retain their own term for God, the missionaries quickly established a pattern of encouraging them to develop their own churches. In 1890 the arrival in Seoul of John L. Nevius, a veteran Presbyterian missionary from China, paved the way for mission strategy that soon characterized Korean missions in general. The Nevius method called for “self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating” churches, promoting indigenous Christianity virtually free from outside influences.
Roman Catholic missionaries, who were in Korea much earlier, had encountered fierce opposition, but they courageously carried on the work. The period between 1784 and 1884, sometimes referred to as “the century of Roman Catholic missions,” was a time of growth despite persecution. In 1866 thousands of Korean Christians were martyred, along with three French priests. An edict against “foreign learning” was issued in that same year, making the teaching of this outside religion punishable by death. The French military retaliated—an act of aggression that only increased negative feelings among Koreans about the outside world. The individual who more than anyone else had been behind the great persecution was Tai Won Kun. Of him and his family connections, Samuel Moffett writes:
It was at the orders of this man of blood that the church had been almost annihilated in 1866. But when he died some thirty years later, the faith, so far from being dead, had moved into his own home. His wife had become a Christian, baptized secretly at night by Bishop Mutel, who twice crept into the persecutor’s palace, once to baptize her and once to give her Holy Communion. The year they buried Tai Won Kun, in 1898, there were forty thousand Roman Catholics in Korea.4
The first Korean Protestant community was born out of the ministry of John Ross, a Scotch Presbyterian. While serving in Manchuria, he extended his evangelistic outreach to the border of Korea in 1873. Here he met with Sang Yoon Suh, who agreed to help Ross and his partner in Bible translation. That involvement led to his conversion and to his returning to the village of Sorai in the Northwest of Korea, where he introduced his relatives and neighbors to his newfound faith. “In the winter of 1884 Ross and his colleagues visited the Korean immigrants in the northeastern valleys of Manchuria,” writes Roy Shearer, “where they baptized seventy-five men…. These men served as the link for the first Protestant work in Korea proper, and some of them became the foundation for the young Church in Korea.”5
It is not uncommon in the history of missions for missionaries to become involved in political or economic or cultural dealings in the country of their residence. William Carey was involved in Indian reform movements; Robert Morrison and his son were connected with the East India Company and involved in treaty negotiations during the Opium War; David Livingstone resigned his mission post to become an employee of the British government; and missionaries and their children in Hawaii were deeply involved in political and economic endeavors. But Dr. Horace Allen (1858–1932), the first Protestant resident missionary to Korea, went a step further than these mission predecessors when he left his vocation as a missionary medical doctor to become a diplomat representing the interests of Korea. This was no loss to the missionary community. He was a man with diplomatic skills in international affairs but utterly lacking in such skills in personal affairs.
Allen was born and raised in Ohio and, after completing his medical training, was appointed by the Presbyterian Church to serve, with his wife Frances, as a missionary in China. However, he was dissatisfied with his situation there—getting calls from opium addicts through the night so that, by his own testimony, “sleep was quite out of the question” and his “life was made miserable.” In 1884, after less than a year in China, he was permitted to transfer to Korea. But he was unhappy with his assignment in Korea as well—especially as it related to other missionaries. “Mission work is a farce,” he protested. “Heron [Dr. John] has every other week wholly to himself and all but 2–3 hours of other weeks. Yet he does not study. Underwood has as much leisure. So have the Methodists. I think it is a pretty soft thing.”6
In reality, these colleagues were conscientious and hard-working, and Allen said as much on various occasions. But wherever Allen went, conflict followed. “Most, if not all these difficulties,” writes Everett Hunt, “centered around Horace Allen and his strange personality.”7 Yet it was Allen more than anyone else who paved the way for the long-term presence of Protestant missionaries in Korea.
Allen was able to maneuver amid the political strife that was simmering beneath the surface when he arrived. The king supported the “progressives” who were open to Western, particularly American, ideas. They were opposed to those who were clinging to the old ways and fearful of modernization. In the fall of 1884, when the conflict erupted into open hostilities, the queen’s nephew was wounded. Allen came to the rescue, and the young man’s life was saved. “This whole affair has been trying,” wrote Allen. “But it has admitted me to the palace and given me a prominence I could not have gotten otherwise. Already the people know me, and our work will not suffer from this event.”8 The progressives had lost ground during the skirmishes, and any hope for mission opportunities could have ended at that time, but for the medical service of Allen.
Early in 1885, after only months of residence in Korea, Allen was invited to help serve the medical needs of the king and queen and was granted his request to establish a hospital in Seoul. He was modest about his achievement. “My professional efforts have been crowned with far greater success than my experience deserves,” he conceded. “I have had some most astonishing recoveries and all I believe in answer to prayer.” Allen’s medical work continued during the precarious political situation, though he feared it would be jeopardized by other missionaries (with no medical skills) who were trickling in. But it continued to grow. In his first annual report for 1886, Allen’s calculations indicated that his hospital had served more than ten thousand patients. This achievement was due in part to his sensitivity to the Koreans. He asked Korean officials to serve as directors of the hospital—except for making medical decisions—and he also invited them to give the hospital a name of their own choosing.9
Despite the apparent success he was experiencing, Allen’s stormy friction with other missionaries persisted. Then, in 1887, the opportunity came for him to leave what had become a very unsatisfactory situation. The Korean king asked him to head up a diplomatic delegation to America. He was to escort and introduce the delegates to government officials in Washington. But before his official duties had even begun, he was grumbling again. On board ship the delegates were “smoking in their rooms which smell horribly,” and his meetings with them were curtailed because he could not “stop long in their rooms as I have had to point out lice to them on their clothes.”10 Nevertheless, Allen effectively represented Korea in Washington, and through his encouragement of American business investments, he helped to stimulate the Korean economy. He strongly defended Korean independence and, unlike many of his mission colleagues, strongly opposed Japanese incursions.
