Wrong Text Message? Don't Press Delete

The South Korean pastor texted back, “Who is this?”

By Andrew McChesney, Adventist Mission

Byong Ju Lee looked with puzzlement at the text message on his cell phone. The words formed a poem in Korean, and he didn’t recognize the sender’s phone number.

Many people might have deleted the message as a wrong number, but not Byong Ju. He texted back, “Who is this?”

Then his cell phone rang.

“Who is this?” a woman’s voice asked.

“You texted me first,” Byong Ju replied.

It turned out that the woman had wanted to text the poem to a friend but misdialed the phone number by a single digit.

Many people might have hung up at that point, but not Byong Ju. He asked one more question, “Are you a poet?”

“No, I’m an elementary school teacher,” the woman said. “I write poems as a hobby.”

“Oh really?” Byong Ju said. He thought he recognized her accent and asked one more question. “Do you live in Busan?” he said, referring to South Korea’s second-largest city.

“No, I live in Jinju,” the woman said said.

“I actually graduated from high school in Jinju,” Byong Ju said. “It’s very interesting that you live there.”

The woman asked which high school he had attended, and they learned that she had studied at a high school just up the street from his.

The two reminisced about their high school days for a few minutes.

Then the woman asked, “What do you do?”

“I’m a church pastor,” Byong Ju said.

“Oh really? Which denomination?” she asked.

The question made Byong Ju think that the woman wasn’t a Buddhist, the second-largest faith group in South Korea, comprising 15 percent of the population. “Christians don’t ask a monk which temple he works at, so the woman must be a Christian,” he thought. Christians account for 27 percent of the population of 51 million.

“I’m a Seventh-day Adventist pastor,” Byong Ju said.

“I see,” the woman said. “Do you know Noah’s Ark?”

Byongju was surprised. Noah’s Ark is an offshoot of the Adventist Church in South Korea.

The woman explained that she had worshipped briefly with a Noah’s Ark group while studying at a university. She had left the group convinced of one thing — that the biblical Sabbath is not on Sunday. Now 20 years later she had sent the wrong text message to an Adventist pastor.

That evening, Byong Ju sent the woman a follow-up text message. “It was great to meet you today!” he wrote.

A year later, the woman was baptized into the Adventist Church.

Evangelism is easy, Byong Ju said. 

“If I had ignored the text message, maybe she wouldn’t have become a church member,” he said. “But I tried to form a relationship by asking just one more question.”

Byong Ju Lee, 51, is the Sabbath School and Personal Ministries director for the Adventist Church’s Korean Union Conference in Seoul, South Korea. He also is director and speaker of “Chun Su Dap,” a daily devotional podcast that is ranked the second-most popular religious podcast in South Korea.