2 churches soldier on in cemetery battle

About 10 foreign diplomats attended the opening ceremony for 100th Anniversary Memorial Church’s new hall in Yanghwajin, western Seoul on March 26.

Easter is the holiest of Christian holidays, but that didn’t stop two Seoul churches ― one Korean, the other foreign ― from waging a new battle in a seven-month-long property war last week.
The 100th Anniversary Memorial Church, the Korean church, drew new ire from its foreign opponent, Seoul Union Church, when it invited foreign diplomats to the opening ceremony of its new memorial hall.
Seoul Union went on the offensive, sending out letters to foreign embassies requesting that their diplomats not attend the ceremony.
The two churches began to clash last August over ownership of the 118-year-old Seoul Foreigners’ Cemetery, a sacred place for more than 10 million Christians in the nation. In the end, Memorial Church evicted Seoul Union from its building, which was on the grounds of the cemetery in conflict.
“We sent the letter for fear that they [Memorial Church] will use the invited foreign diplomats to back their claim of the legitimacy over the cemetery,” said Peter Underwood, representative of the Kyungsung European-American Cemetery Association, in Korean.
Key members of Seoul Union comprise the association.
Underwood, great grandson of the founder of Yonsei University, the nation’s top private school, has seven family members, including his father buried in the cemetery.
Underwood is not against Memorial Church’s plans to build the hall, adjacent in the Yanghwajin, western Seoul-based cemetery.
The Korean church built the memorial hall to honor the 143 missionaries and their families buried in the cemetery.
“We appreciate their effort to pay tribute to the missionaries,” Underwood said.
Around 10 diplomats, including Ted Lipman, Canada’s ambassador to Korea, and Conor Murphy, Ireland’s ambassador to Korea, showed up to the ceremony last Wednesday. While expressing gratitude to the foreign guests, an elder of the Korean church said more diplomats could have attended.
“A diplomat present today said the cemetery association was tenacious in their efforts to dissuade them from attending the event,” said Jung Yong-sup, a Memorial Church elder and head of a committee the church founded to address the conflict with Seoul Union. “So, we don’t know. There might have been more ambassadors without the obstruction [from the cemetery association].”
One of the guests at the ceremony, Alexander Timonin, minister-counsellor of the Russian Embassy to Seoul, said he came as a token of gratitude to the Memorial Church for taking care of the cemetery. Many of the some 500 bodies buried in the cemetery are those of foreign diplomats, soldiers and businessmen, including some Russians.
“We came here because we have some graves of the Russian people. We appreciate highly the organization taking care of the graves,” Timonin said. Asked if he is aware of the ongoing clash between the two churches, he said, “I can’t say anything about it.”
While the bitter conflict surfaced only last year, it was a long time coming, according to sources familiar with the issue.

Memorial Church Pastor. Lee Jae-chul. By Moon Gwang-lip

When King Gojong designated the 14,000 square meters of land as a tomb site for foreign missionaries in 1890, Kyungsung European-American Cemetery Association took charge of managing the cemetery grounds.
The cemetery association and Seoul Union still claim ownership of the land.
The Council for the 100th Anniversary of the Korean Church, which founded the Memorial Church in 2005, deny their claim. The council argues the Park Chung Hee regime in the 1960s annulled the foreign church’s ownership with a law banning foreigners from owning land in Korea.
The council, which counts revered Christian leaders among its members, says it registered the land with the government in 1985 to take care of the cemetery, which it says was left in ruins.
The council says it constructed the building the churches shared within the cemetery out of courtesy toward Seoul Union, Korea’s oldest Protestant church.
But Seoul Union and the cemetery association have a different story.
Seoul Union leaders say the two parties made a long-standing agreement to keep the land under the foreign church’s control.
Memorial Church’s Jung says this claim is an attempt by missionaries’ descendants to take advantage of their ancestors’ revered name to own the land.
“If a Korean claims ownership of Arlington National Cemetery just because his father is buried there, who would listen to that?” Jung said.
“They are trying to make this look like a battle between a minor foreign group and a Korean group, which is not true. We just want to protect the nation’s sovereignty that once was lost.”
With distrust between the two churches, a series of thrust and parry marked the past seven months.
Memorial Church recently changed the name of the cemetery from the Seoul Foreigners’ Cemetery to the Seoul Foreign Missionary Cemetery, which elicited strong criticism from Seoul Union.
Rev. Prince C. Oteng-Boateng, the Ghanaian-born pastor of Seoul Union, said the move grew out of the Korean church’s intent to deny Seoul Union’s management rights to the cemetery.
“The question is why they changed the name,” Oteng-Boateng said.
“It was Seoul Foreigners’ Cemetery for 120 years and never Missionaries’ Cemetery. Why change the name now?”
The Korean church has faced two lawsuits over the conflict, one for defamation and one for obstruction of justice.
Seoul Union brought the obstruction of justice charges, but the prosecution dropped them last week for lack of evidence.
Underwood filed the other charges, claiming Lee Jae-chul, head pastor of Memorial Church, defamed his father, Horace Grant Underwood III. The prosecution has indicted Lee for these charges.
“There were fallacies, in part of Lee’s sermon about [Horace Grant] Underwood [III] ... so we indicted him,” said Park Hyeon-jun, the prosecutor in charge of the case.
Underwood, however, said he dropped the case after some representatives of Korean Presbyterian churches voiced an appeal to him. In turn, the Korean Presbyterians promised their support in resolving the conflict.
“The ball is now in Memorial Church’s court after the Seoul Union dropped the case at our request, but [Memorial] church seems to be doing nothing but keeping claims to its ownership,” said Cho Seong-gi, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Korea, the biggest association of the nation’s Presbyterian churches.
“We are talking with member churches to come up with a unified stance as how to deal with the Memorial Church.”
With no sign of compromise between the two churches, their relations look to sour further in an ugly court battle over the ownership of the cemetery.
“We have everything ready to bring this issue of ownership to the court,” Underwood said.
“We will make every effort to resolve this conflict within the church. But if nothing else is successful, there seems no other way.”

By Moon Gwang-lip Staff Reporter [joe@joongang.co.kr]