Gil Sun-ju

On March 1, 1919, twenty-nine men met in a restaurant in Seoul called Taehwagwan. They read out a declaration in which Korea called itself independent of Japan. Thirty-three names stood beneath that declaration. Sixteen of them were Christians. One of the names belonged to a Presbyterian minister from Pyongyang, a man of around fifty with poor eyesight. He was not there that day. Like three other Christian signatories, he was absent from Taehwagwan, according to an overview by the Korean historian Lee Man-yeol.

His name was there, though. And for that he went to prison.

That man was Gil Sun-ju. In English books he is usually called Kil Sŏn-ju. He was one of the first seven Koreans ordained as Presbyterian ministers in 1907. He stood at the center of the Pyongyang revival in that same year. He started prayer meetings in the early morning, a practice that continues in Korean churches to this day. An article in Christian History calls him the father of the Korean church.

He began his search for God in the mountains, on a very different path.

THREE YEARS IN THE MOUNTAINS

Gil Sun-ju was born in 1869 in Anju, in South Pyongan Province. That town now lies in North Korea. His father was called Gil Bong-sun. According to the Korean Wikipedia, he married young, at around the age of eleven, as was customary in his region. I have not found that detail in other sources.

In those years Korea was a kingdom that had long closed itself off from the outside world. The country was governed according to the ideas of Confucius: order, duty, reverence for parents and ancestors. Alongside Confucianism lived Buddhism, Taoism and the old folk religion with its spirits and shamans. There were hardly any Christians. The first Protestant missionaries did not arrive until the 1880s.

The young Gil was a strong man. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, from the age of nineteen he trained his body with strength exercises. When he was twenty-five, a friend told him about seondo, a Taoist path to a long, strong and even immortal life. Gil went into the mountains and practiced there for three years. He did not find what he was looking for.

The sources do not fully agree about his religious path before his conversion. Christian History calls him a Taoist and Confucianist. Britannica speaks of Zen Buddhism. Korean sources speak of seondo, the Taoist path.

Do you know what that is like, investing years in something and then discovering it does not bring you what you hoped for?

A FRIEND AND A BOOK

The friend who had once pointed him to the mountains, Kim Jong-seop, had meanwhile become a Christian. Through him Gil came into contact with Christian books in Chinese, the language in which educated Koreans read at the time. One book in particular made an impression: The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, the story of a pilgrim who sets out with a burden on his back toward the heavenly city. According to the Christian History Almanac, the American missionary Samuel Moffett had recommended the book to him.

How he finally came to faith, we know from what he later told about it himself. In Soo Kim, professor of church history, puts it this way. While Gil was praying, he heard the sound of a flute and a voice calling his name. Then he prayed: “My beloved God, forgive my great sins and save me.”

It is his own testimony. No one else was there. What followed is certain, though. In 1897, at the age of twenty-nine, Gil was baptized. According to the Korean Wikipedia, this was done by the American missionary Graham Lee.

AN ELDER IN JANGDAEHYEON

Gil did not stay in the back row for long. In 1898 he became the leader of a congregation. In 1901 he became an elder of the Jangdaehyeon Church in Pyongyang, the city’s large Presbyterian church, later also called the Central Church. A year later Moffett appointed him as a helper, a kind of assistant preacher, for the provinces of Pyongan and Hwanghae.

That fitted what Moffett had in mind. According to the Christian History Almanac, he wanted Koreans themselves to lead the Korean church, not outsiders. Men like Gil made that possible. Because of this, the church looked less like a Western, colonial movement to many Koreans.

In the same years Gil worked for his country. With the later nationalist Ahn Chang-ho he founded a Pyongyang branch of the Independence Club, a movement that wanted to renew Korea and keep it free from foreign domination. For him, faith and homeland were intertwined from the start.

I find that a striking point. Many Koreans at the time saw Christianity as something belonging to foreigners. Gil showed that a Korean could become a Christian without ceasing to be Korean.

In 1903 he began studying at the Presbyterian seminary in Pyongyang, the training school for ministers that the American missionaries had set up.

