Archive: Going Once…Going Twice

What happened when God called a fourth generation Methodist preacher and his wife to missionary service in Korea.

by Carroll Ferguson Hunt, Seoul, Korea

The plane trundled up through Tokyo’s gray smog and turned west toward Seoul. When we gained our assigned altitude, the engines took on a more subdued roar as the propellers chewed off the miles. It was March, 1958, and jets were not used for commercial flights. We had four and a half hours left on our journey to Korea, which didn’t seem like much after the car trip across the United States and the two storm-haunted weeks we had spent sailing the Pacific.

Ev and I could hardly believe we were almost there. Before this day was over we would stand on Korean soil, the focus of our plans and prayers for almost two years. Missionaries to Korea! To us it had a satisfying (and decidedly spiritual) sound.

“Going to Korea, huh?”

A woman stopped by our seats and peered at us through her private liquor-induced fog.

“Yes, we are.” This was obvious because the plane didn’t go anywhere else but Seoul. The inanities didn’t stop there, however.

“You, too?” we asked. “Yeah . . . you missionaries?”

We cringed at her question even as we admitted the truth of her observation. No missionary wants to be spotted as one, at least not so quickly. In our culture stereotypes abound regarding the missionary’s dowdy, inept, second-rate place in the scheme of things. And if you are one, you tend to fantasize about being mistaken for embassy staff or foreign correspondents. Anything but being told, “you look just like a missionary!”

“Korea!” Her lip curled and she shook her head with disgust. “That’s the most God-forsaken place in the world.”

I can’t remember exchanging further pleasantries with the lady. Time dissolves things that don’t matter. I do remember, however, the events that brought us aboard that lumbering flight from Tokyo to Seoul.

Ev and I married shortly after my graduation from Asbury College. We lived then in Millville, New Jersey, where he pastored the Mt. Pleasant Methodist Church while attending Temple Seminary in Philadelphia.

Ev was a New Jerseyite, raised in one parsonage after another between Trenton and Cape May. He had listened to Methodist-type preaching all of his life. It must have seemed almost inevitable that he would stand in a pulpit, too, since his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had done so before him.

But during his years of college and the early months of our marriage, the world beyond the Delaware Bay and the Jersey shore resorts began to get under Ev’s skin. Bit by bit the pricks of caring grew too insistent to ignore. And along with a conscience rubbed raw by the waiting world came a strong attraction to OMS International, a non-denominational and evangelical mission board. A “faith” board it was called, and not with kindness by all in South Jersey.

I remember well what happened after we were accepted by OMS. Ev had several sessions with his district superintendent. Sometimes conferences did appoint their men to ministries outside the normal track and we hoped for such an action. After all, being a fourth generation Methodist minister meant a great deal to Ev—and even more to his dad.

But no. Such was not to be our case. Since we were not going overseas with the Methodist Board of Missions, the bishop said “No” to the district superintendent. And the D.S. said “No” to us. Further, he took Ev’s deacon’s orders and stamped “rescinded” across their face.

All of this nearly broke Dad Hunt’s heart. He was so proud of his preacher son, so full of joy to be able to look around and see him following in the footprints of the family. And now to have Ev throw all of this away and disappear over the horizon on his way to some place called Korea! His grief, his opposition, his inability to understand created a heavy load to bear. For him and for us.

And suffering like an arthritis victim at a hearty handshake, Dad Hunt had to stand aside at annual conference in a shimmer of pain and watch all the father-son combinations ministering in New Jersey line up for a photo session. It was almost too much for one man to take.

But God knows just how much His children can bear. He ministered gently and intimately to Dad Hunt’s breaking heart, enabling him to loosen his grip on personal desires. He learned to recognize that our ways are not always God’s ways. Just weeks before we were to leave for Korea, Dad called his elder son and apologized for the opposition and unhappiness between them. The two men wept together and the problem was swept away, never to return.

I remember well driving away from the New Jersey parsonage for the last time. Dad Hunt stood straight and smiling. No more recriminations, no more whys.

Now the DC 3 was losing altitude. Her wheels reached for the runway. We had come to Korea at last. Was it God-forsaken as the woman claimed?

Korea’s war was still a vivid memory in 1958. The airport bristled with military hardware. Brown hills and dormant rice paddies held little natural beauty for us, and the terminal was a frigid corrugated metal shed. But as soon as we worked our way through customs we walked into the waiting arms of those who came to meet us.

People muffled to the ears in fleece-lined parkas and heavy boots stood in an expectant clump. Topping all the swaddling layers were smiles as bright as stars as people reached out to welcome us with warm hugs. God surely stood among us, helping Ev and me feel as if we had finally come home.

