Bill MajorsThe Same Years
Korea threw out its first president the year I was born. I arrived after college — Gimpo on 1 June 1982, twenty-one years old, Gwangju the next day — and most of my life has happened here in Korea ever since.
From a small town in Oklahoma to the streets of Seoul — a life shaped entirely by God's calling and grace, lived out inside a country that was remaking itself the whole time. The left column comes from the public record, much of it from the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History in Seoul. The right column is mine. Where a year appears between them, the two tracks touched.
I was born in Oklahoma in the year Korea threw out its first president. For nineteen years the two tracks on this page had nothing to do with each other — except that a boy in Oklahoma kept saying he was going to be a missionary, and a country on the other side of the world was becoming the place he meant.
The April Revolution
April 19, 1960 — students take to the streets against a rigged election. Police open fire. A week later Syngman Rhee resigns and leaves for Hawaii. The First Republic is over.
Born in Oklahoma
November 8, 1960. My mother, Ellen Mary Jane Maxwell — everyone who loved her called her Mary — had married at eighteen, three years earlier. She grew up on Oklahoma red dirt: oil fields, small churches, the kind of life where nothing comes easy.
The generals arrive
May 16, 1961 — Major General Park Chung-hee takes power in a coup. Military rule begins. In one form or another it will last until 1987 — almost exactly as long as it takes me to grow up and get there.
Five-year plans and a distant war
The first Five-Year Economic Development Plan begins in 1962. From 1964 Korea sends troops to Vietnam — 325,517 of them before it ends, with 5,099 killed.
The half apple
My father came through the door after work with a lunch box, and inside there was always something left — half an apple, the last bite of a sandwich. He did it on purpose. My mother cut it into three. Then he came home less, and then he did not come home.
Expressway, village movement, and a young man on fire
1970 — the Gyeongbu Expressway opens and the Saemaul Undong begins. That November, a twenty-two-year-old garment worker named Jeon Tae-il sets himself alight in Seoul, calling out that workers are human beings too.
A million people at Yoido
Billy Graham preached at Yoido Plaza from May 30 to June 3, 1973. Over five days 3.2 million people came; on the final day the crowd passed 1.1 million — the largest live audience ever gathered for an evangelistic message. His interpreter was Dr. Billy Kim, a Korean trained in America who led Korea Youth for Christ and Far East Broadcasting in Korea. The year before, the Yushin Constitution had made Park president for life.
Thirteen, at Lake Texoma
A church member quietly paid my way to a youth camp on the Texas–Oklahoma border. I came back with an answer. Nine years later I would sleep in the Korea Youth for Christ office in Gwangju, and spend much of my life doing what Billy Kim was doing on that platform — standing beside someone, turning English into Korean.
The first Korean car
Hyundai builds the Pony 1 from 1976 to 1981 — the first car designed in Korea, and the beginning of an export industry.
I stopped being Billy
The summer I turned fifteen. Not officially, not with any announcement — new city, new church, new school, and when someone put out a hand I simply introduced myself differently.
Two shots in eight weeks
October 26, 1979 — Park Chung-hee is assassinated by his own intelligence chief after eighteen years in power. December 12 — Chun Doo-hwan seizes control of the army. The country has six months left before Gwangju.
Chattanooga, with seventy-five dollars
Tennessee Temple University. I drove there in a Volkswagen Super Beetle with seventy-five dollars in my pocket, arriving a week before the dormitories opened hoping to find a job before more students arrived looking for jobs, willing to sleep in the car if it came to that.
“I am going to be a missionary. I said it at thirteen. I said it at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen… The way you tell someone your name or where you are from.”
I landed in a country two years out from Gwangju's May, still under a general who had made himself president, still closed enough that its own citizens could not travel abroad. I was not put into a mission compound. I was put into a Korean family.
A general makes himself president
December 1979 — Chun Doo-hwan seizes control of the military. On May 17, 1980 martial law is extended nationwide, and the next day paratroopers are sent into Gwangju. Citizens demanding democracy hold the city for nine days before the army retakes it. That August Chun is elected president by an electoral body he controlled. He was the only candidate. This is the Gwangju I would move to, two years later.
Joseph's father takes us to dinner
A Korean man visiting Chattanooga took his son Joseph and a few of us to a Korean restaurant. To me he was simply Joseph Kim's father. He was Dr. Billy Kim — the man who had stood beside Billy Graham at Yoido in 1973 and turned his English into Korean for a million people. Later that year, in Gwangju, John Song asked him how one might get an American college student to come and serve as an intern with Youth for Christ. A letter of invitation reached me in Tennessee. I could not leave my newspaper delivery route until I finished school — so I stopped aiming at my grade point average and started aiming at graduating a year early.
