The 13th Stone: The Call for Korean American Christians
Yang Hwa Jin Foreign Missionary Cemetery
By Dr. Alexander Jun
The Fourth Lausanne Congress convened in South Korea in September, 2024. The international team for the Lausanne Movement worked closely with Onnuri Community Church, for which their Korean congregation co-hosted the event. I was particularly thankful when I heard that Onnuri Community Church had over 1000 members volunteering, serving, and praying.
On the third evening of the 4th Congress, an event that celebrated God’s providence was highlighted by a retelling of the history of Christianity in Korea. Starting with the well-documented journeys of the early western missionaries—such as Appenzeller and Underwood, who landed on the shores of Incheon over 120 years ago—they continued to show how the baton was passed from White missionaries from the west to the ethnic Koreans who would become the early leaders of the Korean church. The event chose to capture Christianity in Korea through a symbolism of Twelve Stones, in reference to Joshua 4:5-6.
Command them to take 12 stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight. In the future, when your children ask you, “what do those stones mean?”
The full video of the celebration is available to watch on the Lausanne Movement’s YouTube channel. I won’t go into much detail but the 12 stones are listed as follows:
The first stone: Rope. 1907
The second stone: The Jesus Bible. 1887
The third stone: Earthenware Bowl. 1885
The fourth stone: The Korean Flag. 1919
The fifth stone: Envelope for Thanksgiving Offering. 1940
The sixth stone: The Midwife Jar. 1940
The seventh stone: Tent. 1950.
The eighth stone: Slogans. 1965.
The ninth stone: Banners. 1980
The tenth stone: Handwritten Gospel Fragments. 1990
The eleventh stone: The Lausanne Logo. 1974
The twelfth stone: Wambon Language Bible. 1990
A Joyful Reminder
The evening itself was an incredible emotional roller coaster for me and for the many in attendance. I found myself tearing up numerous times, as I thought about the deep sacrifices of white American and European missionaries who suffered unbelievable hardships, both spiritually and physically, in order to share the gospel with unreached Korean people. I had visited the Yang Hwa Jin Foreigner Cemetery multiple times where many missionaries and their family members were laid to rest, and was always struck by the ultimate sacrifices they made for the sake of the gospel in Korea.
I rejoiced at the stories of the numerous early church leaders of Korea, who persevered through systemic injustice at the hands of Japanese colonizers. The early Korean church leaders were compelled by the gospel to establish their freedom to worship, and to also fight injustice and seek independence. It was the same gospel that helped sustain the fledgling Korean church endure the atrocities of war during a divided Korea in the 1950s. I listened and learned of how the church of Jesus Christ expanded through a suffering Korea, and was reminded of God’s goodness as an increasing number of people came to saving faith in the 60s and 70s. I know that during this time there were a few Korean churches that began challenging American Christian syncretism and taking greater ownership of Christianity in Korea, free of western influence.
A Painful Realization
As we recognized and celebrated the growth of the gospel in the 80s and 90s, especially through college campus ministries, I found myself having a very peculiar out-of-body moment. I found myself oddly anticipating some form of acknowledgment or mention of Korean campus ministries that were exported to the United States. I thought “Surely someone, somewhere, would recognize how the gospel also expanded through a diaspora of Koreans in the 20th century?” I suddenly found myself feeling invisible all of a sudden. Paradoxically seen and unseen at the same time.
Was my personal spiritual journey and the collective experiences of so many of my friends and Korean American ministry partners not a reality?
Did the explosion of Christianity from Korean immigrant families in the 80s and 90s just get erased as the story of the gospel and Christianity in Korea is being documented to the world?
This period of Korean American Christianity is deeply significant to me personally, as I came to saving faith through campus ministries organized by Korean and English speaking ethnic Koreans. My own early spiritual formation after becoming a Christian in 1988 was through a local Korean language Full Gospel church in downtown Los Angeles/Koreatown (our mother church was Full Gospel in Yeouido, Seoul) before joining a Korean/English church plant in 1993 that focused on global missions.
The Burden of Liminality
The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. The story of Christianity in Korea was for a nation rather than a people group, and certainly not for children of those who abandoned their nation for a land of opportunity in America in order to escape the poverty and hardship of Korea.