God-forsaken? Hardly. Even then, just five years after the end of the war, churches dotted the scenery like raisins in Grandma’s cinnamon rolls.

We plunged immediately into language school but knew, even though we couldn’t participate, that there was a ferment of seminary training, evangelism, and in those days, welfare work going on all over Korea. Our Lord was very much alive in this place. The lady on the plane didn’t know what she was talking about.

After language school and a brief time of working in country churches, Ev began to teach in Seoul Theological Seminary. I remember well his agonizing progression from using an interpreter, through mumbling through a manuscript, and on to the first shaky attempts at ad-libbing on church history or the theology of mission. Years it took.

Years of study. Of embarrassment. Of monumental mistakes and small triumphs. Moments when he’d work himself into a verbal corner and be forced to appeal to someone in the class to extricate him,

“By your students you’ll be taught,” is not just a line from a pretty song in The King and I. It’s a way of life for the missionary teacher. And you’d think that was enough struggle for anyone. But no, there was more just around the proverbial corner.

For me it began on a seminary graduation day in the late sixties. The day was cold, gray, muddy. (Commencement is in February in Korea.) Ev and I had just been photographed with a couple of his students when one of them turned to him and made a statement: “You had better go back to school and get a doctorate, or we probably can’t use you in five more years.”

At first I thought my limited language ability had deserted me completely. Then I got huffy (inside, of course) at that brassy kid with his newly-won black tassel dancing over one eyebrow. How dare he talk to Ev like that?

He dared, all right. And what he said was correct. Before the end of the decade, we were emptying our house in preparation for Ev’s enrollment in the University of Chicago graduate school.

This didn’t happen solely because one young man newly liberated from the classroom said it should. He was right. Dr. John Chongnaham Cho, STS president, was much more diplomatic when he discussed graduate programs with Ev. But they both knew the days were over when the seminary B.D. represented the ultimate tool for training national ministry.

Back to the U.S. we went. Back to school for Ev. The agonies and accommodations of those years for an over-age student, a growing daughter, and a tired-of-coping wife is another story. Sufficient here is to say we got through—all of us—and the honor belongs to God. Ev has a new robe to wear in academic processions, and a couple of pieces of blood spattered (figuratively speaking) paper on his office wall. The faculty and administration, the alumni and students are grateful he did it because of the boost every graduate degree gives STS in Korea’s accrediting system.

For 20 years Ev’s life and ministry have been channeled into training Korean young people. Hundreds of men and women have taken notes, argued, asked questions, snickered at his accent (or complimented it). And some, thank God, have caught fire with the concepts he has taught.

Through the years these young people became pastors, some in cities or mountains, on islands or in rice-growing valleys. Some joined chaplains’ corps in all branches of military service in Korea and have become part of the legend of mass evangelism in the armed forces. Some of the girls married pastors or became Christian education directors. Or both. Or they eschewed marriage and became Bible women, ministering with love and tenacity in communities all over the peninsula.

Some direct choirs or Sunday schools. Some serve on evangelism teams that saturate high rise apartments, train stations, welfare institutions, factories, and schools with their bold witness about Jesus.

Now, in the 70s, a new wind blows through the halls of Seoul Theological Seminary. It stirs the hearts and thinking of the students. Like another young man, Sejin Ko, came to Ev with a request:

“We hear talking and preaching about missions. You teach us about missions. We are interested in missions. Can’t you help us do something?”

At Ev’s suggestion, Mr. Ko rounded up the other students who felt the same way. They began meeting in Ev’s office for prayer, Bible study, and information gathering on cross-cultural mission.

What is a missionary? How does (s)he get that way? What kind of training does he need? What does he do? Where does the money come from? Can I be one?

This extracurricular missions fellowship has been meeting for more than a year. The culmination of their concentration on missions was a recent trip to Indonesia. Several young men went with Ev and John Cho to see firsthand what missionaries do and how churches are planted in another part of the world. Each man went prepared to give a short report on how the Korean church functions so they would have a contribution to make to the Indonesian church.

Learning and communicating. The two-pronged emphasis of this history-making journey was a natural extension of what they do at home. Korean Christians are ready and eager to be involved in taking the gospel around the world.

For us, Ev and me, watching these Korean students preparing for missionary service in a country not their own, we feel involved with one of the profound realities of Christian commitment, whether that commitment takes you abroad or keeps you at home.

Jesus said it and we quote it until it loses its meaning. But when you see it happening and can touch it with your hand, it comes alive again.

“Go to all peoples,” He said. And we did. “… teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

We tried to do that, too. We went and we taught obedience to His commands. Even the one about going. Now the students of Korea are catching on to this command. Even as obedient disciples came to them, they, too, are going to “all peoples” and will teach obedience to their Lord.