Administering the Christian movement…from prison

Posted on October 8, 2024 by Pastor Foley

In Ephesians 3, Paul talks about three big topics: the love of God, the power of God, and the knowledge of God. In scripture, all of these big topics are about the cross. You can’t talk about God’s power, wisdom, and love without talking about the cross.

In fact, the cross redefines these three things. The cross shows us that everything that we thought we knew about power is wrong. Everything we thought we knew about love is wrong. Everything we thought we knew about God’s thinking is wrong. In fact, God’s power, wisdom, and love are opposite of the way the world–and us–think about power, wisdom, and love.

If you read Ephesians 3, you might have seen that it doesn’t use the word “cross” at all. But the cross is present in Ephesians 3; it is being carried by Paul himself. This is the part of Ephesians 3 that readers often miss.

You can see the cross at the beginning in Ephesians 3:1.

EPH 3:1  “For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—”

Here is the cross!

Paul is writing from prison. Paul is in prison for the sake of the gentiles. But he doesn’t say, “I am a prisoner of the Romans.” He says that he is a prisoner of Christ.

EPH 3:2 “Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you—”

These Ukrainian brothers tour Jilava prison, where Pastor Richard Wurmbrand was imprisoned. The tour was a part of VOM Korea’s Underground University training.

Paul is in prison. But he doesn’t see his imprisonment as the work of the enemy. The enemy that put Paul in prison is just the means that carried out God’s plan. This is a fundamental principle of the Christian life: God works just as well through His enemies as He does through His servants. Like Joseph said to his brothers: “You meant it for evil. But God meant it for good.” Or like Jesus to Pilate, “You would have no power over me except the power that my Father grants to you.”

Paul’s imprisonment is not in spite of the love or power of God. Paul is not saying, “I am in prison now. But just wait until you see the power of God get me out of here.” Paul’s imprisonment is the love and power of God. Paul said that his imprisonment is God’s plan for the administration of the mystery.

God has a plan to end the old creation and birth the new creation through Jesus Christ. And he has given Paul the administration of this mystery. And the way that God gives Paul to do this is through prison. This is God’s choice. It is the way that God wants it done.

So you can see from this one verse just how different God’s understanding of power and love is from our worldly understanding of power and love. God is all-powerful and all-loving. The man God chose to carry out God’s plan is the man who was trying to stop the plan from spreading outside of Jerusalem at all costs. God chooses the persecutor, the one who doesn’t believe in plan and even objects to the plan. And God says, “You’re going to administer this plan. I’m going to put you in charge of it. And you’re going to do it from prison. And all of creation depends on this plan.”

That is why Paul calls this a mystery. It is something that you could never know according to human thinking. That is why Paul writes as he does in verse 3:

EPH 3:3 “that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly.”

These days, Christian ministers say that they cannot preach the gospel yet because they are “preparing the soil”, which typically means that they are building relationships, distributing aid, and generally doing things other than the direct preaching of the gospel.

But think about how God prepared the soil for Paul. How did God “prepare the soil” so that Paul would receive the gospel? Paul’s “preparation” was to become a murderer bent on destroying the Christian movement through violence. God looked at Paul in the midst of these acts and said, “He is prepared. He is ready.”

God’s way of preparing people to receive the gospel is so opposite of human thinking. God’s way of administering the mystery of the gospel relies on imprisonment rather than human freedom. God’s gospel knows only the cross. The cross redefines the love of God, the power of God, and the knowledge of God.

That’s what we learned from the administrator of the mystery…while he was in prison.

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Rwanda: Government shuts down nearly 10,000 churches in three months

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Pastor Foley

Voice of the Martyrs Korea CEO Pastor Eric Foley recalls meeting Paul Kagame in Denver, Colorado when the President of Rwanda visited the United States in 2003.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame (Photo: World Travel & Tourism Council).

“My wife and I were working with a Bible distribution ministry at that time, and President Kagame told us his country needed Bibles,” says Pastor Foley. “It was about a decade after the Rwandan genocide in which more than half a million Rwanda Tutsis were killed. President Kagame said he believed his country needed as many Bibles as possible.”

Now, Pastor Foley says he and his wife regret supplying the Bibles to Kagame. Kagame’s government has shut down nearly 10,000 churches in the past 3 months, citing building code violations, hygiene dangers, noise pollution problems, and leaders without theology degrees. The closures, which affect mainly small independent and Pentecostal churches, are in addition to 7,000 churches the government shut down for similar reasons in 2018, when it passed a series of laws requiring church leaders to meet minimum education standards, limit the length of church-mandated fasts, and disclose financial information.

