Dudong Church began in May 1923, when a believer named Park Jae-sin offered up the guest quarters of his home as a temporary place of worship. Six years later, in 1929, the congregation built a permanent sanctuary on the current site — and its shape was unusual: seen from above, the building forms an L, a traditional hanok-style Protestant church with men's and women's seating sections deliberately arranged in two wings that couldn't see each other.
That layout was a compromise struck between the Confucian norm that men and women should be kept separate, and Western Christianity's insistence that all believers worship together in one space. There was, for a time, a wave of L-shaped churches built across the country to solve this same problem, but today only two survive: Geumsan Church in Gimje and this original sanctuary at Dudong Church. It served as the main sanctuary until a new one was built in 1964. Standing in front of this building today, you can see, in physical form, how an unfamiliar religion arriving from the West avoided a head-on collision with centuries-old Korean custom, and instead found a compromise expressed through architecture.