EDITORS’ NOTE: Baptist Press today begins a nine-part series on Koreans in the Southern Baptist Convention, highlighting their growing influence and expanding global mission efforts. Four overview stories will appear in Baptist Press today, with five profiles scheduled for tomorrow.
LOS ANGELES (BP)–In less than 50 years, Koreans in the Southern Baptist Convention have started nearly 800 churches and sent out at least 200 missionaries through the International Mission Board to a dozen nations.
Many give credit to the Koreans’ dependence on prayer.
“Korean Christians are bringing to America with them their tradition of praying consistently, urgently and with great faith that the Lord hears and has promised to answer,” said Morris H. Chapman, president of the SBC’s Executive Committee. “They are teaching us much about the power of prayer.”
Changes in U.S. immigration laws and political changes in South Korea positioned Koreans to spread the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.
From 1924 until 1965, U.S. law had barred most Koreans and other Asians from immigrating into the United States. So when Korea’s political climate shifted in late 1972, many Koreans who wanted to a better future decided to go through the doors the United States had opened in 1965.
“When you’re poor, you pray,” said David Gill, pastor of Concord Korean Baptist Church in Martinez, Calif., and the SBC’s second vice president. “When the hard times made the people really look up to the Lord, the church became strong.”
Christianity, via Presbyterians, first entered Korea in 1884 followed by Baptists in 1889, but it didn’t make much headway in part because of a series of persecutions. At the end of the Korean War there were fewer than 800,000 Christians. But they prayed — doubling every decade from the 1950s on, and by the early 1970s, a quarter of Korea’s population were Christians.
Not all the immigrants to the United States were Christians, but almost without exception they connected with a church upon their arrival in this country. Today, about 75 percent of the 1.5 million Koreans in the U.S. (up from fewer than 12,000 in 1960) remain affiliated with a church.
“The churches are very vital for freshly arriving immigrants,” said Dan Moon, who was a church starting strategist for more than 33 years with the SBC’s North American Mission Board and its predecessor, the Home Mission Board. “The churches are the center for all information -– employment, education, investment -– that Koreans can’t find anywhere else in America.
“And no matter what religious affiliation or if they were agnostic, the immigrants are obviously faced with a number of cultural shocks and uncertainties,” Moon continued. “Therefore, regardless of their religious background, they begin to seek God’s strength.”
Anglos started the nation’s first Korean Baptist church in Washington, D.C., in 1956 to meet the needs of Korean diplomats and students. Now known as the Washington Korean Baptist Church, it affiliated with the SBC in 1970.
Don and Esther Kim founded Berendo Street Baptist Church in March 1957 in their apartment in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Today it’s known as the “mother church” of all SBC Korean Baptist congregations because of its influence, leadership and training opportunities.
The next SBC Korean church wasn’t started until 14 years later, in 1971, when Dan Moon, who had been trained at Berendo Street and mentored by Kim, founded the San Jose Korean Baptist Church.
Several other Korean churches started in the 1970s across the nation in response to Korean immigration patterns. Unlike other immigrant groups, Koreans, who often were well-educated, did not feel the need to cluster with other Koreans if they thought they could be more successful elsewhere.
Pastors, often called from Korea, suffered not only from typical immigrant culture shock but also from demands of a pastorate that were much different than in their homeland. They often taught driving lessons and citizenship classes and transported people to various legal and immigration meetings, several Korean leaders explained. Alongside their spiritual leadership, they had to clean the church and care for the grounds whereas, in Korea, “spiritual leader” had been their sole responsibility.
Several pastors, under the leadership of San Jose’s Moon, organized what is known today as the Council of Korean Southern Baptist Churches in America, which helps meet the fellowship, training and spiritual needs of the 761 Korean churches and their pastors across the country.
“We are immigrant churches so we have to adjust ourselves to this new country of freedom and opportunities, so we may be good partners with SBC churches,” said Man Poong “Dennis” Kim, president of the Korean council and pastor of Global Mission Church in Silver Spring, Md. “Actually, we are partners now, and in the beginning we are followers.”
The Korean council gathers for its annual session prior to the annual meeting of the SBC each year. This year their sessions will begin June 20 at the downtown Holiday Inn Express and SBC Building in Nashville, Tenn.
“We have a worship service and many good seminars in Korean on subjects basically to improve the quality of information available, spirituality and relationships, and we encourage them to take part in many different projects with the Southern Baptist American churches,” Kim said. “The leaders of the council would like to encourage every one of our churches to be good partners with the SBC.”
Some pastors took that a step further last year and repeated it in May of this year –- organizing the Kona Mission Summit in Hawaii for pastors of Korean ancestry from around the world to meet with representatives of the International Mission Board and discuss ways of working more effectively together.
Historically, individual Korean churches have sent out missionaries and started churches in areas with concentrations of Koreans without the cooperation of the IMB. This includes East Asia as well as South America and Europe. Entire training systems have been developed that in one nation alone has graduated at least 375 pastors to date.
But as Korean churches learned more about IMB’s effectiveness, some pastors determined it would be wise stewardship to pool their financial and personnel resources with those of the IMB.
“We wanted to learn and discuss how Korean churches can work together with IMB to reach out to other people groups in the world,” said Gill, who facilitated the May 9-11 conference. “We have 6.5 million Koreans in 172 countries. It is God’s providential will to spread so many Koreans in so many countries for world mission.”
Over the last decade, at least 213 Koreans have been appointed by the IMB as career missionaries, by far more than any other ethnic group except for Caucasians. Thousands have gone on short-term mission assignments; 990 from Global Mission Church in Silver Spring, Md. alone.
“It has tremendous implications that our Southern Baptist Convention is embracing other kinds of people,” Gill said. “We are one body. I think that’s what the Kingdom is, what God wants, what the United States is. There’s beauty in it. We’re strengthened so much when we walk together.”
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