Missionary Training Institute

While in Seoul, I stayed at the Missionary Training Institute, which was founded more than 20 years ago by my friend, Young Son, who sensed that God was calling him back to Korea to train Koreans to be missionaries. Young has since retired--actually he is in the upper midwest of the United States, pastoring a church in the Dakotas--but the work of MTI goes on and I was very much privileged to see it first hand. During the term when I visited, students were studying English quite intensively. On certain floors of the building only English is permitted. Basically the school day goes from breakfast at 7:30 a.m. through late homework help until about 9:00 at night. These students work hard and are quite serious about pursuing their calling. My friend, Danya Kelberg, teaches intermediate English and drilled the 8 or 9 students in her class on various things that they were learning. I sympathized with them because learning English as a foreign language is hard! English is such an irregular language and full of idiomatic expressions that a lot of just plain memorization is required. I'm so grateful to have learned it as my mother tongue! Students get exposure to a variety of accents. Their current teachers come from the United States, Australia and England and they have to learn to understand each of these accents. One of the young women I spoke with had spent some time in Uzbekestan and hoped to return there. I asked her about learning Uzbek and she assured me that it was much easier than learning English, since it was closer to the Korean language than is English. A man named Joshua was there with his wife and his 21 year old cerebal palsy daughter, who lives in a wheelchair and doesn't speak any language. Joshua and his family hope to go to Swaziland to do child evangelism. I expect that English will be very useful to him there, although I suspect that he will have to learn the local tribal language, too. Perhaps the most radiant of the people I met there was a young man who grew up in Japan, where his parents are missionaries. For Koreans to go to Japan as missionaries is a real work of grace. There is a centuries-old animosity between the two nations, since the Japanese have invaded and occupied the Korean peninsula many times over the years. This young man already speaks Japanese, having grown up there, but was working hard to learn English. Korean missionaries are everywhere in the world. In Cambodia alone, there were more than 600 of them, plus those who come for short stays of a couple of weeks to do specific projects. Koreans from a Christian univeristy have been invited to come and found a similar institution in Cambodia and have even been granted the land on which to build their school. They also blend in with the scenery much better than do we westerners! They are also the salt of the earth: they work hard, are focused, willing to make sacrifices and they stick with the task until it is completed. How much we have to learn from them! I got to speak to the student body about my own experience and invited questions afterward. Perhaps the most touching was from a young woman who asked "How about single women missionaries?" Right on! It seems that she had spent time in Jordan, where it is very hard for a woman to be alone. Not knowing her background, I gave a more generic answer. It seems that in God's providence, single women have been largely responsible for evangelising the world over the years. They have gone where men could not go--and still do. In China, girls in their early teens go off to remote regions to share the gospel with people who never had a chance to hear the good news. The government watches men more closely and tends to ignore the activities of women, so these girls are evidently quite free to travel. Anyway, being a single woman in a foreign land can be a lonely experience. I reminded them that we are not meant to be alone in our endeavors, and that we have a lot to learn from our Roman Catholic friends, for who singleness is also a vocation. Their single clergy live in community and we Protestants need to realize the wisdom of that. We all need support and companionship. As I read through the New Testament I am more and more convinced that community is God's norm for us.