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 PrintableVersion Father of the Korean ChurchThe story of Scottish missionary John RossA few years ago, I planned to work as a TESOL teacher in my retirement. Having obtained the certificate, I waited. My first enquirer was a Korean who went on to get his PhD and is now on a pastoral team back in his own country. He was the first of many Christian brothers I met doing theology or defence studies at Aberdeen University. They subsequently invited my wife and I to visit them in their homes. One of them is pastoring a small church in Japan, having completed a doctorate here on Samuel Rutherford. One of my friends, who is now lecturing at a Bible seminary in Tanzania, did his doctoral studies on John Ross, the pioneer Scottish missionary to Manchuria, who is regarded by Korean Christians as the father of the thriving Korean church. I had never heard of this man and so would like to give an outline of his life and work to the wider evangelical public. He deserves to be remembered along with Hudson Taylor, Jonathan Goforth, Karl Gutzlaff, Robert Morrison, and William Burns, other pioneers in East Asia whose seed sowing has now borne fruit in China and South Korea. Gift for languagesJohn Ross was born in Balintore, north of Inverness, in 1842. Although Gaelic was his first language, he had a solid linguistic knowledge of 11 languages, including English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, written Chinese, spoken Mandarin, Manchu and Korean. He worked in Manchuria from 1872 until 1910, making a significant contribution to the translation of the Korean Bible, pioneering the theory and practice of missions and possessing an in-depth knowledge of the history, culture and religion of China and Korea. He died in 1915 and is buried in Edinburgh. He belonged to the United Presbyterians and trained in Edinburgh before preaching as an itinerant evangelist across the Highlands, including Stornoway and Portree, for six years. He heard the call of China and, after three years’ deliberation and also marriage, set sail for China. Manchuria was an unreached land, only Burns and Williamson having gone there. It is as big as France and Germany put together. Strangely, the topography of the province he worked in closely resembled that of his home in the northern Scottish Highlands. The prevailing religions were Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Imitating PaulIn the 17th and 18th centuries, there had been waves of economic migration from Korea to Manchuria and, to this day, there are many thousands of ethnic Koreans living there, of whom many are believers and influential in undercover gospel work in North Korea. Ross, we read, strove to be ‘an imitator of Paul’, in that he planned to found churches in strategic places in a land of 40 million people. Shortly after he arrived, his wife gave birth to a son, but died in the severe winter cold. He remarked solemnly, ‘I have not the shadow of a thought of retreating from this position’. Remarkably, he was able to preach his first 20-minute sermon in Chinese after only five months. The Chinese heard him ‘with the profoundest attention and seeming wonder’. After a year, he was preaching every week in Chinese. He commented, ‘How anxious am I to see the beginning of those days when the desert shall blossom as the rose in this wild spiritual wilderness.’ In 1873, he baptised his first three converts and trained one as a native evangelist. The congregation soon numbered over 100. By 1882, he had been joined, after making an appeal for help, by six more Scots missionaries. Marriage and planningHe based his work in what was known as Moukden, now Shenyang, the Manchurian capital. In 1876, he married Catherine, a sister of one of his fellow missionaries, who now cared for his young son Drummond. He planned to establish a Christian presence in the major towns on the road to the treaty port, from which would radiate the knowledge of the gospel. He planned to use some of his Chinese converts as preachers and evangelists. He then united with brethren from the Irish Presbyterians who had come to the country and they formed a united Manchurian Presbyterian church. In 1882, they opened a free medical dispensary, which later became the Moukden Medical College in 1912. The union between Scots and Irish was accomplished finally in 1891, despite the strong reservations of the Scottish home committee. The Chinese soon began to take a large share in the direction and control of their own church. Exploring the fieldHe soon began to embark on a number of mission trips to explore the mission field, the density of the city populations and their value as future mission centres. He distributed many thousands of portions of Scripture and other Christian literature and stimulated public interest in the gospel. He later travelled the circuit of his out-stations several times a year, saying, ‘It is the only practical and the most speedy way in which the gospel can be proclaimed all over China. In this way, we believe that every missionary should be an imitator of Paul’. Ross was also an educator and opened a school in 1873, teaching general subjects and enabling the children to read the Scriptures in their own language, the teaching and the food being provided free of charge. By 1890, he had opened a theological training school with a three-year course for ten Chinese evangelists. He continued this work until his retirement due to ill health in 1910. He also taught a class for Bible-women for one month each year. In addition to this, he wrote nearly a dozen books and numerous articles and reports. He was one of the first to have his studies on the history and culture of the Manchus and Koreans published. For this work, he was awarded a DD by Glasgow University in 1894. Gospel of PentecostIn 1876, he started learning Korean; one year later he published a Korean primer. By the end of 1877, he began to translate the New Testament into Korean. At that time, Korea was a ‘hermit kingdom’, unknown and forbidden, with no Protestant missionaries there. Ross journeyed to the border, where there was active Sino-Korean trade going on, in order to meet the people and explore future mission opportunities. With the help of a language teacher, he translated the gospels of John and Mark. By the end of 1878, they had completed Luke. In 1879, the first Korean Presbyterian church was formed in Manchuria. He compared his Bible translation work to that of Wycliffe moving from Latin to native English, in his case from Chinese, the formal language, to Korean, the language of the 12 million Korean people. By 1886, the New Testament was completed. A few brave Koreans crossed the Yalu river, braving the border guards, to bring the Bibles into the country as far south as Seoul. This work resulted in the later harvest of hundreds of churches in NW Korea (now North Korea, of course). Meanwhile, the Scripture distribution was bearing fruit among the Korean communities in Manchuria; 85 men were baptised in one valley alone and, in each of 28 valleys, there were people waiting to be received into the church. Ross could scarcely believe the report, but then travelled the 400 miles east in the depth of winter to see for himself the miracle of grace. He was ‘humbled and shamed’ over such results brought by the gospel. He was witnessing the beginning of self-propagating Christian churches. Throughout the valleys, there were spontaneous mass conversions. ‘We didn’t believe that the gospel of Pentecost had such power’. Ross later reported: ‘There are thousands on the Korean and Chinese side of the Yalu river who daily read the Scriptures and pray to God’. When the American missionaries arrived, they found numerous indigenous Christian communities and were mystified; where had they come from? Legacy in Korean ChurchFurther south, one of the Korean evangelists reached Seoul in 1883 and in one year a church was formed and Ross was invited south to baptise the 79 new believers. It was impossible for him to make the long overland journey, even if a European could have obtained permission to enter the sealed nation, but he sent thousands of copies of gospels and tracts by the safe sea route. However, the Christians in Seoul, who had been converted by Ross’s native colporteurs, insisted on being baptised by him, not by the American missionaries. Eventually, in 1887, he journeyed to Seoul by sea to meet the new church and was further assured that there were now 300 believers in the city who were not yet prepared to publicly join. Ross was seeing the fruits of his years of work preparing for the evangelisation of Korea. They were, from the beginning, entirely self-supporting and, in 1895, when they had expanded and needed a new church building, the members united in a self-build. By 1898, an American missionary was visiting 60 churches a month, examining 400 for baptism and receiving a thousand people who were enquirers. ‘A revival is now in progress in the native church.’ Ross, for his part, continued to train the Korean diaspora in Manchuria and sent some of them back into Korea. The National Bible Society of Scotland, representing the churches, funded the publication of the first Korean Bible. John Ross only returned three times on furlough in the 39 years of his missionary life. He is buried in Newington cemetery in Edinburgh. He is largely a forgotten man, unknown to Scottish Christians today, but his legacy lives on in the Korean church and the churches continuing in Manchuria. Mike Harris,
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