Please Pray For The 33 Detainees Awaiting Execution In North Korea. But Please Don’t Call Them Underground Christians

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Pastor Foley

SUSA-KoreanMy sincere thanks and professional appreciation go out to Radio Free Asia’s Joon-ho Kim,  Hyosun Kim. and Rachel Vandenbrink for what in my view is perhaps the only credible story among the large media outlets regarding the dozens of people now being held in North Korea in connection with South Korean missionary Kim Jung Wook’s ill-conceived effort to travel to Pyongyang using false papers, allegedly in the hope of planting 500 underground churches.

You may recall my post a few weeks back in which I cautioned you not to believe everything you read in the media about North Korea, especially when it comes to stories about underground Christians. This past weekend proved a textbook example. One media outlet in Korea ran a single-source story (i.e., one without confirmation from other sources) that, as it was picked up by other media outlets (including the Washington Times and Fox news) and retweeted and re-posted on Facebook, became a wrenching story of how 39 underground Christians who had been partnering with Kim Jung Wook were now awaiting weekend execution in North Korea. I received emails from friends of our ministry letting me know that they were holding all-night prayer vigils and gathering signatures in support of our dear underground brothers and sisters. A dear sister in the US even wrote a poem in their honor.

Problem is, once again the media identified the wrong tragedy.

Fortunately, Kim’s Radio Free Asia article has it precisely correct, in my opinion, and done with the highest standard of journalistic integrity which is grievously lacking in the other reports on this matter. Please–by all means–read, repost, and retweet the RFA article, not the other ones! (And bookmark RFA’s English language NK news feed so you can check back in the future next time you hear a story like this!) Let me quote from it and make what I believe to be some important observations:

North Korean authorities have detained dozens of people accused of helping a South Korean missionary smuggle himself into the country, a local source said, as a report suggested that some of them face execution on charges of conspiring with him to set up underground churches.

Yes! Exactly! This is the way you report a single source story–especially one as tragic as this. The key point that is attested by multiple sources, as Kim establishes in the opening sentence, is that the people who are detained are being detained because they are accused of helping Missionary Kim enter the country. Then the RFA report notes that “a report suggested that some of them face execution on charges of conspiring with him to set up underground churches.” This is excellent journalism–to note that this is a single source that is suggesting this.

So are these detainees seasoned underground North Korean Christians who were delighted by the arrival of a South Korean missionary and immediately set to work with appreciation for his plan to plant 500 underground churches in North Korea?

Er, no.

Back to the RFA report:

Those facing punishment include guards who allegedly allowed Kim Jung-wook, a Baptist evangelist held by North Korean authorities since last October, to pass through security checkpoints on his way from China to Pyongyang, according to a source in Sinuiju, a North Korean town bordering China….

Since the press conference, people accused of helping him have been banished to prison camps, and authorities have arrested security guards in charge of the checkpoints Kim allegedly passed through, the source in Sinuiju said.

“After the press conference, dozens of people vanished into thin air,” the source in Sinuiju told RFA’s Korean Service, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The missing people are presumed to be people connected to Kim Jong-wook or family members of those connected to him, and may be sent to remote areas or to prison camps.”

Note what RFA did. They sought confirmation of the story by checking with sources on the ground. It would not be hard for the Washington Times or Fox News to have found such a source, since this has been buzzing in the relevant circles all over Sinuiju and the surrounding area for several months.

In my opinion, the tragedy for which we should have been holding (and still should be holding) all-night prayer vigils and writing poetry is one that is all too common in this line of ministry work:

Many innocent people may lose their lives because they were drawn into a poorly conceived plan. 

There are not 33 underground Christians awaiting execution in North Korea. But there are dozens of people (that’s probably a conservative number) being interrogated, beaten, and disappearing into thin air because they had contact with a man who had a plan that the rest of us in this line of work (at least I hope so)  either said or would have said if asked, “Please don’t do that. It won’t work. If you do that, many innocent people will die. And you know that the underground Christians don’t work like that.”