In 1889 Allen returned to his mission vocation, first to Pusan and then to Seoul, where he practiced medicine; but again he found the circumstances unsatisfactory. By 1890 his second mission term was behind him, and he was back in diplomatic service, this time working for the U.S. government in Seoul, which eventually led to his being appointed U.S. Minister and Consul General to Seoul in 1897. But he was a mere diplomat, and his strong views did not prevail in Washington. In 1903 he returned to his nation’s capital to plead Korea’s cause with President Theodore Roosevelt, but to no avail. As Wi Jo Kang points out, “In his discussion with the president … Allen’s pro-Korean and pro-Russian views clashed sharply with Roosevelt’s pro-Japanese attitude. Allen attacked Japan’s aggressive behavior, but he was unable to sway the president.”11
Allen’s strong views led to his recall in 1905. “There was little question,” writes Kang, “that Allen was dismissed because he strove for Korean sovereignty in opposition to Japanese imperialism.”12 Back in Ohio, Allen practiced medicine and continued to be a great promoter of Korea through writings and speeches. He translated some of the best-loved Korean folk legends into a condensed version that he published as Korean Tales. In his book Korean Things, he sought to win American support for Korea’s struggle against Japan, and his book A Chronological Index was a historical overview of Korea’s foreign diplomacy from 97 B.C. to 1901.
In many respects Horace Allen, the failed missionary, became the greatest missionary to Korea. When he died in 1932, according to Kang, he left behind “a rich legacy of Christian witness to political justice as the first Protestant missionary to Korea.”13
On Easter morning, April 5, 1885, Reverend Horace G. Underwood and Reverend Henry G. Appenzeller, the first ordained missionaries, arrived in Inchon, Korea. The story is that they held each other’s hands and jumped ashore together so that no one might later say that either the Methodists or the Presbyterians had arrived first. That Horace Allen had already been serving as a Presbyterian missionary in Korea was apparently dismissed because of his lack of ordination—though ordination credentials had hardly been a prerequisite for most pioneer missionaries. The desire for unity across denominational lines was commendable—though from the beginning there was considerably more denominational conflict among the Korean missionaries than such hand-holding symbolism would imply.
That the beginning of Methodist work should be dated that Easter morning was very important to Appenzeller, who was forced to return to Japan less than a week later, and he wanted to make certain of that for the history books and for his own denomination, as he penned in a letter: “The Methodist Church may rightfully be said to have entered Korea at this time as we left part of our goods behind.” He repeatedly wrote of his plans for “the success of Methodism” and his hopes that “Methodism will flourish.”14 If the Presbyterians had less denominational loyalty, they were not without apprehension about their competition. Allen wrote to the home board that he wished the Methodists would “blow their trumpet a little more mildly and not scare an exclusive nation.” And Underwood reiterated those concerns: “I am afraid the Methodists may come into Korea and jeopardize matters. They are welcome if they will only be judicious.”The issue of who arrived on the scene first was also important to the mission directors back home. Of the Methodists, the Presbyterian mission secretary responded with some apparent haughtiness: “If they have been outrun in the occupation of the field, they should submit to it pleasantly.”15
Henry Appenzeller (1858–1902) grew up in a German Reformed church in Pennsylvania and was reared “with a strong devotion to the Bible and the Heidelberg Catechism.”16 But at twenty-one he joined the Methodist Church, “probably because of its evangelistic outreach and lively fellowship.” He served for a short time as a Methodist minister before going to Drew University to study theology. Only weeks before receiving his assignment to serve in Korea as a missionary, he married Ella Dodge, a Baptist. Despite his diverse denominational connections, Allen referred to him as “a most ardent Methodist of the John Wesley type.”17
Like many American missionaries of his era, Appenzeller was an American patriot, and he was eager to bring to Korea all that was good in American culture. Although he “ventured beyond Seoul in search of places to plant Christian churches,” writes Edward Poitras, “he seems never to have considered adapting to Korean cultural ways.”18 This may have been due in part to his strong bias against the Catholic missionaries who wore Korean dress and adapted Korean culture to a large extent. He believed (now decades after Hudson Taylor had made native dress an accepted part of Protestant mission work) that such practices compromised true Christianity. He was convinced, according to Daniel Davies, “that God commissioned the Anglo-Saxon race (led by the United States) to spread Protestantism throughout the world as the vehicle to remove all forms of corruption from human life.”19
Yet he was a strong supporter of Korean independence long before such a notion was internationally endorsed—though “he believed that Koreans could master their own destiny only through Western-style knowledge and political institutions.” Unlike Allen, who was very conscientious about submitting to Korean authority and laws, Appenzeller was more autonomous and unrestrained by the authorities, be they Korean or American. He “pursued direct evangelistic activities when they were expressly forbidden by Korean law and the orders of missionary supervisors and colleagues.” He was convinced that he was bringing not only God’s message but also God’s methods. He had come to Korea to remove “the rubbish of idolatry, superstition and custom” in order to pave the way for “a bright, positive life free of the dark, enervating work of Satan.”20
Despite the unsettled political situation in Korea and his own deficiencies in contextualizing the gospel, Appenzeller encountered surprising success during his early—and later—years of ministry. He opened a boys’ school less than a year after his arrival, and within six months he had more than thirty students receiving a standard liberal arts education. The purpose of the school from his perspective was evangelism, but at that time any type of proselytizing was officially prohibited. Preaching—not teaching—was Appenzeller’s calling, and the school was a cover for his real reason for being in the country. But as time passed, the school consumed more and more of his time and served his purposes as an evangelistic ministry—“the foundation stone on which he would build the Methodist Church in Korea.” In September of 1887 the new school building was officially dedicated, and Korean officials were invited. But it was not merely a dedication service. Appenzeller was careful to turn it into one more momentous first: “This is the first public service of a religious kind ever held by anyone in Korea.”21 In 1890 required chapel services were part of the curriculum, and three years later a theological program was initiated.