A COUNTRY UNDER PRESSURE

To understand what happened in 1907, you need to know how things stood with Korea at the time. In 1905 Japan won a war against Russia. After that, Japan took over most of the Korean government. In 1907 the Korean king was forced to abdicate and the Korean army was disbanded. Three years later, in 1910, Japan annexed Korea completely.

They were years of humiliation and anger. According to In Soo Kim, many disillusioned Koreans sought refuge in the church in that period. There they found a community that brought them together, and later also a strength that would feed the independence movement of 1919.

In the accounts of the revival you read that in January 1907 the American missionary William Blair preached about the hatred of Koreans toward the Japanese, and called on the men to let it go. For a people that had just lost its freedom, that was not an easy message.

BEFORE DAYBREAK

Around this time Gil started something for which he is still known in Korea. He met with other believers in the church to pray before daybreak. In Korean this is called saebyeok gido, early morning prayer. The church historian In Soo Kim described in his dissertation how this initiative of Gil’s found a lasting place. An article in the journal Acta Koreana calls him one of its founders, along with the Bible conferences in which church members studied the Bible for days on end.

When exactly it began is not certain. Some sources mention the autumn of 1906, others 1909. The article in Acta Koreana draws a connection with his years in the mountains: the zeal of seondo found a new direction in his prayer. The practice remained. The goal had changed.

When do you pray? Gil chose the hour when it was quiet and the day had not yet begun.

According to a biography written by his son Gil Jin-gyeong in 1980, something else happened in September 1906. Gil had heard about revivals in Wales and India. That month the American minister Howard Agnew Johnston asked who wanted to receive the Holy Spirit fully in order to lead the Korean church. Gil, then a student and elder, raised his hand and came forward. In December of that year he was one of the main speakers at a Bible conference in Hwanghae, and he agreed with the missionaries to prepare the great winter conference of January together. This story comes from the family and was taken over by Bonjour Bay in an article. I have not found independent confirmation.

JANUARY 1907

In January 1907 the Presbyterian churches in Pyongyang held their annual Bible conference for men. About fifteen hundred men gathered, writes the Korean theologian Young-Hoon Lee.

According to the article by Bonjour Bay, Gil preached on January 9 about opening your heart to the Holy Spirit. After that the congregation began to pray aloud. Gil also led the conference’s early morning prayer meetings.

On Monday evening, January 14, writes Young-Hoon Lee, the missionary Graham Lee led the meeting. The historian Thomas Kidd describes, based on eyewitnesses, how in those days men began to pray aloud all at once. They confessed their sins in public, wept and fell to the ground. One missionary wrote that the prayer sounded like the sound of many waters.

Gil Sun-ju played a key role in those days. He confessed his own sins in public, and many followed his example. The sources differ on the date: the Korean Wikipedia mentions an early morning prayer meeting on January 6. Stories also circulate about what exactly he confessed. I have not found those details in any source I could read, and so I leave them out.

In March 1907 the missionary E. F. Hall wrote to his mission board that Gil had received the baptism in the Spirit during the revival. Not everyone in Korea accepts that interpretation. The Korean historian Park Yong-gyu has disputed it. On one thing the sources agree: after January 1907 Gil was the minister who carried the revival across the country. Young-Hoon Lee writes that he led revival meetings and Bible classes everywhere.

It cost him a great deal. According to a common overview, the meetings in Pyongyang faded in the spring of 1907, possibly because Gil was exhausted. Whether that was the real reason, no one knows for sure.

ONE OF THE FIRST SEVEN

On June 20, 1907, Gil graduated from the seminary. He belonged to the first class, seven men. On September 17, 1907, they were ordained in Pyongyang during the first meeting of the Korean presbytery. So the Presbyterian church in Korea received its first ministers of its own. Gil became minister of the Jangdaehyeon Church.

He was an innovator. In his church a curtain hung that separated the men from the women. Gil had it taken down. He brought Korean court music into the worship service and formed choirs. According to In Soo Kim, he gave evening classes in hangul, the Korean alphabet, in his church until the Japanese authorities forbade it. His love of Korean music led to a revision of the hymnal, with five hymns set to Korean melodies.

