Korean Protestant Christianity: A Missiological Reflection

Abstract

April 2012 Joon-Sik Park is the E. Stanley Jones Professor of World Evangelism, Methodist Theological School in Ohio, located in Delaware, Ohio. He is the author of Missional Ecclesiologies in Creative Tension: H. Richard Niebuhr and John H. Yoder (Peter Lang, 2007). —jpark@mtso.edu T first Protestant missionary set foot on the Korea Peninsula in 1884.1 The growth of Korean Protestantism in the past century and a quarter has been extraordinary by any measure. Korean churches experienced rapid numerical growth, in particular from the 1960s through the 1980s. In 1960 the Protestant population was 623,000, and by 1985 it had grown over tenfold to 6,489,000. From the early 1990s, however, the growth rate of the Korean church began to decline. In 1995, according to the Population and Housing Census Report, 8,760,000, or 19.7 percent of the population, were Protestant Christians. During the following decade the number of Protestants declined slightly, to 8,616,000, a 1.6 percent decrease. During the same period, by contrast, Korean Catholics increased by 74.4 percent (from 2,951,000 to 5,146,000), and Buddhists by 3.9 percent (from 10,321,000 to 10,726,000).2 This downward trend has alarmed Korean Protestant churches, forcing them to search for its causes and cures. Their responses thus far, however, have been reactive and shallow; the churches have not yet engaged in the critical theological self-reflection necessary for the renewal of the church at a more fundamental level. Specifically, I believe that Korean Protestant Christianity needs radical transformation at the level of its ecclesiology. In this article I examine the past growth and present decline of the Protestant church in South Korea, identifying major factors in its advancement and their role in the current downturn. I then propose an Anabaptist vision of the church as an ecclesiological tradition to be integrated into a new vision of the Korean church, and hospitality as the context for its mission and evangelism.