As much as Appenzeller felt compelled to preach, his time was consumed primarily with other activities and a schedule that would quickly dispel any accusations of laziness. He served at different times as both treasurer and superintendent of the mission; he purchased tracts of land and acted as general contractor of various building projects; he translated portions of Scripture; he edited and wrote various publications for both Korean and American audiences; he was actively involved in several ecumenical projects, including the Bible Society, the Literature Society, and the Seoul Union Club; and he was the pastor of the first Methodist church in Korea.
During the early years of mission work, the missionaries met for a “union” service—Methodists and Presbyterians together. In fact, for all the competition between the two groups, they accomplished a remarkable amount of ministry together, including Bible translation work. The first baptism of a Korean—on Easter Sunday of 1886, one year after they arrived—was officiated by Methodist Appenzeller, with Presbyterian Underwood assisting. In 1888 the new year brought both denominations together for a week of prayer, but denominational loyalties and significant theological differences kept them apart. Just a month after that special week, they came together for a conference the purpose of which was to divide up Korea between the two denominations.
The work of both the Methodists and the Presbyterians progressed on through the 1880s, but as it did, opposition increased. Appenzeller was often quick to place the blame on the Catholics, as he did in 1888, after the government had placed a ban against Christianity: “The Catholics here are putting up a building in a part of the city objectionable to the King who very generously offered them another plot and damages on the present lot if they would move. This they refused to accept. The King then ordered Christian work to cease and of course we ‘innocent ones’ suffer with the guilty.”22 Appenzeller himself had ignored the king’s decrees against evangelizing and was believed to have contributed to the backlash as much as had the Catholics. The situation worsened by the summer of 1888, when rumors began to circulate that missionaries were in the business of kidnapping and killing Korean children and eating them—in the basement of Appenzeller’s Christian school no less. The king came to the rescue, issuing “a proclamation calling for the arrest of all persons circulating false rumors.”23
More than anyone else, Appenzeller laid the foundation for Methodism in Korea. “His emphases on evangelism and individual conversion, conservative biblical hermeneutics, strict morals, and social implications of the Christian faith have all been carried forward.” But “to the extent that he remained insensitive to the implications of Western cultural domination,” writes Poitras, he has been viewed less favorably.24 Yet during Appenzeller’s seventeen years heading up the Methodist ministry in Korea, forty-seven Methodist churches had been established. In summing up all the statistics, he concluded, “What hath God wrought!”
Despite his shortcomings, Appenzeller’s mission work was characterized by sacrifice and self-denial. His wife would “create a home that would make a visitor feel like they had dropped in on a family in Pennsylvania,” yet Asia would never be home to them. Early in his ministry he had written to his brother-in-law, who was considering coming to Japan for a business venture, that he should stay in America: “As a missionary I am glad I came and expect to stay, but I would not remain, much less come for any other purpose. I would much rather have a salary of $1,000 at home than $10,000 out here.”25
Appenzeller gave his life for the work. In the summer of 1902, while traveling by steamship to the southern tip of Korea for a meeting of the Bible translation committee, there was a collision in the fog with a Japanese steamer. According to accounts passed along, he died in circumstances fitting a true missionary hero: he “lost his life in an attempt to save his Korean assistant in the translation work and a Korean child entrusted to his care.” He was forty-four years old. “Thus ended the life of a man in his prime, and the blow to the Methodist Episcopal mission in Korea proved staggering, if not crippling.”26
Horace and Lillias Horton Underwood
If Appenzeller was overly concerned about establishing the Methodist church in Korea—with the proper date corresponding to that of the Presbyterians, Horace Underwood was overly concerned about how he should properly impress the Korean people themselves. The mission secretary back home had received word that he was wearing “an Oxford coat and a ministerial dress generally,” and counseled him that “the true course for a Protestant American in a country where everything is yet so unsettled would be to throw off all ministerial dress and ministerial manner.”27
The competition between the Presbyterians and Methodists touched Underwood’s life in a very personal way. The Presbyterians, with the first medical doctor in Korea, had a decided advantage in the court of the king—a fact that was not overlooked by the Methodists. But both sides were very conscious that a male physician had severe limitations in matters that pertained to the queen and any other female royalty. So the race was on. Which side would be first to offer the court the services of a woman doctor? Appenzeller had written to the home board about the urgency of this matter because the Methodists were “at great disadvantage” to “our sister society.” Presbyterian Dr. Allen, however, had an ace in the deck in the person of his bachelor colleague: “If one [woman doctor] could come out soon and marry Mr. Underwood, our prospects here would be grand indeed.” With a touch of humor, he added, “If you are quick we may convert the Wicked Queen of Korea. Otherwise the Methodists may have that pleasure.”28
The Presbyterians won the prize when one of their own arrived to become the first woman “doctor” in Seoul. Allen was pleased to announce that “Dr.” Ellers would become the queen’s physician. There was only one problem—if indeed it was a problem. Annie Ellers was a nurse. But this fact apparently went unnoticed by the queen, and Ellers served her with distinction and married a missionary—though not Horace Underwood. But as Allen had hoped, Underwood would marry the first woman physician, Dr. Lillias Horton, who arrived in Korea in 1888 and served the queen as Ellers’ successor.
Horace Underwood (1859–1916) was born in London and emigrated with his family to America when he was a youth. After graduating from New York University, he continued his education at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and was ordained to the ministry in the Reformed Church in America. Unlike virtually every other denomination, however, the Reformed Church did not send missionaries overseas to perpetuate one more denomination. Rather, it supported missionaries to work with churches that were already established in other countries. Thus, it was natural for Underwood to be appointed to serve with the Presbyterian Church in Korea and to work with the Presbyterian mission board.
