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SEOUL: The Yanghwajin Foreigners Cemetery, the most sacred site for Protestants in South Korea, occupies a tree-shaded hill overlooking the Han River here. Usually it presents a peaceful scene, where magpies hopscotch among the tombstones and slow-gaited visitors pause to read inscriptions.

But over the past two years, it has become the setting for a highly charged battle between Korea's oldest, and predominantly foreign, Protestant congregation and one of the country's newest.

On Aug. 5, about 2,000 members of a Korean church that was established in 2005 to honor the early American missionaries buried here took over the cemetery chapel and claimed it as their own. They locked out the congregation that was started by those same missionaries 122 years ago and had been holding services in the chapel for the past 22 years.

The young Korean congregation, called The 100th Anniversary Memorial Church, declared it a historic moment, a strike against foreign domination comparable to Hong Kong's 1997 transfer from British to Chinese rule. Its leaders said they had finally reclaimed the holy ground from "foreigners who had turned it into an extraterritorial zone."

The 100 or so locked-out members of the older Seoul Union Church held their own service in a tent outside the chapel and vowed not to surrender. "Our church's history is tied to this place," said the Reverend Prince Charles Oteng-Boateng, a Ghana-born pastor. "We will keep meeting here until Jesus comes."
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He warned that pushing out the expatriates could have negative consequences. "Korea is now trying to turn itself into a country that attracts a lot of foreigners and an international place for foreigners," he said. "For them to do something like this is not right."

The dispute comes as South Korean Christians in general are facing new scrutiny over aggressive expansionism, at home and overseas, even in Islamic countries. In July, the Taliban kidnapped 23 South Koreans in Afghanistan on a church-sponsored aid mission and have since killed two of them.

A century ago, Korea was on the receiving end of Christian evangelists, mostly from the United States. Now, more South Koreans identify with Christianity than any other religion, and South Korea has become the world's second largest exporter of Christian missionaries, after the United States.

The Yanghwajin cemetery is the 117-year-old burial ground for many of these early American missionaries and other foreigners, many of whom are revered by Koreans. Not only did these pioneers spread Christianity, but they also fought for Korea's independence from Japanese colonial rule. They also founded some of South Korea's oldest and best-known universities and hospitals.

But now Memorial Church argues that Christianity in South Korea has come of age and that South Koreans should take the lead. And as the larger, and richer, congregation, it says it is in a better position to maintain Yanghwajin. It says the cemetery had been turned into a "garbage-strewn, crime-infested urban haunt for juvenile delinquents" under Union Church's care, a charge the foreign congregation rejects as part of a "smear campaign."

"We should establish a new order at Yanghwajin by making it clear who is the owner and who is the visitor," said the Reverend Lee Jae Chul of the Memorial Church, adding that his church was claiming Yanghwajin "not because of nationalism but because this is our land."

"This is a sacred place for the Korean Protestant church," he added. "It should not be controlled by a small group of foreigners who are in this country for their own private interests and have nothing to do with those buried here."

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The Union Church, which holds its services in English, ministers primarily to expatriates in Seoul. Only a few of its 150 active members today are directly related to the early missionaries buried at the cemetery. But many feel an attachment to the history represented here and feel they have fallen victim to anti-foreign nationalism.
"There is that sense of nationalism or racism that I think still is in the society," said Robert Black, a Union Church member and an American private equity investor who has lived in South Korea for 12 years. "At different times, it comes up in politics, it comes up in business and, unfortunately, it comes up in religion."
Robert Neff, a Seoul-based historian who has studied the early missionaries, said, "You can't talk about Korea's modernization without talking about those buried here."
American Protestant evangelists began arriving in Korea in 1885, a full century behind Roman Catholic missionaries from Europe, who bore the brunt of Korea's early persecution of Christianity.