I found myself once again feeling quite sad as the double whammy that I’ve experienced most of my life sunk in: Our story as Korean American Christians will not be recorded as part of the history of Christianity in Korea, nor will it be included in the history of Christianity in America. It was yet another reminder that we live in a liminal space as ethnic minorities in the United States.
Korean American Christians have plenty of issues, to be sure. Anecdotally, I know that from a Korean perspective, our parents and grandparents have been subtly and not so subtly accused of abandoning their country and their people. They were faulted for being opportunistic as they pursued a better life for themselves rather than staying and enduring the hardships of a rebuilding nation.
Most second and third generation Korean Americans oftentimes live our lives oblivious to these types of transnational and generational tensions. We were, by and large, fighting our own battles of choosing between assimilation into white normative American Christianity, or being required to sustain an extinct cultural Korean Christianity of the 1970s and 80s here in the United States. We continue wrestling with de-syncretizing both American whiteness and cultural Koreanness from Biblical Christianity. While life and culture evolved for our compatriots in the motherland, the children and grandchildren of Korean immigrants here in America remained in a cultural time vault. What many of us have experienced firsthand was a “forever foreigner” existence on two fronts: South Korea and the United States. We are culturally homeless in two nations and explaining and understanding our own identities are more complicated in the mission field.
The 13th Stone: The Call for Korean American Christians
Perhaps our role as Koreans in America is to establish a 13th stone, or perhaps our role is to restart the stones of Korean American Christianity. I am not sure.
However, it is worth noting the irony that my friend and current CEO of the Lausanne Movement, Michael Oh, is Korean American. I had the privilege of attending the 4th Congress with several of my closest friends—many of whom currently serve as key leaders of national Christian organizations and seminaries, as well as pastors of local churches in the United States and Korea. They are modern Korean American prophets, priests, and kings serving across denominational lines in various ministry contexts. It is important to note that my goal here is neither to create a grandiose hagiographic story for Korean American Christian leaders in the present, nor to perpetuate existing hagiographies of white western leaders of the past. A focus on just their lives and stories may be too small and miss the bigger picture of Christ’s work and the Kingdom of God. Yet at the same time their stories are not insignificant in the Kingdom. Their stories are still worthy of documentation, if not for anyone else, then for our children and our children's children.
I often think about Toni Morrison’s profound challenge to future authors: “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
While our collective Korean American Christian story has been part of neither Korean Christian history nor of American Christian history, I take hope in the reminder that God has always used His unnamed, unknown, and uncelebrated children to advance the gospel to the ends of the earth. For every Underwood, Appenzeller and other blue-eyed white western missionaries whose stories have been recorded in the annals of Korean and American Christian history, there are thousands of souls and stories we will never know. And yet their lives were devoted to proclaim the Good News and make disciples to the ends of the earth. Indeed, they lived to be forgotten so that Christ would be remembered.
We share this same call.
My point here is not to create a grandiose hagiographic story of Korean American Christian leaders. That story may indeed be too small to tell in the grand scheme of the gospel in America. But it is not insignificant in the Kingdom. It is a story worthy of documentation, if not for anyone else, then for ourselves.
Our call is to carry the legacy of sacrificial love to the next generation. Our call is to fight injustice as a Biblical response. Our call is to love our neighbors here in the United States, and specifically, to love them as the third-culture missionaries we are. Our call is the same, even if our contexts are different. Our call is not limited to Korean American Christians. I wonder what the call looks like for Korean Australians, Korean Brazilians, and Korean Canadians, for example. I also wonder what this call means for my Indian American, Taiwanese American, Mexican American Christians and other siblings carrying out the gospel through their own lived diasporan experiences. Our collective stories ought to be documented in order for our children and our children’s children to know and celebrate God’s faithfulness. I am compelled and am persuaded to share our stories. For when our children ask what this all means, we can answer and say that these stones are reminders of what the Lord has done.
Dr. Alexander Jun is Director of Development and Partnerships for KALI. He and his family attend church at Citizens Los Angeles. He is author of a forthcoming book, Sabbath God: Gospel for Korean America (Wipf & Stock, 2025)
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