Now you may fairly ask, “Yes, but how do you know that all 33 of these were not underground Christians? Or perhaps they became Christians after their contact with Missionary Kim?”

Regrettably, there are things in this matter that must be left unsaid. But referring back to the general principles I shared in my earlier post about being wise as serpents when it comes to sorting through North Korea news (especially North Korean underground Christian news),

So don’t believe everything you hear reported about North Korea. Even if you see it reported on Fox News and in the Huffington Post and on Yahoo and by five of your friends on Facebook. Check the sources. Make sure there’s more than one. At Seoul USA, we require three sources before we publish or certify a report as accurate.

If a news report about North Korea is sensational, it’s probably just that: Sensational. North Korea is not a comic book villain. They haven’t lasted this long because they are careless.

Truth be told, the kind of evil that is witnessed daily in North Korea is rarely sensational. It’s most frequently dull, unrelenting, and purposeful.

The true stories of martyrdom almost never make the news. The enemy works to make sure of it.

Remember (and be sure to verify this through your own research! Be a good reporter like Joon-ho Kim!):

  • The North Korean government does not have a history of arresting people or executing them on charges of Christian activity. That would draw too much attention from the rest of the world. So when they arrest people for such activity, they call it treason, or sedition, or espionage, because they view Christian activity as just that: A crime against the Kim family.
  • North Korean underground Christians do not plant churches in groups of 500. For more than 60 years they have continued to advance the gospel faithfully, but not like comic book characters. The best, most active, most on-fire-for-the-Lord North Korean underground Christian evangelists might share the gospel with a dozen people outside of their family in their lifetime (before, of course, their life is cut short because they are sent to a concentration camp for such flagrant sedition/treason/espionage).

The problem with spreading the idea that North Korean underground Christians would readily collaborate with a South Korean missionary to plant 500 underground churches in one fell swoop is analogous to the problem with a guy watching pornography: When his wedding night comes, no matter how beautiful his new bride really is, she can never match what he ogled online over and over again. In the same way, if we find ourselves taken in by these kind of stories, then the truly beautiful, gut-wrenching, wise, strategic, and, yes, small, efforts of North Korean underground Christians won’t even register on our radar screen. And we will forget to hold all-night prayer vigils for them.

Please pray for Missionary Kim. May his best missionary efforts be today and henceforth.

And please pray for those whom he met, those whom he managed to evade, those to whom he spoke, and those to whom he speaks now.

But please don’t call them underground Christians.

Posted in North Korea, persecution | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

What Happens To The Faith Of North Korean Underground Christians When They Come To South Korea?

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Pastor Foley

SUSA-KoreanMrs. Foley and I are honored to enjoy the friendship of a number of North Korean defector Christians and Christian families who were previously underground believers when they lived in North Korea. To a person, they are all extraordinary human beings from whom I have learned–and continue to learn–a great deal about faith and patient endurance and the high cost of discipleship, which they insist is a privilege that is to be joyfully paid.

It is rare for us to publish their stories because Christianity runs in families inside North Korea, and almost all of them have family members still there who would be punished for the defector Christians’ indiscreet speech. Still, they are a great help to us in everything from teaching us North Korean underground Christianity to serving as a sounding board for our projects and curricula to helping us investigate/validate/evaluate the claims made about underground Christians in the media, books, and film, most of which are sadly exaggerated or flat out incorrect. We owe these former underground believers a debt that, happily, continues to mount and that we will never be able to repay.