According to Pastor Foley, that early ministry experience is one of the reasons why his organization does not work with governments but only partners directly with local Christians in places where the practice of their faith is restricted.

“Kagame has created regulations that may sound like reasonable ways to protect the public, but anytime governments define what the church should be and look like and do, and who can lead it, then the church becomes an organization that is created in the image of the government, serving the government’s purpose,” says Pastor Foley. He says he is disappointed that Rwanda’s state-sanctioned churches have stood with the government and against the churches the government is closing, and that churches around the world have mostly been silent about the crackdown.

“The national and denominational associations of churches in Rwanda have pointed to the government’s giving churches five years to comply with the new laws as a sign of reasonableness,” says Representative Foley. “They’ve been urging the independent and Pentecostal churches to meet the government’s educational requirements and to stop meeting in places like caves and riverbanks. But Jesus and his disciples themselves would not meet the Rwandan government’s educational requirements, and the book of Hebrews even talks about the faithful believers living in caves who we should emulate. The issue is not whether governments make reasonable legal requirements for churches but rather who can call the church into existence, set the standards for church leadership, and determine when and how and by whom the gospel is preached. The Bible is clear that those decisions belong to the Lord alone.”

Pastor Foley notes that President Kagame continues to call for a tax on church offerings, accusing churches of trying to, in Kagame’s words, “squeeze even the last penny from poor Rwandans”. The President also noted that Kigale, Rwanda’s capital city, had more churches than water boreholes or factories, calling the proliferation of churches a “mess”.

Kagame, who has ruled Rwanda since ending the 1994 genocide, has been widely cited for violations and restrictions on religious freedom, including in a 2023 US State Department report, which raised concerns over his negative comments about pilgrimages by Rwandans to Catholic holy sites, a practice Kagame called “worshiping poverty”. The State Department report indicates that about 40% of the Rwandan population is Catholic, 21% Pentecostal, 15% Protestant, and 12% Seventh-Day Adventist. 2% are Muslim, according to the report.

Pastor Foley says that while international religious freedom watchdogs are well aware of Rwanda’s ongoing crackdown on Pentecostal and independent churches, ordinary Christians around the world often know little or nothing about the situation.

“These kinds of persecution situations, where government-sanctioned churches say nothing while other Christian groups in a country experience restrictions, often happen without Christians in the rest of the world raising their concerns and prayers about it,” says Pastor Foley. “Often Christians around the world think, ‘Well, if some Christians in a country are free, then how bad can the situation be?’ So, faithful Christians in countries like China, Vietnam, and Eritrea experience a ‘double-suffering’: their sufferings are ignored by Christians in their own country, and also by Christians around the world.”

Pastor Foley says Voice of the Martyrs Korea is continuing to monitor the situation in Rwanda and to consider ways to directly serve and strengthen the local believers there, rather than working through the government or mission agencies. He urges Christians around the world to pray for the Rwandan Christians facing restrictions. “Pray for the Rwandan Christians in the government-sanctioned denominations to stand up for their brothers and sisters in the restricted churches,” Pastor Foley says. “Pray for winds of revival to blow from the caves and riverbanks where faithful Rwandan Christians have been meeting, into the air-conditioned government sanctioned church buildings led by government-approved leaders. Pray also for Paul Kagame to read and take to heart the teachings of the Bibles he received from us twenty years ago, teachings that make clear that the word of God cannot be bound to the times, places, and people approved by governments.”

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China: Authorities raid churches serving NK sex-trafficked women

Posted on September 10, 2024 by Pastor Foley

Search and seizures by Chinese authorities are on the increase for churches serving North Korean sex-trafficked women. That’s the word from Voice of the Martyrs Korea, which operates underground discipleship training programs in the region for North Koreans, including sex-trafficked women married to Chinese men. The ministry is emphasizing that discipleship groups of sex-trafficked North Korean women led by the women themselves are the safest and most effective—and increasingly the only—means for North Korean sex-trafficked women to grow in their Christian faith.

“The Chinese government’s continued crackdown on local churches across the country is well known, but its specific efforts against churches serving minority populations, like churches ministering to North Koreans in China’s northeast region, has largely escaped international notice,” says Voice of the Martyrs Representative Dr Hyun Sook Foley.

She says that during one recent raid, a Chinese house church had all their Korean language Bibles and papers with Korean writing on them confiscated. “All the North Korean women who had been attending that church were required by a state security official to show their faces every morning through their phone,” says Representative Foley. She adds that the North Korean women were also restricted from traveling to other regions.

