Korea, the Pacific, and Latin America

Today's Scripture

Revelation 5:9 — "And they sang a new song, saying, 'Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.'"

1 Corinthians 1:27-28 — "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are."

Matthew 13:31-32 — "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree."

The Big Idea

The gospel's greatest victories in the last two centuries did not happen where the mission planners expected. They happened in Korea, on Pacific islands, and across Latin America — carried mostly by local believers, often through suffering, sometimes through what looked like complete failure. God seems to prefer it that way. He grows his biggest trees from the smallest seeds, in the least likely soil.

Reflection

The church that arrived before the missionaries

Korea breaks the usual storyline. The faith did not arrive there in a missionary's suitcase. In the late 1700s, Korean scholars visiting Beijing picked up Christian books, carried them home, studied them — and believed. A Korean named Yi Seung-hun was baptized in Beijing in 1784 and returned to baptize others. When Protestant missionaries finally arrived a century later, they found Koreans already asking for the gospel.

Paul described this unstoppable quality from a prison cell. 2 Timothy 2:9 — "for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound!" You can chain the messenger. You cannot chain the message. It crossed into Korea inside books and changed hearts before any preacher landed.

When the Bible was translated into Korean, the translators made a crucial choice: they used hangul, the simple Korean alphabet that ordinary people — including women and the poor — could actually read, rather than the scholarly Chinese characters of the elite. The result was a Bible for everyone. Korean "Bible women" carried Scripture village to village, teaching their neighbors to read it. Once again, the faith spread along the most ordinary roads imaginable.

Then came 1907. In the city of Pyongyang — yes, that Pyongyang — a prayer meeting turned into a flood. Revival is an old word for the moment God's Spirit wakes up thousands of people at once: public confession of sin, restored relationships, prayer that sounded like a roaring sea. The Korean church exploded outward from there. Samuel Zwemer, the great missionary to the Muslim world, named the pattern behind every such story:

"The history of missions is the history of answered prayer." — Samuel Zwemer

Jonathan Edwards had said the same thing a century and a half earlier, looking back across the whole Bible:

"From the fall of man, to our day, the work of redemption in its effect has mainly been carried on by remarkable communications of the Spirit of God." — Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption

In other words: the engine of this story has never been human strategy. It is Zechariah 4:6 — "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts." Korea proved it again. Through thirty-five years of brutal Japanese occupation, when Christians were pressured to bow at imperial shrines and pastors filled the prisons, the church suffered, endured, and grew. A faith that had arrived without Western armies could not be blamed on them — it belonged to Koreans, and they kept it at great cost. Today South Korea sends missionaries all over the world.

Islands that passed the torch

Walk down any sidewalk and you will eventually see it: a weed that has split the concrete. Nobody planted it. Nobody watered it. Life found the crack. That is how the gospel moved across the Pacific.

The pattern comes straight from Acts. After persecution scattered the Jerusalem church, Acts 8:4 says, "Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word." Not the apostles — ordinary believers. In the 1800s, the gospel hopped from island to island across Polynesia and Melanesia the same way: carried by islander converts in canoes, not by mission boards in boardrooms. Teachers from Tahiti and Samoa sailed to islands their own grandfathers had warred against. Many of those evangelists were killed by the peoples they went to reach. Most of their names were never recorded. Heaven has them all.

A century earlier, the Moravians — a small community of German believers — had already shown what ordinary people could do. They sent out craftsmen and farmers as missionaries decades before William Carey was born. Their leader, Count Zinzendorf, explained the secret of their endurance:

"I have but one passion: it is He, it is He alone." — Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf

People with one passion are very hard to stop. John Wesley caught the same breadth of vision in a single famous line from his journal:

"I look upon all the world as my parish." — John Wesley, Journal

And when the Scottish missionary John G. Paton announced he was going to the New Hebrides — islands where two earlier missionaries had been killed and eaten — an older church member warned him about the cannibals. Paton's reply has never been improved on:

"If I can but live and die serving and honouring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms." — John G. Paton, Autobiography

Today, those same islands are among the most Christian places on earth. The despised, overlooked corners of the map became gardens. 1 Corinthians 1:27-28 was not a poetic exaggeration. God really does choose "what is low and despised in the world... to bring to nothing things that are."

The grain of wheat in Ecuador

Latin America adds the strangest chapter. For centuries the region was officially Christian but often unreached at the level of the heart. Then, in the twentieth century, a wave of evangelical and Pentecostal churches — churches that emphasize the Holy Spirit's present power — swept the continent. It was led not by foreigners but by Brazilian bus drivers, Guatemalan farmers, and Chilean street preachers. By 2020, roughly one in five Latin Americans was Protestant, worshiping in storefronts and stadiums that no foreign mission board planned or paid for.

But the most famous missionary story of the century happened in Ecuador, and it looked like a catastrophe. In January 1956, five young American missionaries — Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming — tried to make contact with the Waodani, an isolated tribe known for killing outsiders. Within days, all five were speared to death on a river beach. They never got to preach a single sermon.

Years earlier, at age twenty-two, Jim Elliot had written a sentence in his journal that explains why he could take such a risk:

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." — Jim Elliot, journal entry, October 28, 1949

He could not keep his life. No one can. He traded it for something spear-proof. And then came the part no newspaper predicted. Jim's widow, Elisabeth Elliot, and Rachel Saint, sister of Nate, went to live with the Waodani — the very people who had killed their family. They learned the language. They shared the message. Within a decade, many of the killers had become baptized believers, and some became elders in the Waodani church. Years later, two of the men who had thrown the spears baptized Nate Saint's own teenage children — in the river beside the beach where their father died.

Stop and let that sink in. The world has revenge stories and the world has tragedy stories. It does not have a category for that. Only the gospel produces it. Elisabeth wrote:

"Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with 'ashes.'" — Elisabeth Elliot, These Strange Ashes

Jesus had given the math in advance. John 12:24 — "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Five grains of wheat fell into Ecuadorian soil. The harvest is still coming up.

Not by might

Step back and look at the pattern: a faith smuggled into Korea inside books; islands reached by canoe; a continent stirred by street preachers; a tribe won through a widow's forgiveness. None of it came by might or power. All of it came by the Spirit, through the seed of the word. God promised it would work this way. Isaiah 55:10-11 — as surely as rain makes the earth sprout, "so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose."

This should change how we measure our own lives. We grade ourselves on visible results — followers, trophies, acceptance letters — and we panic when the numbers are small. God's favorite tools, this chapter of history suggests, are small numbers: five students, five missionaries, one baptized scholar, a handful of canoes. If your offering feels embarrassingly small, you are in excellent company.

And the pattern has a center. Before Jim Elliot, before the islander evangelists, there was an original grain of wheat. Jesus spoke John 12:24 about himself first. His mission also ended, apparently, in total failure — a teacher executed, a movement scattered, a tomb sealed. Three days later, the single seed began bearing more fruit than the world could count.

That is why Revelation 5:9 sings what it sings: "by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation." The mustard seed of Matthew 13:31-32 — "the smallest of all seeds" — is becoming a tree with room in its branches for Waodani warriors, Korean grandmothers, and you. The gospel takes root in unexpected soil because its power was never in the soil, or the sower. It is in the seed.

Going Deeper

Find a world map today — your phone works fine — and look up three places from this story: Pyongyang, Vanuatu (the former New Hebrides), and Ecuador. Pray one honest sentence over each. Then ask yourself Jim Elliot's question in your own terms: what am I gripping that I cannot keep anyway? Name one thing — time, money, reputation, a plan — and tell God it is available.