In the latest inspirational and informative article on influential Scots in Church History and Missions by Paul James-Griffiths of Christian Heritage Edinburgh, he writes, “Scottish Christians had a significant influence in the founding of the first Protestant Church in Korea. Dr John Ross, who is buried in Edinburgh, is regarded highly by the 12 million Christians in South Korea (and also among North Korean Christians), but he is virtually unheard of today here in Scotland. It is a joy to bring out the significant part he played in God’s story in Korea.”
Plaque dedicated to Revd Dr John Ross (1842-1915) at Portree Parish Church on the Isle of Skye, where he had been the pastor before leaving for China. From the website of Mayfield Salisbury Parish Church, Edinburgh, where he was an elder.
The Revd Robert Jermaine Thomas stood paralysed with fear as the fire began to rage on board the merchant ship, the General Sherman. This Welshman had been delegated as an interpreter in Chinese to the Koreans at Pyongyang, but the boat had run aground in the river and the locals, stirred with hatred towards the foreigners, had set light to the ship.
Coming to his senses as the fire licked his clothing, he grabbed an armful of Chinese Bibles, and dived into the river. The other members of the ship were being massacred on the river bank when he came ashore. With love and kindness, he thrust the Chinese Bibles at the Koreans. A sneering soldier struck him with his sword. As the missionary fell to the ground, the Bibles tumbled with him. Intrigued, his executor picked one up, not knowing why. Perhaps it was the beautiful Chinese script that caught his attention? Certainly, there was a deeper reason, which he would later discover.
Chu Won Park returned home that day on 2nd September 1866, carrying the book. Later, he decided that the Chinese artwork and writing would look good as wallpaper, so he methodically ripped out pages of the Bible and stuck them on his walls. One day he found that the writing had a habit of drawing his attention and calling him to read. Bit by bit he worked his way through the Bible wallpaper with a growing sense of a spiritual thirst inside him. He invited his friends to come and join him reading the Chinese script on his walls. Before long a group of Koreans was studying the Chinese wall-Bible in his home, and believing the message.
Later this man moved and his house became an inn in 1893, which was then bought by missionaries and turned into a church. The original congregation was called Chowlangli Church, or the Thomas Memorial Church. Out of this grew the Jangdaejae Church, which was later called the Jangdaehyun Church in a different location, in which the Pyongyang revival first broke out in 1907, bringing an estimated 30,000 Koreans to Christ. It was during this revival that Chu Won Park confessed to murdering Revd Thomas forty-one years earlier. Before the Communist take-over, Pyongyang became known as the Jerusalem of the Far East because of its vibrant Christian community.
It was at the instigation of Revd Alexander Williamson, a missionary sent out to China by the National Bible Society of Scotland, that had stirred Revd Thomas to reach out to the Koreans in their own country when he boarded that merchant ship for Pyongyang. Both Williamson and Thomas had discussed the great need of Scriptures amongst the Koreans who could speak Chinese. Williamson had been looking after Korean Roman Catholics who had fled a great persecution from Korea to Chefoo in China, and sadly discovered that they knew almost nothing about the Bible.
Dr John Ross and Korea
Seven years after the martyrdom of Revd Thomas, Dr John Ross of Scotland set out on a seven-day trek from Niu-chuang to the Korean border. He hoped to be able to reach the Koreans through the Korean Gate, but was not allowed to cross the River Ya-lu. Whilst he was praying and deliberating what to do, he befriended a Korean man at the border who showed interest in the Christian faith, and he received some Chinese Gospels and tracts. As a result, several Korean travelling merchants came to Mukden to seek out the missionaries. Ross tried again to get into Korea, but again he was thwarted from going to live there and learn the language and culture. On this second occasion a Korean merchant lost his boat and produce in a squall on the river and was devastated. Ross offered to pay him to teach him Korean, but at first the merchant was terrified, knowing that if he was caught his family would all be put in prison, and he would probably be executed for this crime. At last, he agreed, as long as the teaching sessions took place at night.
After this initial grounding in the language John Ross and John McIntyre were assisted by four Koreans to help them translate the Gospel of Luke into Korean, which was published in 1882, and eventually the whole New Testament came off the press in Mukden in 1887. In the same year the Gospel of Luke was published, an extraordinary work began. The National Bible Society of Scotland sent thousands of copies into Korea via Japan, but just before this several Koreans who had become Christians at Mukden took the message to the Korean community in Uiju on the Chinese border with Korea, and then brought the Gospels there. When Dr Ross and Mr Webster were asked to visit the Korean valleys there in December 1884, they found people hungering after God. On a careful examination of the faith of the new believers, they baptized seventy-five of them. They discovered that all of them had become Christians either through the Korean evangelists from Mukden, or through the Gospels of Luke and tracts.
If Uiju was one of the first seedbeds for Christianity among the Koreans in China, then one of the first known seedbeds in Korea itself was at Sorae on the West coast. Seo Sang-ryun had come with his brother Seo Sang-u as ginseng merchants to Mukden in the late 1870s. Through the work of Ross and McIntyre they became Christians and Seo Sang-ryun in particular was a great help in the translation of Luke’s Gospel. The church at Mukden supported him as an evangelist to his own people in Sorae in 1884 where he disseminated many copies of Luke’s Gospel and planted a church.
When Horace Grant Underwood and Henry Gerhard Appenzeller arrived in Korea from America in 1885, they found a group of Christians already in Seoul, the capital city. Dr Ross went there to assist in the formation of this church of thirteen members, all of whom had been converted through Seo Sang-ryun who had been baptized and trained at Mukden. Dr Ross had followed William Chalmers Burns’ Chinese model of training up indigenous evangelists, teachers, and leaders, in order to see a self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing church. To this end he had pioneered the Theological Class in 1883, which became a Bible college. When John Nevius of the China Mission of the Presbyterian Church of America visited Seoul in 1890, he recommended that they should see a native church that from the beginning would adopt his “three selfs”, which was adopted by the Northern Presbyterian Mission of the USA the following year and implemented in 1893. But this model had already been pioneered by William Chalmers Burns and John Ross from Scotland.
Although Ross’ Korean New Testament was superseded by the American version in 1901, his work had been foundational. The American Old Testament in Korean came later in 1911, by which time the Korean hunger for God was so high that 660,000 Bibles, Gospels, and tracts were sold. When the Hon. T.H. Yun from Songdo in Korea stood up to speak at the 1910 World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh, the 1,200 delegates were on the edge of their seats with expectancy. “Twenty-five years ago,” he said, “there was not a single missionary and not a single Christian; today there are nearly two hundred thousand Christians in Korea.” Today, South Korea has one of the highest percentages of evangelical Christians in the world.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19, NKJV).