This paper investigates the development and characteristics of the Korean Protestant church buildings in 1895~1912 from the perspective of Christian modernity and indigenization. Their number reached only 80 in 1897, yet bounded to 1,000 in 1907 and over 1,400 in 1910. A church building was the unique location where “American” Christianity made confrontations and negotiations with traditional Korean religions, contemporary political situations, and social custom. This study will reveal such dynamic interactions in the process of the modernization of the religious space by Protestantism and the indigenization of Western Christianity in Korea.
The first section reviews the origins of the earlier Korean church styles. The American Gothic revival style influenced upon the Methodist brick churches built around 1900 in Seoul and other open port cities. The Richardson Romanesque style was accepted at the Presbyterian churches around 1910 in Seoul and some open port cities. By contrast, the three-self theory of John Nevius (1829~1893) of Shandong encouraged to establish self-supporting Korean house style chapels in towns and rural villages. John Ross (1842~1915) of Shenyang built the Presbyterian Church in the mixture of the Scottish Romanesque revival style with the Chinese Daoist temple style in 1890~91. It was L-shaped for the visual gender segregation. It made a great impact upon the development of the Reformed Korean style churches in Pyeongyang and beyond.
The second section examines the numerical and geographical growth of the churches in the northwestern region with statistics and maps. It emphasizes the rapid expansion of the churches buildings in the northwestern provinces was accelerated by the international wars, the railroad, and the self-propagating efforts of Korean Christians.
The third section delineates the construction process and features of five representative local churches—the Sorae Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) on the northwest coast of Whanghae province, the Central Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Pyongyang, the Jeonju Presbyterian Church (PCUS) in North Jeolla province; the First Methodist Church (MEC) in Seoul, and the Wonsan Methodist Church (MECS) on the northeast coast. It compares regional and denominational differences.
The fourth section investigates external characteristics of the churches. Small thatch-roofed rectangular house chapels were gradually replaced by larger tile-roofed rectangular or L-shaped church buildings with glass windows. Both styles had strong horizontality. One of the contested locations for the church was the hill, which was the spiritual transitionary space between the village and the tangible spiritual world of ancestors. The intrusion of the western religious space, time, and sound to the hill disturbed the life of the villagers and the spirits of their ancestors.
A unique addition to the chapel was the flag of St. George Cross (the red cross on the white cloth). Many churches hoisted it on the high pole erected in the church yard from 1895 to 1907. It had continuity with the verticality of the wooden pole of the Shamanistic village guardian or the stone pillars of the Buddhist icon. When the Sorae Church hoisted the flag of the red cross during the Donghak Uprising in 1895, it symbolized the foreign missionary's extraterritoriality and the Christian principle of non-violence in politics. However, the symbolic meanings of the flag developed into different directions. First, it was hoisted together with the national flag on the national holidays in 1896~1898. It symbolized Christian nationalism. Secondly, during the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese War, the flag of the cross symbolized the chapel as the “ten auspicious place” (十勝之地) where the cross defeated the evil spirits for the salvation in the end times. Thirdly, it was an expression of power-orientation of the so-called rice Christian groups who wanted to protect their properties by depending upon the power of missionaries extraterritoriality, and squeezed money and labor from the people. Many Protestant “church abuse cases” (敎案) were caused by these flag-pole erecting groups. The Protestant missionaries, therefore, adopted the policy of the separation of church and state.
The fifth section discusses the influence of Confucian hierarchical ideas and custom in gender, age, and class upon the inner space of the Protestant churches. The curtain or partitions were used for the gender segregation, and they remained in the most churches until the 1920s. The yangban class opposed to the mixed seats with butchers and established their own socially homogeneous churches. The efforts to create the Christian space of social equality in Seoul was failed, partly due to their yield to the Confucian gender segregation and class discrimination.
In the period of the Great Han Empire (1897~1910), the principle of modernization was shifted from “Eastern Way and Western Instrument” (Dongdo Seogi) to “Keep Old Foundations and Add the New” (Gubon Sincham). In this context the cultural orientation of Korean Protestantism, at least in the church building, was not different from that of the government. The Reformed Korean style proved that Protestantism did not adopt the policy of confrontational triumphalism toward Korean traditional cultures, but that of accommodating indigenization that added new Western elements to the Korean foundation.
On the other hand, even the Western style church did not have pews but cushions on the floor. The worshippers kneeled down to pray like at the Daoists and Buddhist temples. The curtains, partitions, or L-shaped rooms segregated male seats from female seats according to the Confucian inside-outside rule, or the temporary separated seated for yangbans and butchers according to the Confucian social status law relapsed into separated churches. Moreover, in the national crisis of wars, famine, and colonization, some groups hoisted the flag of the cross to protect life and properties or to squeeze money from the villagers. It was a case of negative syncretism influenced by Shamanistic fetishism and political messianism of folk religions. One of the impacts of the Great Revival in 1907 and the Million Soul Movement in 1910 was the purification of such a syncretistic form of religiosity from the Church.