Graduation, a year early
May 1982 — Tennessee Temple University. I had come to Chattanooga with seventy-five dollars and left with a degree earned twelve months ahead of schedule, because a letter had arrived from a city I could not yet find on a map.
The curfew ends. The soldiers stay.
January 5, 1982 — the midnight-to-4 AM curfew ends after 36 years. It had been imposed by the US military government in September 1945 and never lifted by any Korean government since. It stayed in force in front-line and coastal districts. Seoul had won the 1988 Olympics that September and the 1986 Asian Games in November; the National Assembly voted the curfew away in December. Nothing else about the security state changed.
Gimpo, June 1. Gwangju, June 2.
Twenty-one years old, with nine hundred dollars, a cowboy hat on my head and boots on my feet with no plan beyond the calling — and no experience of living under a military government. Uniformed soldiers inside the airport and outside it. Military exercises — soldiers marching, tanks and trucks on the streets. Monthly civil defence drills: twenty minutes in the daytime, and sometimes at midnight.
Straight into the deep end
I could not speak Korean. I started out in a Korean apartment with a grandmother and her youngest son — neither of them spoke any English. It was the Nestea plunge: fall backward into the pool and hope. From there I moved into the Youth for Christ office and slept there on my own. Then I moved into John Song's home and became the seventh of a family of six — two daughters, one and three years younger than me, and two sons, seven and ten years younger.
A city that could not say what happened
Under Chun Doo-hwan, what the army had done in Gwangju was officially a riot stirred up by agitators. Saying otherwise in public could be prosecuted. The city knew what it had seen and kept it indoors.
What they told a foreigner
Several people I met in Gwangju told me what they had lived through in May 1980. It was not legal to speak against the government, and it stretched them emotionally to say these things out loud. They told me anyway — I believe because I was a foreigner, and whatever else I was, I was not going to report them.
Three days to leave the country
Three months in, I filled out a missionary visa application and described my missionary activities honestly. The description was the evidence: I had been illegally doing missionary work on a tourist visa. A registered letter from the Justice Department gave me three days to leave the country. Dr. Dick Nieusma, a dental missionary at the Gwangju Christian Hospital, contacted a missionary couple in Osaka asking if I could stay with them. I applied at the consulate in Osaka, and what I was told would take one week came back five weeks later with a missionary visa. It felt like a rejection. It was language school in disguise.
Professional baseball begins
March 27, 1982 — the KBO opens with six clubs. The Haetae Tigers, founded that January, play at Mudeung Stadium in Gwangju.
The home team of my new city
I arrived mid-season of the first year professional baseball existed in Korea, in the city whose team would offer healing to hurting citizens after the government crackdown of May 1980.
A country still poor
Annual income per person stood at about $1,800. Hyundai had built the Pony 1 from 1976 to 1981, and the Pony 2 reached the market in 1982. Almost nobody drove: the whole country would not pass one million registered vehicles until May 1985, for a population of forty million. It reached two million in January 1988 and three million by June 1990.
A country its own people could not leave
Koreans could not leave their own country freely. From January 1983 a tourist passport required you to be over 50 and to have kept two million won in a bank for a year — good for one trip. All limits ended on January 1, 1989.
Learning the language
Formal study of Korean had one location in the whole country. Studying at Yonsei University meant moving to Seoul. It was the beginning of the fluency that would let me preach, teach, and eventually interpret at the highest levels.
A hundred thousand orphans, and where they went
The Korean War left around 100,000 orphans. Overseas adoption began about 1953, and Holt International alone would place some 60,000 Korean children in American homes. 1984 was also the centenary of Protestant mission in Korea.
Resident missionary at the orphanages
Resident missionary at Hwarang Orphanage from 1983 to 1985 and Sungshin Orphanage from 1985 to 1987, both in Uijeongbu. Between 1984 and 1987 I escorted 23 orphans to the United States.
The curfew comes back
During the Ulchi military exercises of August 1985 and July 1986, the night curfew was reimposed across fifty cities nationwide — the full midnight-to-4 AM restriction, then lifted again when the exercise ended.
In the house before midnight
I remember those military training periods. Inside before midnight, and not permitted out again until after four in the morning. The nation had officially ended its curfew before I ever arrived — but I still lived through it, during civil defence and military training exercises.
June 1987
1,308,300 people took to the streets across the country. On June 29 the government conceded direct presidential elections. Korea's democracy dates from that month.
