Profile: Execution of father played role in ministry By John H. Adams The Presbyterian Layman Volume 33, Number 4 Posted August 4, 2000 RICHMOND, Va. – The Rev. Syngman Rhee is the son of a Presbyterian minister who was imprisoned and executed in Korea during that nation’s civil war. That tragic event has shaped much of Rhee’s life and continues to do so. Rhee recalls standing before his father’s grave in 1957, seven years after his father was executed. “In a sense I was agonizing, ‘Why do the good people have to suffer this kind of death and evil seems to prosper?’ A small, quiet voice came to my heart, saying, ‘Shouldn’t you follow your father’s footsteps in order to continue that ministry that your father was unable to complete because of his death at the age of 49?’” Rhee’s answer was yes. The Korean War years But in 1950, the possibility of becoming a Presbyterian minister seemed remote. His father had already been executed. Rhee and a younger brother fled North Korea in 1950, leaving behind his mother and four sisters. His family was hoping they would return in two or three weeks. For Rhee, it turned into decades of separation, finally ending in 1978. As a refugee in South Korea, Rhee recalls that “Church World Service came with food, blankets and most of all hope in the hopeless situation for the people who were struggling. The ministry of compassion touched me very, very deeply. That’s one of the reasons why I was very active in National Council of Churches and Church World Service.” Rhee is a former president of the National Council of Churches, and he supported full funding for the NCC and the World Council of Churches during the Long Beach General Assembly. Rhee joined the South Korean Marines and in 1953 was sent to the United States for special training at the U.S. Marine School in Quantico, Va. He says he struck up close friendships with Christian Marine officers and that they continued to correspond after he went back to South Korea. His friends from Quantico sponsored him as a student at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia, where Rhee majored in English and religion. From there, he went to Louisville seminary, graduating in 1960. He was ordained in Louisville and a week later married to Haesun Rhee, a long-time friend and medical doctor in South Korea. Rhee’s first call was to serve two small congregations near Louisville. “That was a wonderful experience for me,” he said. “I found what it means to be one in Jesus Christ.” Rhee next served for 13 years as Presbyterian campus minister at the University of Louisville. He began his campus ministry in the early ’60s and recalls that Martin Luther King made several visits to the campus. “I remember marching with him and the black students in Louisville,” Rhee said. “That experience taught me what it is to be engaged in the ministry of racial justice.” In 1978, Rhee left the University of Louisville to become coordinator for Middle East Missions for what was then the United Presbyterian Church (USA). He was with the agency for seven years during which “I learned what it means to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in a complex situation.” Worried about his family Since his ordination and settling in the United States, Rhee said he had both a “deep sense of gratitude that I was able to become a minister of the gospel following my father’s footsteps … and a continued nagging, what about the family I left behind, my mother, four little sisters, 14, 10, 8, 6 months old in 1950? There was no way of knowing anything about the loved ones left behind.” But his mission work in New York provided Rhee with a link back to his family in North Korea, from whom he had not heard since he fled to South Korea in 1950. Because of his position with the church, “I was able to call on the North Korean Embassy in Cairo to ask about my family … when the unexpected door was open to visit North Korea after 28 years.” Egypt had diplomatic relationships with North Korea, so the Cairo connection, and the fact that he was a native Korean, gave Rhee a chance to visit North Korea. “I met my four sisters and learned that my mother had passed eight years prior to my coming back. I also learned that an elder brother died during the Korean War.” Rhee has made 18 additional trips to Korea. He stays in touch with his sisters and sends assistance to help them through the current food shortage. Presbyterian mission efforts produced strong Presbyterian congregations both in the North and the South. Rhee is a third generation Presbyterian. Today, Presbyterian congregations are booming in South Korea, but they are only slowly re-emerging in the North. Rhee says all of the church buildings in North Korea have been destroyed, including the building that housed his father’s 3,000-member congregation. “In 1985, when I returned to North Korea, I discovered the beginning of house churches,” Rhee said. “Maybe eight, nine or ten people begin to gather in their houses and apartments. In 1989, the first building identified with a church was opened. They still have a long way to go.”

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