COLPORTEUR ACTIVITY

Brother Lee Shi-chong, at age 22, dedicated his life to Jehovah in 1930 and devoted himself to the colporteur service. “I was not courageous enough to preach in the city, so I acquired a bicycle and decided to preach in the provinces,” Brother Lee tells us. “I piled my baggage and literature on my bicycle, and the first place I went was to the county office in Kyŏnggi Province. I hesitated about going in, but I thought of my mission as a Kingdom ambassador, a term I had heard often from the branch manager. The result was that I placed several books with the officials, and I was very much encouraged and had confidence from then on.”

Brother Lee, who is presently serving as an elder in a Seoul congregation, traveled the length and breadth of the land, reaching into what is now North Korea and even into Manchuria. He would order literature from the Seoul office and have it sent ahead to the next village or town. This was his life for three years until 1933 when the witnessing work came under difficulty.

THE WORK GOES ON

Colporteur Lee Shi-chong, who was called back to Seoul because of the arrests, recollects: “The brothers quickly recovered their courage and resumed preaching with The Golden Age, the only publication not banned, and, of course, we kept holding our meetings.”

However, there were few qualified brothers in Seoul to conduct these meetings. Why was this the case? Because the branch overseer enrolled all he could in the colporteur work and then sent them to faraway territories. As a result, the experienced brothers were scattered about the peninsula and were unable to associate together.

[Picture on page 143]

Lee Shi-chong, a colporteur who traveled through rural areas by bicycle in the early 1930’s to spread the Kingdom message