And yet, it is impossible not to notice the ambivalence with which they live their present lives of faith:

  • All of these different individuals and families are still believers. Engage them in a discussion on the Bible and it is as if they emerge from a deep, persistent fog.
  • Most, though not all, attend church in South Korea. All, however, struggle with their experience of church in South Korea. This is not because of something deeply troubling about South Korean churches. The things they struggle with are some of the things that many Western believers would assume to be very basic and right and normal and attractive about church–things like: pastors telling stories in their sermons; little emphasis on memorization; the church being built around the lives/interest/needs of its members (think “relevance”) rather than around the Bible (which is interesting given that the South Korean church is far more Bible-centric than most evangelical churches in the West). Still they would never criticize their church openly. Fascinatingly, they just end up viewing their church involvement as tangential to their faith life and development.
  • Most are wistful, bordering on nostalgic, for the struggles they faced as underground believers. They light up when they talk about the pain they had to endure. They often speak about these experiences as if they are as fascinated by them as we are.
  • And here’s the hardest thing to write: In their present walk of faith (and I think they would all agree with this characterization), they are less zealous in their actions than they were during their time inside North Korea. From a “hear the word” standpoint, they still clearly love the Bible and are as evangelical/orthodox/theologically straight-arrowed as ever. But when it comes to putting their faith in practice, it is as if in many ways they are retired, on furlough, distracted… Most of them would be easily describable as workaholics at their present jobs in South Korea. Their default conversations are much like ours. When we ask how they are doing they talk about aches and pains and illnesses they or their family members in South Korea are facing (most North Korean defectors have pretty significant residual health problems even after having been in South Korea for a while). They talk about their kids, they talk about school, they talk about work. I would not describe them as naively materialistic, but I would describe them in the same way I describe most of us Western and South Korean Christians: Pragmatically materialistic–our agenda set by the world and by work and by our kids, with God as an ever-present help to get us through another day. Still actively hearing the word (through Bible study, prayer, family devotions, and church attendance) but not so actively doing it. A bit like retired superheroes, with a little bit of a paunch and gracefully graying hair, always happy to reminisce longingly about past capers but no longer entertaining thoughts about putting on the cape again.

I’ve wondered over the years whether this was just a phase, and a very understandable one. After all, these are refugees with all that entails. Who can go full tilt for God while trying to learn how to operate an elevator, peel a banana, and get a job?

But what I’ve observed as time has passed is that former underground Christians are more adept than many North Korean defectors at achieving material success in South Korean society. They save money well. They stay at one job instead of hopping around. In short, they think about the future and not just the present. And as they achieve that success, I note that they become just as attached to it as we Western and South Korean evangelical Christians do to our own success. They don’t become raging materialists. But they do become surprisingly recognizable Christians of the type that South Korean and Western societies produce, ones that have made their peace in the world even as they continue to know that they are not of the world.

In other words, over time they come to look a lot like you and me.

Now none of this causes me to despair. I am incurably optimistic and so I keep their superhero costumes dry cleaned and phone booths ready for them to charge into. I regularly shine the bat signal into the sky outside their windows and drop not-so-subtle hints that Mrs. F and I are going out crime fighting and there’s a seat available in the batmobile.

But all of this does shape my thinking on what I believe to be some important issues that we as Christians all to rarely discuss:

  • I think it is not quite accurate to say that persecuted Christians are amazing. I think it is more accurate to say that the Holy Spirit is amazing and that God draws especially close to those willing to suffer for his name.
  • I think “the good life” is far more corrosive to the spirit than any of us have really yet fully grasped.
  • I think Paul was not being modest but rather incredibly insightful about human nature when in Philippians 3:10-14 he wrote,

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

“Called heavenward”–it’s worth us (and them) thinking about what that means.

Posted in Bible, Making Disciples, North Korea, persecution, Reigning, Works of Mercy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

North Korean Underground University Students Learn Why Rest Is An Act Of Faith

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Pastor Foley

The first of 54 Bible stories that the Foleys are teaching the North Korean Underground University students is the Creation account from Genesis 1:1 – Genesis 2:25.  Pastor and Mrs. Foley focus on what God did on the seventh day–rest–and how our imitation of that rest is an important aspect of our faith…especially for ministry leaders.

To watch our other North Korea videos visit our Seoul USA Video Page.

Posted in North Korea, Videos | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment