Fervour and naivete lead 'missionaries' into harm's way

sourcehttp://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=b88562b5-320a-4bae-8819-379baca41122

Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun

Published: Friday, July 27, 2007

Christianity is a fiercely competitive business in South Korea, with evangelists vying to attract followers by demonstrating ever more outlandish feats of holiness.

Sending missionaries in large numbers to the world's most violent trouble spots is seen as a surefire way of filling the churches with admiring disciples.

These days, dispatching missionaries to Afghanistan and Iraq, into the jaws of militant Islam, is the ultimate demonstration of Christian fervour.

And the larger the army of followers, of course, the larger the spiritual and financial rewards.

It is a tried and true promotional technique that has produced a surge in popularity for Christianity since the Second World War. A recent survey by the Pew organization found 26.3 per cent of South Koreans say they are Christians, a proportion second only to the Philippines in Asia.

Most belong to fundamentalist protestant or evangelical Christian churches where the passion for missionary zeal has always been strong.

There are nearly 13,000 South Korean missionaries operating in about 160 countries.

In some popular missionary destinations, such as Africa, there are sometimes hundreds of South Korean missionaries in the same town. There are even reports that the competition among evangelists sometimes becomes so intense there have been fistfights over territory.

Only the United States with 46,000 missionaries abroad has a larger army of faith, but as a proportion of population the South Korean missionary force is much larger.

However, to call these people missionaries is not always accurate. Most are not bent on making converts, but are more like aid agency workers.

Indeed, the South Korean missionary operations are more like those Japanese television game shows where the prize goes to the contestant who takes the greatest humiliation and still comes up grinning.

The missionaries are frequently naive young people driven by an unfocused desire to do good, just like most of the 23 South Korean hostages taken by the Taliban on the road from Kabul to Kandahar in Afghanistan last week.

The group is made up mostly of young women who were not off to try to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity, but to provide medical and child-care services for needy people.

They were led by pastor Bae Hyung-kyum from their Saemmul Presbyterian Church, just outside the South Korean capital Seoul. The Taliban demanded that some of their people being held by the Afghan government be released, but there seems also to have been a ransom demand.

It is not yet clear whether the negotiations stumbled over the refusal of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to release Taliban prisoners -- though it did so in March to get the freedom of a kidnapped Italian journalist -- or the Kabul government's obstruction of the Koreans' efforts to pay a ransom.

At any rate, the Taliban became agitated, shot Bae a dozen times and dumped his body by the highway.

This is not the first time South Korean missionary operations have come to grief in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.

In April 2004, terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and beheaded an aspiring South Korean missionary, Kim Sun-il. Earlier this year a South Korean pastor was killed in Kenya and hundreds of South Korean missionaries are believed to be in prison in China after trying to convert people in refugee camps for North Koreans.

In August last year a potentially highly dangerous event was narrowly avoided when the Kabul and Seoul governments managed to stop 1,300 South Korean evangelicals from travelling to Afghanistan to hold a public peace rally.

The giggly group of young Saemmul Church missionaries even posed with raised clenched fists for a photograph before their July departure from Seoul's international airport in front of a government notice advising Koreans not to travel to Afghanistan.

But avoiding government barriers and disapproval in both Seoul and Kabul is one of the joys of competition in these missionary contests. Overcoming bureaucratic hurdles brings bragging rights and more followers.

The death of Bae and the uncertain fate of the remaining 22 young hostages has had a sobering effect on South Korean public opinion. There is now much questioning of the habit of sending neophyte young people to these dangerous places without even the most basic training in the type of cultural quagmires they will face.

Sun International Affairs Columnist

jmanthorpe@png.canwest.com