Learning the language was the greatest obstacle Underwood faced when he first arrived in Korea, but once he was able to communicate, the people showed unusual interest:
As soon as we had secured a little knowledge of the language, we regularly went out in the lanes and byways, sitting down under some tree near a frequented road, or beside some medicinal spring to which the people were in the habit of flocking. We would take out a book and start reading and when several gathered around us to ask questions, we would attempt to explain to them the book, its truth and what it meant.29
Like Appenzeller, Underwood would have a cover for his preaching ministry so that he would have a legitimate vocation. He established an orphanage and was encountering success equal to that of the Methodists with their schools—though the Presbyterians funded only about half as much as did the Methodists from their mission board. Underwood also spent time in Bible translation and was eager to spend more of his time in preaching. Like the Methodists, the Presbyterians were amazed at the progress they were able to make in such a short time: “Now we have been here but a little over two years and the work has opened up so wonderfully that there is really more to be done than we can undertake.”30
The circumstances for missionaries were truly unusual in Korea, and Underwood and his colleagues often expressed their amazement. He confessed that he arrived “with the expectation that we would have to wait many years before we would be able to do any work, looking forward to a steady work in the line of learning the language and translating the Scriptures for several years to come.”31This had been the normal way things progressed in other mission settings, so there was genuine surprise when the faith took hold so quickly.
For Underwood there would be the additional good fortune of inheriting church growth that had been initiated by others—John Ross, Sang Yoon Suh, and others who had evangelized in the remote village of Sorai far to the north-west. Without warning he was visited by four men who had walked more than two hundred miles, requesting baptism from him. They asked him to visit their area where several more were awaiting baptism. When he visited them, he baptized seven more. Sorai has since been called “the cradle of Protestant Christianity in Korea.”32
These baptisms and the organization of a church in Sorai were not without controversy. Dr. Horace Allen, Underwood’s close colleague, was upset that the law prohibiting evangelism was being ignored and would potentially risk the entire mission endeavor. Underwood argued that he had merely baptized—that the evangelism had been done by others. How could he have done other than grant their request, he argued, building his support from Scripture and church history: “I can find no warrant for such action denying them baptism either in the history of mission, in the story of the Acts of the Apostles or in the teaching of Christ.”33
After Allen left the mission to serve in diplomatic service for the government of Korea, Underwood’s close connection to the Korean royalty came through a doctor with whom he would have a more stable relationship—Dr. Lillias Horton, whom he married in 1889, the year after she arrived. In the years that followed, she “became such a familiar figure at court” that “she was able to dispense with the formality of an interpreter when she was talking with the queen,” and “she often forgot that she was not chatting with an intimate friend.” Yet she recognized her place as an outsider, and for that reason was reluctant to make a forthright presentation of the gospel.
All the missionaries were praying for the conversion of the queen, but their hopes were dashed in 1895, when the Japanese began a period of oppressive rule. The Japanese perceived the queen as their enemy, and on October 8, 1895, “Japanese cutthroats, under the eyes of the Japanese army officers, rushed the palace guard and murdered her.” It was a terrible loss to the mission community, and to Lillias Underwood in particular, but she would continue her medical work in Korea despite the setback.34
The name most associated with the first decade of mission work in Korea is that of John L. Nevius (1829–93), a missionary to China who spent only two weeks in Korea. But those two weeks, some would say, transformed the Protestant mission endeavor and the future of the church in Korea. The “Nevius method” is often credited with the rapid growth of the church in Korea—making the difference between the church in Korea and that in Japan.
Nevius was born in western New York into a family of Dutch Reformed heritage. His father died when he was young, and he was brought up in the faith by his mother, who had lamented his moving south “to seek his fortune” as a young man. “John,” she implored, “if you were going away to be a missionary to the heathen, and I should never see you again in this world, that I could bear; but this I cannot.”35 He later wrote to her that he was determined to serve God rather than seek a fortune. Soon after that he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he not only immersed himself in studies but set up for himself a strict program of spiritual disciplines, the last one which read: “16. Every Saturday night to eat sparingly or nothing at all, and spend a part of the evening in looking over these rules, seeing how far I have transgressed them, how much I can improve them, and myself by them; and in preparation for the Sabbath.”36
In 1853 Nevius and his wife, Helen, sailed from Boston to China, where they would continue to serve for the next four decades. His approach was to do itinerant ministry and train converts to conduct basic evangelism. The Nevius home became a center for short-term training, with as many as forty men coming from outlying areas to study the Bible and learn how to more effectively reach out with the gospel. He was a critic of much of the mission work in China, believing that the progress was slow in part because too many missionaries settled into “mission station” life and because they hired Chinese Christians to do the work of itinerant evangelism. But he was not just a critic; he had laid out a method of evangelism that he was convinced would be far more effective, and he was invited to present his ideas at the Second General Missionary Conference of China, convened in Shanghai. There were over four hundred missionaries in attendance, and Nevius was one of the prominent speakers.
In China, however, after more than a half century of mission outreach, missionaries tended to be set in their ways. But word of his ministry and of his presentation at this conference reached Korea, and there was immediate excitement. The year was 1890, barely six years after the work in Korea had begun, and the missionaries were not yet set in their ways. They were open to new ideas, and they invited Nevius to present his ideas to them. Thus, on their way home for a furlough, he and his wife spent two very important weeks in Korea.
During this time, Nevius clearly pointed out the differences between the “old system” and the “new system”: “The Old uses … the more advanced and intelligent of the native church members in the capacity of paid colporteurs, Bible agents, and evangelists, or heads of stations; while the New proceeds on the assumption that the persons employed in these various capacities would be more useful in the end by being left in their original homes and employments.”37He accused missionaries of employing nationals to produce quick growth so that they could send favorable reports back home, but he insisted that such methods only resulted in an uncommitted church leadership, with converts who are doing evangelism only for the money they received.
What the missionaries heard from Nevius was not a new strategy of mission. Many others had said essentially the same thing, but he came as an experienced practitioner having a clear plan of action. Charles A. Clark later summed up his method in nine points:
Following their two-week stay in Korea, the Neviuses continued their voyage home for furlough and then returned to China in 1892. The following year, as he was ready to leave on an extended tour of visiting the churches he supervised, he suddenly died of a heart attack at age sixty-four. His most enduring work for missions had been his forty years of service in China, but his name would become known for his influence on Korean missions during its early, most impressionable stage.
How much Nevius influenced the rapid church growth in Korea is debatable. Most would agree that there were many other factors as well. But whatever the various factors were, the church in Korea grew rapidly in comparison to the church in other Asian settings—and in comparison to almost anywhere else in the world. One of the young missionaries who had arrived only six months before the definitive visit of Nevius was Samuel Moffett. According to Alan Neely, “Moffett stressed two facets of the plan especially: intensive Bible study for all believers and evangelism by all believers…. Three years later he moved to Pyongyang, where the response to the gospel and the growth of the church became legendary.”39
Beginning in 1895, there was what some described as an “explosion” of church growth, and there was evidence that the Nevius method was being employed. In Pyongyang, according to one report, the church was “beginning to develop, to expand and to make itself felt as a factor in the life of the city and surrounding country.”The main reason for this was further explained: “A cause for rejoicing is the earnest evangelistic work carried on by the members and catechumens. The men have been doing the work and we [missionaries] have been receiving calls to follow up their work.”40
The church in Korea continued to grow in the years and decades that followed, despite the fact that Korea was in the midst of very hard times during most of this era. Indeed, some observers have suggested that the hard times actually fostered growth in the church. Elsewhere in Asia, persecution of Christians had typically come primarily from fellow citizens. But in Korea much of the persecution came from the hated Japanese, who had formally annexed Korea in 1910. Prior to this annexation, the Korean church had experienced the “great revival” of 1907, which did not necessarily increase membership but rather marked the “spiritual rebirth” of the church. Then in 1910–11, the “Million Souls for Christ” campaign was inaugurated, though again with no significant church growth.
Perhaps more significant than these spiritual revivals were political movements—particularly the Independence Movement that developed in the churches apart from any missionary influence. “The Church became a rallying point for the oppressed Korean people,” writes Shearer. “Missionaries had no part in planning this ‘Independence Movement,’ and the official mission board reports denied that it had any religious character” even though many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1919 were prominent Christians, as were many of the participants in the street demonstrations.41
What followed was a very bleak time for Christians in Korea. Many were imprisoned for their political involvement, and churches were burned. According to one local report, “almost all the men of these two churches took part in the demonstrations and fight,” and most were either arrested or fled the area.
It seemed a black day for the Church. Many churches stood almost empty…. Christian schools had to be closed, and the country itineration of missionaries stopped temporarily. Colporteurs could not sell literature anymore, and it looked as if the year 1919 was a black year for the Church in Korea. Yet within the space of a year it was evident that 1919 was … instead the bright mark of a new era for the kingdom of God in Korea…. The fact that Korean people came to Christ under the prison conditions gives us a hint of the nation’s great receptivity to the Gospel and a clue to the rapid growth of the Church for the next seven years.42
During the 1930s the church in Korea continued to grow under continued persecution. This was an era when Koreans were required to give obeisance at Shinto shrines—though the Japanese rulers insisted that such acts were not religious in nature but rather reverence for ancestors. For not complying, Christian schools lost government recognition, and many people lost their employment. In Pyongyang, Samuel Moffett made the decision, along with other missionaries, that they would close the seminary and college rather than submitting to the ultimatum that they take part in ceremonies at the local Buddhist shrine. For his part in what was considered to be obstructing authority, he was forced to leave the country. It was a time of testing for the church in many ways, and it was also a time when independent movements and what some described as “fanatical” groups of Christians became more prominent. As the 1940s and World War II approached, missionaries were evacuated from Korea, and the church would continue to be even more free of outside influence.
Protestant Mission Initiatives in Japan
Protestant mission work began in Japan in 1859 and grew in the decades that followed, with many mission agencies involved in the work. But unlike the situation in Korea, no conspicuous leaders or personalities stood out in those early years, and there was no comparable church growth to report to mission societies in the homeland. Some of the early missionaries transferred from China and maintained close contacts with their colleagues there. Most, however, were sent from their headquarters to transplant their respective denominations in Japan. One of the common descriptions of Japanese Christianity is that it is Western and not truly Japanese. Whether due to a different political situation or a different set of “pioneer” missionaries or the lack of the widespread use of the “Nevius Method,” Japanese church growth remained very slow, with professed Christians probably never exceeding more than one percent of the population.
One particular mission endeavor that did experience rather significant growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Russian Orthodox outreach headed by Ivan Kasatkin, who took the name Nikolai after he was ordained a priest. His initial assignment in 1861 was to serve Russian diplomats, but his vision was to do missionary work, and with that in mind, he spent the next years in language study of both Chinese and Japanese. In 1868 he baptized his first three converts, and within a year he had a fellowship of twelve baptized believers and twenty-five catechumens.
Unlike many of the Protestant missionaries who had very close ties with their denominations and mission organizations back home, Nikolai was determined from the start that this was to be an Orthodox mission to the Japanese people, “entirely independent of the Russian state and its traditions.”To accomplish this, he laid out a strategy to train catechists, “the best among whom might later be ordained,” writes Stephen Neill. “Japan was to be evangelized by the Japanese. Laypeople were to be drawn into the administration of the Church in a way that was almost unknown in other Orthodox churches.”43 By 1882 there were upwards of eight thousand baptized members, that number growing to some twenty-six thousand by the turn of the century.
Nikolai’s loyalty remained with the Japanese Orthodox churches during a time of great testing for him personally. War broke out between Russia and Japan in 1904. In light of the predicament, he wrote a pastoral letter to the churches under his care:
Brothers and sisters, carry out all the duties that are demanded of you as loyal subjects in this situation. Pray to God that he may give victory to your imperial army; thank God for the victories that have been given; make sacrifices to meet the needs of the war…. But in addition to our earthly fatherland, we have another, a heavenly fatherland. To this all men belong without distinction of nationality, since all men are equally children of the heavenly Father…. It is for that reason, brothers and sisters, that I do not separate myself from you, but remain in your family as though it was my own.44
One of the unique aspects of Protestant mission work in the early years was the emergence of evangelistic bands of youthful converts. Beginning in the 1870s, these young men were developing into Japan’s church leaders of the future. Guido Verbeck, a Dutch Reformed missionary, had organized one of these bands in Nagasaki soon after he arrived in Japan. His primary evangelistic method was to teach English by using the Bible as his text. When he opened a school for Japanese interpreters, he added the U.S. Constitution as a source. He was involved in a number of educational ventures and served for a time as Japan’s official translator of government documents, but his vision was to train students for ministry and government service. Another American who organized an evangelistic band and had a profound influence in Japan was William Smith Clark, a man who today would be described as a short-term, tent-making missionary.
