This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 17 September 1907, Presbyterian missions working in Korea organized themselves into an independent church body, counting 33 missionaries and 38 Korean presbyters at its founding. The new church was still young when Japanese colonial rule and then the Second World War disrupted it severely; its General Assembly was re-established only in 1947, after Korea's liberation, marking the church's formal reconstruction rather than a fresh beginning.
Reconstruction proved to be the platform for extraordinary growth. Across the following decades the Presbyterian Church of Korea expanded into one of the largest Presbyterian bodies found anywhere in the world, reporting around four million attendees spread across 286 branches within South Korea by 2019. Seoul's Myungsung Presbyterian Church, founded in 1980, grew large enough within the same century to describe itself as the largest Presbyterian congregation anywhere, a single congregation standing as evidence of how far the wider church had come from its 33 founding missionaries.
What the 1907 organization changed for Presbyterianism's spread was the creation of an independent Korean church rather than a mission outpost answering abroad, a body that survived colonial disruption and world war to become, within little more than a century, one of the largest expressions of its tradition on earth.