In 1910, at the meeting of the presbytery, he proposed a campaign that came to be called “A Million Souls”: a great evangelism plan for all of Korea. When the Presbyterian church held its first General Assembly in 1912, Gil became vice-moderator, writes Britannica.

THE SHADOW OF 1911

After the annexation of 1910, Japanese rule grew harsher. In 1911 a major case began against Korean nationalists and Christians, who were accused of a conspiracy against Japanese rule. It became known as the Case of the 105. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture writes that Gil also suffered under this case.

In 1917 he lost his eldest son, Gil Jin-hyeong. According to the Korean Wikipedia, this son had been a member of a secret nationalist society and had been imprisoned in the case of 1911. Whether his death was directly connected to that, I cannot establish from the sources.

I pause here for a moment. A father burying his son, under a regime that silences his people. We do not know what Gil said about it. No letter or sermon about it has been preserved that I have been able to find. Two years later he put his name to the declaration.

THIRTY-THREE NAMES

In the months before March 1919, Seonu Hyeok, a Korean from abroad, came north to consult with Christian leaders. Among others he spoke with Lee Seung-hun, Yang Jeon-baek and Gil Sun-ju, writes Lee Man-yeol. From those conversations grew, in part, what later became the March First Movement: a peaceful protest in which people all over Korea took to the streets and cried out that Korea must be free.

Gil was one of the thirty-three signatories. Britannica calls him one of the first two names on the declaration. According to In Soo Kim, he handed out flags, spoke of Christianity as a Korean faith and urged nonviolence.

So on March 1 itself he was not in Seoul. The Korean Wikipedia mentions that by then he already had serious problems with his eyes. He was arrested, like almost all the signatories. The sources differ on the length of his imprisonment: the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture speaks of two years, the Korean Wikipedia of a year and seven months. According to that Wikipedia, after nearly two years of pretrial detention he was the only one of the arrested signatories to be acquitted. I have not been able to check that acquittal myself in a court source.

The movement was crushed. Yet something did change. According to In Soo Kim, from that time on many Koreans no longer saw Christianity as a faith imposed on them by a foreign power. Christians had stood at the front.

THE BOOK OF REVELATION

After his release Gil traveled the country again. He led revival services and Bible conferences, also in North Gando, the area in Manchuria where many Koreans lived. His preaching gained a new focus. Britannica writes that after prison he preached mainly about the end times, with emphasis on the book of Revelation. A frequently told story is that he read Revelation hundreds of times in prison. There is no source for it.

The last book of the Bible ends with a promise of Jesus and a prayer of the church: He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming quickly.” Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:20). For a people under foreign rule, that promise had a sound all its own.

Theologians view this period differently. According to the article in Acta Koreana, his emphasis on repentance and the authority of the Bible, together with his later expectation of the millennial kingdom, grew into a conservative, fundamentalist theology that is still strong in Korea. The Korean researcher Bae Deok-man sees him as the one who spread this way of thinking about the end times among Korean Presbyterians. English-language overviews report that he stepped down as senior pastor of Jangdaehyeon in 1926. For this too I have found no verifiable source.

He also wrote. Early on Haetaron and Mansa seongchwi appeared. After his death a book about the end times, Malsehak, and a collection of sermons were published.

Large numbers circulate about his ministry: seventeen or twenty thousand sermons, hundreds of thousands of listeners, tens of thousands of converts. They come from later overviews and contradict each other. No one has been able to count them.

IN THE PULPIT IN GANGSEO

In his last years Gil could see almost nothing. He kept preaching. In November 1935 he led a Bible conference in a church in Gangseo, in South Pyongan. There he suffered a stroke. According to the Christian History Almanac, he collapsed in the pulpit while preaching to thousands of people, and was pronounced dead within a few hours. He was sixty-six. Most sources give the date as November 26; the Almanac holds to November 25.

Ten years later Korea was free. The country was divided in two. Pyongyang, the city that missionaries once called the Jerusalem of the East, became the capital of North Korea.

In 2009 the South Korean government posthumously awarded Gil Sun-ju an honor for his role in the struggle for independence.

If you walk past a church in Seoul or Busan early in the morning today, there may be a light on. Inside sit people praying before the day begins. Most of them may not know his name. They have the hour from him.