William Smith Clark and Kanzo Uchimura
William Smith Clark (1826–86) was the president of Massachusetts Agricultural College when his contributions to the field of agriculture came to the attention of visiting dignitaries from Japan. They invited him to come to Japan to set up a similar institution in their own country. His tenure was short, but his accomplishments were enormous, as David Mitchell summarizes:
In July 1876 the dynamic Clark reached Sapporo, capital of Japan’s newly colonized northern island, and within eight months set up a college, preparatory school, and experimental farm, introduced crops and trees, agricultural buildings and methods, and converted all sixteen students to Christianity. The young believers, exemplifying his parting words, “Boys, be ambitious,” won all the second class who also signed Clark’s “Covenant of Believers in Jesus.” The zealous group became known as the Sapporo Band, whose most notable member was Kanzo Uchimura.45
Kanzo Uchimura (1861–1930), writes Andrew Walls, was “one of the outstanding Christian figures of his day in Japan.”46 He was born in Tokyo, the son of a prominent samurai official who was also a Confucian scholar. His early schooling was a traditional Confucian education, but his father was concerned that his son be prepared to confront the modern world and urged him to enroll in Sapporo Agricultural College, where he was awarded a full scholarship. Here Uchimura was suddenly confronted with the Christian faith. Clark had returned to America, but his students remained—and they formed the tenacious Sapporo Band. Uchimura’s conversion in 1878 was prompted in part by his disillusionment with Shinto. “As a child, he had been taught that there were more than 8,000 Shinto gods and goddesses…. Sometimes the demands of these gods were contradictory…. This troubled the serious young Uchimura, and he now found a solution in Christianity and its one God.”47
Uchimura was baptized by a Methodist missionary, but he felt no particular loyalty to that denomination. He soon gathered a group of friends to help him plant a church in Sapporo—friends who, likewise, felt no special loyalty to the Western denominational church through which they had been baptized. Their evangelism and building project was suddenly halted, however, when one of the Methodist missionaries, who had granted them $698 for the new Sapporo church building and who had assumed the church would be a Methodist one, realized that Uchimura did not intend to affiliate the church with the Methodist mission. He became angry and demanded immediate repayment. The young men repaid the money from their own earnings—a considerable amount, but well worth the sacrifice. “S. Church is Independent,” wrote Uchimura. “Joy inexpressible and indescribable! The result of two years economy and industry was our freedom.” Not surprisingly, “the sectarianism Uchimura encountered regarding the building of the church,” writes Chung Jun Ki, “enhanced his negative feelings toward the Western missionaries in Japan.”48
This was the beginning of what would become known as the Mukyokai, or “Non-Church Movement,” which Uchimura emphasized should not be viewed negatively, “as one sees in anarchism or nihilism; it does not attempt to overthrow anything. ‘Non-church’ is the church for those who have no church.” Recognizing that it could become another sectarian denomination, he emphasized the need for a continual spiritual “revolution”—always moving away from the “old” mukyokai while recreating mukyokai. There was no hierarchy or any kind of organized religious system; rather, the movement was to be simply “a gathering of Christians in a communal atmosphere, where Christ is the center and love and faith draw them together.”49
Discipleship was the movement’s philosophy of missions. As followers matured in the faith, they invited friends and neighbors to their homes and began to teach them. The movement would spread as the members moved from place to place. He was convinced that this concept was the key to bringing Christianity to Japan—“that the Japanese could easily be taught Christianity if they were properly instructed, that is, if they were directed to the teachings in the Bible and not instructed in the rites and formalities of church institutions.”50
Some missionaries viewed the movement as cultic because of its separation from Western denominations, and Uchimura was harshly criticized for using the term “Japanese Christians” for his followers. He was a man of strong national pride, and he regarded Japan as “a peaceful, prosperous nation, a model for other nations.” In defending his national pride, he was quick to point out the same national spirit among the missionaries:
I am blamed by missionaries for upholding Japanese Christianity. They say that Christianity is a universal religion, and to uphold Japanese Christianity is to make a universal religion a national religion…. Why blame me for upholding Japanese Christianity while every one of them upholds his or her own Christianity? … Is not Episcopalianism essentially an English Christianity? … Why, for instance, call a universal religion “Cumberland Presbyterianism”? If it is not wrong to apply the name of a district in the state of Kentucky to Christianity, why is it wrong for me to apply the name of my country to the same. I think I have as much right to call my Christianity Japanese as thousands of Christians in the Cumberland Valley they live in.
When a Japanese truly and independently believes in Christ, he is a Japanese Christian, and his Christianity is Japanese Christianity.51
Uchimura’s most enduring legacy to Japanese Christianity was found in his writings. He published hundreds of issues of his monthly journal, The Biblical Study, and along with that a 22-volume Bible commentary. His writings were widely used by Christians outside his movement, many of whom were not connected with the more established denominations as had been the case in Korea. His writings, some of which have a contemporary tone that rings as true today as when they were written, are still used and quoted. He was a profound social critic, as is demonstrated by a piece that was published in 1926 in the Japan Christian Intelligencer:
Americans themselves know all too well that their genius in not in religion…. Americans are great people; there is no doubt about that. They are great in building cities and railroads…. Americans have a wonderful genius for improving the breeds of horses, cattle, sheep and swine; they raise them in multitudes, butcher them, eat them, and send their meat-products to all parts of the world. Americans too are great inventors. They invented or perfected telegraphs, telephones, talking and hearing machines, automobiles … poison gasses…. They are great in democracy…. Needless to say, they are great in money…. They first make money before they undertake any serious work…. To start and carry on any work without money is in the eyes of the Americans madness…. Americans are great in all these things and much else; but not in Religion, as they themselves very well know…. Americans must count religion in order to see or show its value…. To them big churches are successful churches…. To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavour. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers! … Mankind goes down to America to learn how to live the earthly life; but to live the heavenly life, they go to some other people. It is no special fault of Americans to be this-worldly; it is their national characteristic; and they in their self-knowledge ought to serve mankind in other fields than in religion.52
Uchimura had lived and studied in America, but most of his perspectives on Americans came from his association with them in Japan, primarily with American missionaries. Many of the early missionaries were independent or sponsored by independent faith missions, and they sometimes seemed to mirror the description that Uchimura had drawn—Americans bringing to Japan a religion of numbers and money and strategies. Charles and Lettie Cowman, with their ties to the Holiness movement, could have been the very Americans he was describing.
