Church outside churches: A research on the woman house church movement in Korea

This dissertation explores an important movement within Korean Protestantism, Korean woman house church (Gajung Jedan in Korean). Most participants in the woman house church are Protestant lay women who also perform active roles in mainstream Protestant churches, particularly Presbyterian and Methodist Churches. Although the woman's movement has been a part of Korean Protestantism, not enough research has been conducted on this important movement. My motivation for doing this research derived from my intention to lay a foundation for further research on the movement. To this end, I examined the movement in two ways: in terms of the life stories of participating women and in terms of its place in Korean Protestantism as well as world church history. A methodology of ethnography proved to be useful for the former whereas historical analysis helped with the latter.;By means of ethnography, I discovered that, through the movement, woman in suffering are awakened, healed, trained, and learn to help other women in similar circumstances. Thus, woman house church is the locus of sharing painful stories, experiencing healing, and being trained to be God's daughters, who will save other suffering women in the future, although it has several limitations. Historical analysis revealed that the movement restores the tradition of an earlier Korean Protestantism such as nationalism and resolution of han, and shares the tradition of the renewal movement that has been active throughout the history of Christianity.;Because of its somewhat unorthodox characteristics, the movement produced tension within mainstream Protestant churches that, interestingly, share the same people as their members. As a voluntary church, woman house church created tension with the mainstream institutional church. Following in the tradition of female-centered Shamanistic culture, the movement revealed a conflict with the patriarchal Confucian mainstream church because the two bodies have different understandings of woman leadership as well as of the role of the Holy Spirit. The woman house church restores the life-giving power of early Korean Protestantism especially for women who are sharing the tradition of the renewal movement in the history of Christianity.