According to Representative Foley, Chinese authorities are now closely watching North Koreans who may have the intent to defect to South Korea and has renewed repatriation of North Koreans back to North Korea.

“Chinese authorities are seeking to isolate North Korean women from foreign influence by encouraging them not to interact with South Koreans or even ethnically Korean Chinese people,” says Representative Foley. “The government is now rolling out new programs to grant benefits to North Korean women who quietly support their family in the home, including rewarding them with valid Chinese residency ID cards.”

Representative Foley says that in the midst of authorities’ crackdown on churches, individual North Korean women remain the primary stable ministry to other North Korean women in China.

“The most effective ministers to North Korean sex-trafficked women have always been other North Korean sex-trafficked women, not foreign missionaries or Chinese churches,” says Representative Foley. “It’s much harder for authorities to catch and stop individual North Korean women who are ministering to other North Korean women in their area, and Chinese officials are much less concerned about North Korean women interacting with other North Korean women.” She says that’s why her ministry focuses on training and resourcing North Korean women to share their faith with their North Korean sex-trafficked neighbors.

“One of the North Korean women we trained told us, ‘We are still doing worship. I shared the [Voice of the Martyrs Korea sermons] that you sent and people said, “Where did you learn this good word?” Everyone heard and said they received grace’,” says Representative Foley.

Letter [pixelated for security reasons] from a sex-trafficked NK woman in China to VOM Korea about the current crackdown and her participation in a discipleship group led by other sex-trafficked NK women.

She shared the following additional testimonies from North Korean sex-trafficked women who had been evangelized by other North Korean sex-trafficked women trained by her ministry.

“In Chosun, I never knew the name of God or even knew that God existed. Facing the March of Suffering and the growing challenges each day, my only thought was how to feed and save my family. As soon as I opened my eyes, I would take up my merchant’s bag and lived only by striving. How can I describe it? At that time, I tried to defect from North Korea and came to this land of China after experiencing a painful separation from my beloved hometown and my beloved brethren. Nothing was forgiving to me upon my coming. First of all, I couldn’t do anything because I couldn’t understand the language, and I couldn’t even eat a spoonful of rice that I wanted to eat because my lifestyle was different, and it was really a hellish life. In this way, I blamed myself every day. I had no choice but to go through life, and I spent 15 long years without thinking. However, as I lived for a long time, I met fellow Chosun compatriots, and in the process of meeting them, I was invited by one of my compatriots to join this [discipleship group of other North Korean sex-trafficked women]. I didn’t even know what it was, but I was so happy to meet my compatriots and rediscover the Korean language… Finally, I understood, I came to know what God is like. Later, I realized that my escape [from North Korea] was God’s calling… I am grateful to God for giving me the bright light of heaven when I was wandering in the world, and for finding the language I almost forgot and for finding songs, and dances. I pray that, in the future, I will praise more, make dances for those praise songs, and to only believe in and follow God alone. Amen.” – Sister A

“When I came to China, I felt a lot of sadness, pain, and sorrow. I was always lonely, but my friend introduced me to this [discipleship group of North Korean sex-trafficked women] and I learned to sing hymns and received God’s grace. I learned many hymn songs, and I was able to express my troubled heart and pain to God in prayer, and I had peace in my heart. I will continue to give thanks to God and live my life believing in God alone. Amen.” – Sister B

“Thank you, Heavenly Father. Before I knew God, I was wandering on the path of straying. Through this [discipleship group of North Korean sex-trafficked women], I learned God’s praises and received God’s grace to know Jesus better, who washed away my sins. I will continue to give thanks to God infinitely through God’s praise, and I will do my best to dedicate my body and soul to the Lord.” – Sister C

“I couldn’t speak properly because of language differences living in a foreign land and I always lived as a sinner. Sometimes, I even thought about taking my life because I didn’t want to live. One day, I was introduced to this [discipleship group for North Korean sex-trafficked women] by a friend. From then on, I came to know God through praise songs to God, and I received a lot of God’s grace. I loved it. Praising God gave me great strength and I relied on it very much. Thank you for strengthening my heart and changing me to stand in faith, in the midst of constant tribulation and temptation. From now on, I will not forget God’s grace and love, and I will overcome the hardships and difficulties of the world with praise.” – Sister D

North Korea viewed from China border.

Individuals or churches interested in supporting Voice of the Martyrs Korea’s North Korea ministry can make a donation at www.vomkorea.com/en/donate or wire transfer to:

국민은행 (KB Bank) 463501-01-243303 

예금주 (Account Holder): (사)순교자의소리 

Please include the phrase “NK Ministry” with the donation. 

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