{"id":1103,"date":"2026-03-22T11:36:47","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T03:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/?p=1103"},"modified":"2026-04-11T21:00:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T13:00:48","slug":"when-pyongyang-was-the-jerusalem-of-the-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/2026\/03\/22\/when-pyongyang-was-the-jerusalem-of-the-east\/","title":{"rendered":"\"\ub3d9\ubc29\uc758 \uc608\ub8e8\uc0b4\ub818\"\uc774\uc5c8\ub358 \uc2dc\uc808\uc758 \ud3c9\uc591"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today, Pyongyang is best known as the sacred capital of North Korea\u2019s Kim dynasty. But in the first half of the twentieth century, it had a different reputation altogether: as the \u201cJerusalem of the East,\u201d the center of Christendom in East Asia and home to some of the world\u2019s biggest Presbyterian missionary institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At its heart was one man who became synonymous with the \u201cJerusalem of the East.\u201d Samuel A. Moffett, a native of Madison, Indiana, was born during the Civil War and graduated from nearby Hanover College in 1884, where he became a member of Phi Gamma Delta\u2014ninety-seven years before Mike Pence, Hanover class of 1981, would become president of the very same fraternity chapter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like other young idealistic Christians in the late nineteenth century, Moffett longed to become a foreign missionary, and on his twenty-sixth birthday in January 1890, he arrived in Seoul by steamship, making him one of the first Protestant missionaries in the newly opened kingdom of Korea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By then, Protestant missionaries had been spreading the Christian gospel for decades in India, China, and Japan\u2014with only limited success. In Seoul and the southeastern Korean city of Pusan, that pattern largely continued, with Moffett\u2019s colleagues struggling to win converts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it was a different story entirely in Pyongyang, a city that had developed a stature over the centuries as a kind of Las Vegas\u2014home to Korea\u2019s most notorious saloons and dancing girls. It also boasted a reputation for scrappiness, business acumen, and openness to new ideas. As Moffett preached the Christian message in the city, he found a receptivity that astonished him. Before long, he described being so inundated with inquirers that he hardly had time to eat or to sleep, so curious were the people of Pyongyang for the gospel he was preaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a few years, Moffett opened one church after another, only to have each new building bursting at the seams with new converts and congregants\u2014so packed that, as one missionary wrote, \u201cwe are almost afraid that the walls will begin to bulge out.\u201d Primary schools, high schools, a college, a seminary, hospitals, schools for the blind and the deaf, and orphanages soon followed, until Pyongyang had won a reputation across the Christian world for its fervency in the faith\u2014most notably in a mass revival that swept the city in 1907, just five years before Kim Il Sung’s birth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Pyongyang, one missionary wrote, \u201ceverywhere praying was heard, weeping, singing. The world had gone mad over a religion that the fathers had never heard of.\u201d Among the city\u2019s very first converts was Kang Ton-uk, who became a church elder and worked with Moffett to found a Christian school in the outskirts of Pyongyang. Kang raised a daughter who would later serve as a \u201cBible-woman,\u201d and delighted in a grandson who, in time, would become known as Kim Il Sung\u2014a boy who, raised on Bible stories and Sunday school in the \u201cJerusalem of the East,\u201d would reshape the city in his own image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Today, Pyongyang is best known as the sacred capital of North Korea\u2019s Kim dynasty. But in the first half of the twentieth century, it had a different reputation altogether: as the \u201cJerusalem of the East,\u201d the center of Christendom in East Asia and home to some of the world\u2019s biggest Presbyterian missionary institutions. At its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49546014,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1372],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ph2bTO-hN","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49546014"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1106,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1103\/revisions\/1106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koreanmessiah.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}