Married on October 31
A single missionary living at an orphanage, I had been asked a simple question by Dr. Dick Nieusma, a visiting American dental missionary: “Have you ever thought about marrying your friend?” Two weeks of prayer in the rice fields behind the orphanage led to a proposal. Four months after the June 29 Declaration, I married Ja-kyung “Niki” Lyu — Halloween in the West, but with no Halloween in Korea it was simply a beautiful Saturday afternoon. We married at the Women Evangelist Hall (여전도회관) in Yeonji-dong, opened that year — a fourteen-storey headquarters built by Korean churchwomen on the ground where American missionaries had run a girls' school from 1895 to 1975. Korea as the mission field had become the sender of missionaries, and I was an American marrying a Korean inside the proof of it.
Seoul hosts the Olympics
September 1988. The following year, overseas travel was fully liberalized — Koreans could leave the country freely for the first time.
A voice at the medal ceremonies
I translated for the medal ceremonies at the Gymnastics Stadium of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. Regional Director for International CBMC Asia, 1988–89. And seven years as simultaneous interpreter at Young Nak Church every Sunday (1987–1993 and 1997–1998) and at the annual Korea National Prayer Breakfast, where I interpreted for five different Korean presidents between 1987 and 2006.
“The country lifted its curfew five months before I arrived. I lived under it anyway.”
This page gives the outline in the right column. The full account — the half apple, the calling, the orphanage, the language, and everything underneath it — is in my autobiography, The Half Apple.
The Half AppleKorea grew wealthy, joined the world's institutions, and then very nearly lost it all in a single winter. My own decade ran from a seminary classroom in Dallas back to a university lectern in Seoul.
Seoul opens to Moscow and Beijing
Diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in September 1990, and with China in August 1992. After forty years of Cold War isolation, the country my daughters were born into was no longer walled off from half the world.
Sarah, and then Anna
Sarah was born in 1990, named after my grandmother. Anna was born in 1992. Twenty-five months apart. Land was purchased an hour from Seoul and a country house was built for our family. Two Korean-American daughters, both born in Uijeongbu to a father who had arrived eight years earlier unable to even ask directions.
Both Koreas join the UN
1991. The following year, a joint declaration on the denuclearization of the peninsula. A brief season of hope.
Every account must carry a name
Kim Young-sam takes office in February, the first civilian president in over thirty years, elected freely — a third-generation Christian and a ruling elder at Chunghyeon Presbyterian Church in Seoul. On August 12, by emergency decree effective at eight that same evening, every bank account in the country must carry its owner's real name. Until then money could sit in the banking system belonging to nobody — which is what had made slush funds, bribes and hidden wealth possible. Two months to comply. Within two years the concealed funds of two former presidents were traceable, and both were convicted.
Back to USA
Seminary at Dallas Theological Seminary, 1993–95, finishing with an M.A. Recognized in 1994 with the Student Missions Fellowship Service Award.
The year things fell down
Kim Il-sung died that July. In October the Seongsu Bridge dropped into the Han River. The following June a department store collapsed in Seoul. A country that had built very fast was learning what it had built.
The gap
November 25, the night after Thanksgiving. As an English pastor in a Korean church gymnasium in Dallas, a stage being built to look like a television screen, a stack of black construction paper. I was the tallest. It was my time to go up the ladder — and then there is nothing. Nobody saw me fall. Phil Kim, a college student home for the holiday, found me and called 911. The ambulance drove thirty minutes to find a neurologist on a holiday weekend. The next thing I remember is a hospital room, my wife's face, my daughters.
New wiring
The insurance company decided I was normal and stopped paying for rehabilitation. Normal, not restored. The damage was to the analytical side — the side I had lived in my whole life. What was left was the emotional side that I had underused. I cried at everything: advertisements, songs, children playing. It was so disorienting and embarrassing, and it made me a different kind of husband, father and minister. The accident had brought a new call to be a missionary pastor.
Into the rich countries' club
WTO membership in 1995, OECD accession in 1996. Income per person passed $12,000 — from $1,800 when I landed.
Teaching at Hanyang
Associate Professor at Hanyang University, College of Education, teaching ESL from 1996 to 2002.
The IMF crisis
1997. The currency collapsed, companies failed, and a country that had climbed for thirty-five years was restructured almost overnight. Koreans still call it simply “the IMF.”
Translating at Youngnak
The house we had built was too far from Seoul for the girls' school, and then the financial crisis arrived and Korea faced bankruptcy. That same year I began translating again at Youngnak Church, and shared a dream with the senior pastor: that two languages could worship at the same church, not as guests in each other's spaces but as members of the same church family. The International Worship in English (IWE) grew out of that conversation.
“The deportation that felt like rejection had been language school in disguise. The orphanages that felt like detours had been family formation. The ladder accident that felt like an ending had been a rewiring.”
Korea recovered, hosted a World Cup, and swung between summit handshakes and naval gunfire. I spent the decade building a church within a church for people who did not speak Korean.
