Creating a Culture of Reconciliation and Life through Hanpuri and Hanmaji

During the earliest period of its history in Korea, when the Gospel of Christ was being propagated, the Korean church was the quintessence of salvation bringing liberation to the baekjeong1, slaves, peasants, and powerless women who had been living a repressed and Han-full life under the patriarchal tradition of Confucian feudalism and caste structures. However, as the church gradually became institutionalised and authoritarian it began to take on the characteristics of a patriarchal hierarchy and the Gospel, which had liberated the poor, became distorted into a Gospel for the powerful. During the Japanese colonial period the autocratic leaders of the church acquiesced to the unjust power of the colonial overlords and merely sought to further their positions, and preserve their livelihood. Many continued to distort the Truth of Christ by blindly adhering to the logic of ideology that sought to legitimate the division of the Korean people in order to preserve their dictatorial power over the people.