In Underground Technology and Underground University, our discipleship and missionary schools for North Korean defectors in Seoul, we don’t teach South Korean or Western strategies of evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. We don’t even teach missional “best practices”.

Instead, we (and North Korean Christians figure prominently into that “we”) the time-honored, field-tested methods of the North Korean underground church.

Our student missionaries and graduates have been deploying these methods for more than ten years to reach North Koreans from Russia to Thailand, Europe to the Middle East, the West Sea to the East Sea.

Students share the Christian proclamation using everything from MP3 players to SD cards to USBs, and lots of other really cool technologies.

But the core technology of the North Korean underground church remains the Cross. The Cross is the mark we bear on our bodies in this world as a result of having received and remained faithful to the proclamation of the coming Kingdom. The Cross follows the preaching of the gospel like day follows night.

I received an update from one of our team members this month. She has been distributing MP3 players with the Bible recording to North Korean female factory workers who are sent abroad by the North Korean government to make money for the regime. One of the factory workers wrote this thank you note:

“Every single word in the Bible has touched my heart and it has given me the enlightenment that the world I am living is not about all visible things I can see. Now I realize that there is no being like God at all in the world. Jesus was crucified to save us. I would like to commit my body and mind to lift up the great God and Jesus higher through my life.”

And just like that, another new North Korean Christian gets ready to take up her cross.

“And so, dear brothers and sisters,” says the Apostle Paul in Romans 12:1, “I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice–the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.“