Charles and Lettie Cowman came to Japan as independent missionaries in 1901 and later founded the Oriental Missionary Society and worked closely with the Holiness Church in Japan. Their commitment to missions had come several years after they had married and settled into an affluent lifestyle—Charles, in management at Western Union Telegraph Company, and Lettie the daughter of a banker. They had only recently been converted and were attending a mission conference at Moody Church in Chicago where A. B. Simpson (founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance) was the speaker. Following the emotionally charged message, an offering was taken. So moved was Charles that he contributed “a roll of bills that represented a month’s salary.” But the offering had just begun. “Then, as the enthusiasm mounted higher, people wanted to give their jewelry and even watches. At the announcement of this second offering, Charles disentangled his solid gold watch and chain, and looked down at the large diamond in Lettie’s engagement ring, as if to say: ‘Surely you are going to come along with me in this, aren’t you?’”53
The connections with Moody Memorial Church, A. B. Simpson, the Holiness Movement, and their student days at Moody Bible Institute put the Cowmans squarely in the camp of turn-of-the-century Fundamentalism—as did their concerns about separation from the world. After her conversion, Lettie had stood by her piano and “yielded” her stacks of dance music, operas, popular songs, and secular books to God, never to again be involved in such worldly amusements.54At about the same time, her husband received a very specific message from God that he wrote in his Bible: “Called to Japan. August 11, 1900, at 10:30 A.M.”55 But their obvious piety did not make them immune from what Uchimura would have called “this-worldliness,” that “national characteristic” of Americans.
Numbers and money and statistics and strategies were the threads that held the Cowman’s ministry together from the very beginning. In her leather-bound birthday book, Lettie had written what her biographer describes as “her financial hymn of praise, her monetary missionary psalm”—not to be mistaken for “an audit-account of finance.”
Received to date
$ .25
November 1, 1900
300.00
70.00
Japan
464.00
Nakada
50.00
China
25.00
India
909.00
December, 1901
$1,000.00
from a stranger
500.00
from a stranger
1,000.00
from a stranger for missions
February 28, 1903, to date
$7,000.00
January, 1909, to date
$104,000.00
praise God!
February 1, 1919, to date
$510,000.00
praise God!
May 1, 1939, to date
$5,000,000.00
56
Despite the significant growth in income in less than forty years, there was never enough. There was always a shortage of funds, as Lettie’s biographer writes on page after page:
Days and nights are given to prayer for funds…. How thrilling (with an empty treasury!) to have young Bud Kilbourne come rushing in from town, waving a cabled order from America for $2,000.00…. Funds begin to flow more freely. She [Lettie] is learning to be a campaigner on the deputational field…. Soon the funds are gone once more. New friends must be raised up to maintain the advance of the work…. As they return to Japan, she sees the crusade vision burn like a fever in Charles’ heart. Faster-farther! Are his watchwords. He knows that time is short…. Things look dark. Funds are falling off at a fearful rate. She goes at once to the bankbook of heaven…. Millions of dollars will be needed, but millions of dollars are nothing to God.57
“Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers!” wrote Uchimura. For the Cowmans, numbers did not just relate to money, though specific amounts of money were very significant. For instance, a bill for $878.05 arrived at the office (for the purchase of 100,000 Gospels). When all the receipts for money that had arrived over the following weekend were calculated, the adding machine tape totaled exactly $878.05.58 Money was a critical element. Under the title “What would I do if I fell heir to a million dollars,” Charles penned a wish list for his mission dreams.59
Equally important figures were those used for calculating numbers of people and households and souls saved. Like many other missions, the Cowman’s worked with evangelistic bands during their ministry in Japan. “One band has increased to seven bands, with a total of seventy-eight crusaders…. It is thrilling—two hundred saved yonder, a hundred here. Day by day the tally grows. Thousands are numbered among the redeemed.”60 The mission strategies hinged on numbers:
Charles E. Cowman’s vision for Japan is carried out through crusade bands, pledged to visit every house in the Empire. They have the benefit of military maps which the government has released. (God provided them for this hour; not before, nor since, have these been available.) They are large maps representing five-mile squares of territory. Marked on every road and path is each house, Buddhist monastery, Shinto temple, wayside shrine, or tenant shack.
Charles makes definite assignments, receives personal reports, believes in achieving day-by-day goals. His room takes on the activity of a combined business, missionary, and military headquarters…. Mission stations are multiplying. Nightly meetings and nightly converts swell the totals.61
In 1918 the plan that the Cowmans had initiated after they had arrived in Japan was declared finished: “The initial work of the mission has been completed…. The pioneer ‘Every Creature Crusade’ has been completed. Ten million three hundred thousand homes of Japan have received a first gospel message—all in seventeen years!”62 Then, in 1924, after suffering from a serious heart condition for several years, Charles died.