The first summit
June 2000 — the first meeting between the leaders of North and South, and the June 15 Joint Declaration.
World Cup, and the West Sea
2002 — Korea reached the semi-finals and the whole country turned red. In the same month, the Second Battle of Yeonpyeong killed six sailors.
Leaving the lectern
Six years of teaching at Hanyang came to an end, and full-time ministry at Youngnak became what being a missionary pastor was all about. Sarah and Anna started attending Seoul Foreign School in 7th and 5th grade.
A city of ten million
Seoul in the mid-2000s had become one of the world's great cities — and had begun to think of itself as one.
Honorary Citizen of Seoul
Awarded Honorary Citizenship of Seoul by Mayor Lee Myung-bak — twenty-three years after arriving unable to speak a word of the language.
The nuclear turn
North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006. A second summit and the October 4 Declaration in 2007. In 2008 a South Korean tourist was shot dead at Mount Kumgang, and the exchanges froze.
Seoul Foreign School
Elected to the Board of Trustees, serving as Secretary — the beginning of fourteen years of volunteer service: eight years on the board, then six as chair of the SFS Foundation.
The decade Korea stopped being my mission field and became my country. It was also the decade I went furthest away in order to come back better prepared.
Cheonan and Yeonpyeong
2010 — the corvette Cheonan sank with 46 lost, and Yeonpyeong Island was shelled in November. The worst year on the peninsula in decades.
Korean citizenship
Thirty years after arriving, I became a citizen of the Republic of Korea while remaining an American. Korea was no longer where I served. It was where I was from.
Chaplaincy at MD Anderson
Clinical Pastoral Education — four units in twelve months — at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, ministry in the hardest of places. Attending and sometimes preaching in Korean on Sundays at Calvary Korean Baptist Church.
Kaesong closes
The joint industrial complex, the last working link between North and South, was shut down in 2016.
Doctor of Ministry
D.Min. from Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Lead Pastor at Somang Church's English Worship Service (EWS), 2015–2017, then at Sinchon Church International Community (SCIC), 2017–2025.
Panmunjom
April 2018 — the two leaders stepped across the line together. By the Hanoi summit of 2019 the opening had closed again.
The Foundation
CrossCulture Community Foundation registered as a 501(c)(3) in Texas — thirty-seven years of ministry given a formal shape.
A pandemic, and then something I never expected to see in the Korea I had watched become a democracy: martial law declared again, at midnight, in December.
Pandemic
Korea's response drew the world's attention: QR check-in everywhere, and tracing that could reconstruct where you had been. From November 2021 a vaccine pass was required to enter bars and gyms, extended in December to restaurants, cafes, cinemas, libraries and study rooms. Vaccination was never made law, but without the pass there was almost nowhere left to go. The courts struck the system down piece by piece, and it was dropped nationwide on March 1, 2022. That October, 159 people died in a crowd crush in Itaewon.
Two is too many
When I arrived in 1982 the government was running a campaign, and the slogan was simple: two is too many. Families were urged to have one child, at most two. It worked. By 2023 the birth rate had fallen to 0.7, among the lowest on earth, and the government that once said two is too many now cannot find the people it needs. I went to a contemporary history museum in Seoul in 2023 and found an exhibit about that campaign. The tone was not pride. It was regret.
Martial law, and six hours
December 3, 2024 — martial law was declared. 190 lawmakers forced their way into the National Assembly and voted it down. It was lifted within six hours. On December 14 the president was impeached, 204 to 85, and removed by the Constitutional Court on April 4, 2025.
Forty-two years on
I came to a country under military government and watched it become a democracy. That December I watched the word return — and watched the country refuse it before morning. The difference between 1980 and 2024 is the whole story of the decades on this page.
A new president
Lee Jae-myung was elected on June 3, 2025 and sworn in the following morning. In the local elections of June 2026, turnout reached 61 percent.
Sixty-five, and a full-time missionary again
I turned 65 in November and completed a planned transition out of Sinchon Church International Community (SCIC) after eight years as pastor. That same year I won two national senior citizen doubles tennis titles and was promoted to the Gold League.
CrossCulture Community, and the book
CrossCulture Community (크로스컬처 커뮤니티) was established in Seoul in March. The Half Apple was finished and released in April. And the Seoul Bible Museum — a virtual museum now, a physical one in Seoul one day — became the work ahead.
“I arrived in a Korea that feared too many people. I am writing these words in a Korea that fears too few.”
Who am I, and where does Korea end?
The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History ends its permanent exhibition on that question. I have spent forty-four years inside the answer without ever settling it.
I look like a boy from Oklahoma. I hold two passports. I arrived unable to say good morning, and I have preached, taught, and interpreted in this language for most of my adult life. I came as a guest of one family of six, and became the seventh.