In 1961, a Korean Protestant man and an American missionary woman began the University Bible Fellowship (UBF) in South Korea. Despite their different backgrounds, Samuel Chang-woo Lee and Sarah Barry partnered together to minister to college students in Kwangju. Their shared vision for Christian evangelism led to the creation of an international mission agency that sent the second-largest number of South Korean missionaries throughout the world by 2000. In Rebecca Y. Kim's engrossing and meticulously researched book, she traces the evolution of the UBF's mission in the United States from the 1970s to the early 2010s to uncover why the group devoted more resources to the United States than any other country and how it pursued its religious aims in a nation where an overwhelming majority of the population self-identify as Christian.
Kim utilizes 108 formal interviews; 186 online surveys; over three years of participant observation; and content analysis of a myriad of UBF documents and related scholarship on Korean Christianity, Korean American religion, and world Christianity to advance a nuanced argument about the continuing influence of white American evangelicalism within this autonomous Korean mission. The missionaries in her study embody and propagate what she identifies as hyper-Korean evangelicalism—“an intense, biblical, and conservative evangelical faith and practice shaped by indigenous Korean culture”—in the United States (p. 6). Their motivations for coming to the United States are manifold: they see the country as a “modern Rome” and a strategic base to mobilize for world mission; they find American colleges and universities are fertile ground to evangelize to foreign students from “hard-to-access mission fields like China and the Middle East”; and they believe, like other missionaries from the Global South, that Christians in the United States are declining in their spiritual rigor and succumbing to the practice of a nominal faith without a strong moral foundation (pp. 55–60). Yet Kim astutely points to how some UBF methods, especially over time, illustrate the Korean missionaries' compliance to American evangelical culture. They target and privilege whites as “ideal converts” and “real Americans” above other racial-ethnic minorities partly out of the belief that focusing on the dominant group (in number and stature) is an effective top-down strategy to revitalize American Christianity but also because they envy and desire the physical appearances of light-skinned white students, with blond hair and blue eyes that resemble Grace Kelly, James Dean, and other Hollywood stars they grew up watching in Korea (pp. 105–7). The UBF gradually toned down its religious intensity, abandoned distinctively Korean practices, adopted white American evangelical worship styles, and joined various US evangelical organizations. According to Kim, the UBF missionaries “came to save white Americans…. [I]n a short span of time, however, they have begun to be more like the American churches they once so eagerly distinguished themselves from” (p. 138).
In addition to Kim's linkage of South Korea's neocolonial relationship with the United States at the geopolitical level to Korean evangelicals' more subtle yet enduring admiration of white American evangelicals in religious life, her work also produces fresh and compelling insights on Korean American Protestants through the lens of mission instead of the more familiar paradigm of immigration. Whereas Korean immigrants formed their own churches to retain old world cultural values and establish new world social networks, the UBF missionaries in Kim's book by and large left comfortable middle-class lives in South Korea and intentionally separated themselves from the wider Korean American community in order to evangelize to young white Americans (pp. 112–13).
Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, Kim deftly presents the UBF as an in-depth case study to analyze changing patterns in Christian missions over the last several decades. Kim argues that the UBF's increasing white assimilation in the United States is part of a broader development in which the churches and church-related agencies initiated by Christians from the Global South to re-evangelize the West “will eventually lose their fervent and sectarian character and become more like the mainstream churches in their midst” (p. 137). Kim also raises intriguing connections between the decreasing spiritual vitality of the UBF in the United States and the stagnant conditions of Christianity in South Korea. Several senior UBF missionaries recognized how the numbers of Christians in South Korea have declined with the country's rapid economic growth and Westernization—bemoaning “that Christianity in South Korea is mirroring the trajectory of Christianity in the West” (p. 161).
Kim highlights the UBF's global focus, as evinced by its missionaries in over eighty countries, but the book only briefly touches upon UBF missionaries in African and Asian nations. Because Kim's comparative analysis between UBF mission work in the Global South and its evolution in the United States illumines the ambiguous position of the South Korean foreign missionary enterprise more generally, the reader is left wanting to learn more about how missionaries are leveraging their country's status as a “new subimperial power” to establish a “position of financial, cultural, and technological superiority” (p. 173). South Korean missionaries now possess material resources commensurate to the West and wield considerable influence in the Global South. But Kim implies that South Korean missionaries will not be able to forge their own path forward as long as white American evangelicalism remains the model to emulate and the goal to surpass. Scholars of Korean Christianity, Korean American studies, American religion, and world Christianity may gravitate toward The Spirit Moves West for different reasons, but they will all find compelling insights and substantive findings in this book.