During her husband’s long illness, Lettie had written and published a devotional book, Streams in the Desert—a book that would become an evangelical bestseller and classic. Following his death, she was nearly paralyzed with grief, but eventually she began to write books again, including a biography of her late husband. Then in 1928, after the death of Ernest Kilbourne, who had succeeded her husband as president of the Oriental Missionary Society, Lettie herself assumed the presidency, a position she held until 1949. Seven years later, “at 6:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, August 10, 1936, the Lord speaks: ‘I sanctified thee and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations’ ( Jer. 1:5). She sees that before she was born, God planned her life.” God, she was convinced, had given her a “new thing” to do, and that was nothing less than “the evangelization of the world.” She believed God was calling her to finish the work Charles had started—he was “God’s pioneer in putting the gospel into every home in one nation.” She would put the gospel in every home in the world.63
From that point on, her story reads almost like an atlas. She started her campaign in Finland, then went on to Lapland and the other Baltic States, and to Russia and other European countries. Egypt, Israel, Ethiopia, India, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Korea, Columbia—one country followed on another—though when her world tour was over, most of the world was still untouched by her ministry. In many places she was hosted by government dignitaries, and in every country she visited—and some she did not—she sought to carry out her evangelization of the world by having evangelistic bands distribute Gospels in every home. In Mexico alone, the number of Gospels distributed was 1,455,000.64
Still counting to the very end, this banker’s daughter died April 17, 1960, one century old, minus a decade.
Mabel Francis was a contemporary of the Cowmans and, like them, influenced by turn-of-the-century Fundamentalism, but her life and ministry was very different. Indeed, most of her life was spent in obscurity. Her missionary work in Japan would have appeared utterly insignificant, with no “Every Creature Crusades” and millions of dollars to account for. Yet at the end of her fifty-six-year mission tenure in Japan, she was the country’s most celebrated foreign “citizen.”
Mabel was born in 1880 and grew up in New Hampshire. After the untimely death of the young man she hoped to marry, she became an itinerant evangelist and store-front preacher. Then, at age nineteen, she felt God calling her to be a missionary in Japan, where she began her ministry with the Christian and Missionary Alliance ten years later in 1909. In 1913 her brother joined her in the work, and together they planted twenty churches. In 1922 her widowed sister, Anne, also joined her, and she and Mabel spent much of the next forty years together, with Mabel doing evangelism and Anne teaching.
Mabel Francis, Japan’s most celebrated foreign “citizen.”
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Alliance, strapped for funds, recalled their missionaries from Japan. But unlike their colleagues, the sisters refused to come home. The needs in Japan were too great to abandon the work. Money trickled in from supporters back home, but life was very difficult. Mabel conducted her evangelistic outreach by bicycle, though she often thought “how nice it would be to have money to ride the bus.” And how nice it would be to have men come and do the work: “O Lord, where are the men who ought to be riding these bicycles up and down these trails?” She was a single woman who had longed for a husband, as she later confessed:
You see, when I was so discouraged and the job seemed so terribly big, I thought, “Well now, if I was married, I could follow on with my husband, and there would be something doing, but what can a little person like myself do?” I just felt so hopeless!
And then the Lord said, “You are on the wrong track. I have a plan for your life and it is not for you to be married…. Well, you know the whole thing passed out of my life like a cloud passing away, and that was many years ago. The thought of marriage has meant nothing to me since that time—nothing!65
The difficult times during the 1930s were only exacerbated after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Initially the sisters were permitted to remain in their home—officially under house arrest. But later they were taken to an internment camp set up in a Catholic monastery. After the war Francis was heavily involved in humanitarian efforts, but she was distressed by the lack of supplies and fellow workers. “That’s where America failed in Japan,” she lamented. “Our churches didn’t grasp the opportunity—they didn’t send a thousand missionaries. During the first ten years after the war, the Japanese people were really very open and seeking…. Now … it is much harder to reach them.”66
Though never trained in cross-cultural communication, Francis won the hearts of the Japanese people that she came to know. One of the Japanese converts as a young girl had been intrigued by a foreign woman, and she inquired of a friend who this bicycling woman was—this woman who was always smiling. When she was later invited to attend a service, “much to her surprise,” wrote Francis, “she found out I was the preacher when she got into the church.”67 Francis was open and honest about her own struggles—particularly in her desire to organize and plan the ministry in a culture that was not her own. She writes of one such incident that reveals her seriousness as well as her sense of humor:
For instance, we had an elderly Japanese man in one of our groups who had been wonderfully saved. It was indeed a miracle, and he would faithfully get up and give long testimonies, magnifying the Lord.
But he had lost his teeth, and he could not talk plainly. No one could really understand him very well.
I used to sit there and pray, “O Lord, stop him. He is spoiling the meeting. Everything will go to pieces here.”
So one night the Lord spoke to me and said, “I can bless right over that old man. He is standing there trying to glorify me.”
“But you do bother Me,” the Lord said to me, “by sitting here and fretting over it.”
Oh, wasn’t I ashamed of the spirit I had! I saw it. And that’s the way He took that fretting spirit out of my life. I just committed it to Him.68
More than a decade after the end of World War II, Japanese officials honored Mabel and Anne for their long years of service in Japan, and they were invited to speak at official functions. In 1962 the emperor honored Mabel Francis with Japan’s highest civilian honor, membership in the exclusive Fifth Order of the Sacred Treasure. This was one of many ways she was singled out for her sacrifice for “the welfare of the Japanese people in their distress and confusion at the time of their defeat.”69 The award had come after a furlough in America. She had returned to Japan to continue her ministry. She was eighty-three.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chung, Jun Ki. Social Criticism of Uchimura Kanzo and Kim Kyo-Shin. Seoul: UBF Press, 1988.
Cowman, Lettie B. Charles E. Cowman: Missionary—Warrior. Los Angeles: Oriental Missionary Society, 1939.
Davies, Daniel M. The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988.
Francis, Mabel. One Shall Chase a Thousand. Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1968.
Hunt, Everett N., Jr. Protestant Pioneers in Korea. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1980.
Pearson, B. H. The Vision Lives: A Profile of Mrs. Charles E. Cowman. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1961.
Shearer, Roy E. Wildfire: Church Growth in Korea. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966.