Henry Appenzeller Arrives in Korea and Founds the First Methodist Mission

Four years after the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference united world Methodism in London in 1881, already recorded here, and forty seven years before three British Methodist churches united at the Royal Albert Hall in 1932, also recorded here, the American missionary Henry Gerhard Appenzeller carried Methodism to a kingdom that had only just begun to permit Christian missionaries within its borders. Appenzeller and his wife Ella sailed from the United States in February 1885 and reached the Korean port of Chemulpo, present day Incheon, on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1885, the same day the Presbyterian missionary Horace Underwood also arrived. Political unrest following the previous year's Gapsin coup forced the Appenzellers to withdraw briefly to Japan, but they returned to Korea within months, and Appenzeller organized the first Korean Methodist congregation and, in 1886, founded Paichai Hakdang, the Pai Chai school for boys, which King Gojong himself named and which grew into one of Korea's most influential modern educational institutions. Appenzeller spent seventeen years building Korean Methodism, translating scripture into Korean and training the first generation of Korean Methodist pastors and teachers, before drowning in a shipping collision off the Korean coast in 1902. Historians of Korean Christianity treat his 1885 arrival as the founding moment of Korean Methodism specifically and, alongside Underwood's, of the wider Protestant missionary movement that grew within decades into one of the largest Christian populations in Asia.