Partner: The Global Church Should Always Serve, Never Supplant, The Local Church In Any Ransoming Effort

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Because people forgot–or just didn’t know–that the North Korean underground church still existed.

That’s the reason why ten years ago Mrs. Foley and I sold what we had, gave it away, and followed Jesus in creating Seoul USA to serve especially the underground church of North Korea.

It’s a longer story, of course, but the most germane part of it for our discussion here about the Work of Mercy of ransoming captives is that Mrs. Foley and I saw, again and again, South Korean churches, missionaries, and NGOs setting the evangelism and discipleship  agenda for North Korea and sharing it with the world.

They didn’t mean anything bad or presumptuous by it at all, of course. Many South Koreans at that time weren’t even sure there were any underground North Korean Christians left. And, historically, up until the end of the Korean War, there had only ever been one group of Koreans and thus one Korean church. So certainly it was understandable that South Korean churches and missionaries would take the approach of evangelizing North Korea as them reaching their own flesh.

And yet…

What prompted Mrs. Foley and I to form an organization devoted to serving as a platform for the North Korean underground church to reach North Korea and the world was that we kept running into North Korean Christians who had deep connections inside North Korea, frankly better ideas about how to evangelize and disciple their own country, and distinct differences–not divisions, but differences–between North and South Korea that they were uniquely in a position to address. Things like the sharp divergence in dialect, life experience, and current circumstances that had yawned into a vast chasm in less than 50 years.

Well, that and the very fascinating recognition that Pyongyang and the northern region of Korea, not Seoul and the southern region, had historically been the cradle of Christianity–and the heart of the resistance to both the Japanese policy of forced worship at the Shinto shrines and the North Korean state policy of forced worship of the Kim family. In other words, the DNA of North Korean Christians is distinct and pretty special. North Korea lags behind South Korea in nearly every way, but not, it turns out, in Christian discipleship. There are more South Korean Christians, but they are not better.

The North Korean Christians we met were deeply dedicated–and seriously untrained. They had vision but not strategy, lots of trauma but not a lot of tactics to accomplish the word God gave for them to do among their own people.

And even if they hadn’t had these things, they were still the Church of North Korea, after all–the called-out ones God had raised up as a witness to himself in the darkest corner of the earth. Why supplant (or, worse, ignore) them? Why undertake activities that rendered them irrelevant and invisible? Why do things that could potentially harm them in service to some ostensibly greater good of reaching their nation for Christ at their peril? What purpose would God have for them if he put them there–and by “there” I don’t simply mean inside of North Korea. I mean everywhere North Koreans are found, across Asia and around the world.

Are North Koreans latecomers to the South Korean church, or are they their own church–a surprisingly prior church, that is, one that precedes the South Korean church explosion?

Well, that was the question ten years ago, and it remains the question today. We founded Seoul USA on the conviction that the North Korean underground church, by the grace and design of God, is his vessel for reaching North Korea and that the global church is called to serve her in this work, as each part of the church is called to serve and to look to the interest of the other.

We are more persuaded than ever today that this strategy was and is the right one, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this present post. And we are likewise persuaded that this discussion has deep bearing on the question of ransoming the captives not only for us but for every church population around the world, since I can say with equal parts confidence and grief that some of the greatest difficulties faced by not only the church in North Korea but also the church in persecuted countries around the world has been the global church’s well-meaning but misdirected tendency to supplant, rather than serve, local churches in circumstances of persecution and captivity.

It all begins with compassion wrongly rooted and resources wrongly reckoned. Churches with worldly resources–political and social freedom, for example, and material wealth–look at churches without worldly resources and say, “They need our help!” The implied perspective is that we are in the advantageous situation and they the disadvantaged one. The implied goal is to make them more like us by sharing more of what we have with them.

But that overlooks what must have been a very surprising and unpopular message Jesus sent to the church in Laodicea in Revelation 3:14-22 (ESV):

14 “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.

15 “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. 17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. 19 Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. 20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. 21 The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. 22 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”

What if worldly wealth really has no spiritual coinage? What if, in other words, the persecuted church doesn’t need our worldly wealth and freedom? What if God is not trying to make them more like us but rather make us more like them? What if your worldly wealth cannot ransom captives and only your spiritual wealth can? Would your “check” clear? Or would it bounce?

The persecuted church desperately needs us to grow spiritually, not materially. It needs our spiritual service far more than it needs our material support. God supplies all our needs in Christ Jesus, Paul says, not from the bank accounts of rich Christians. Paul is surprisingly nonchalant about whether Christians send him money or no. He knows that God will always supply in the way God wants to supply, for purposes which often escape our knowledge and understanding. What interests Paul–and God–is how our giving grows us so that our spiritual wealth increases even as our material wealth passes away along with the world that gave it birth and staunchly insists on its value.

So how does this apply to ransoming captives?

Seoul USA is a running bet, now ten years in, that transferring material wealth from the prosperous church to the persecuted church is not God’s highest goal for the relationship between these two parts of the body of Christ. Instead, he intends the arrow to go both ways; that is, for the spiritual wealth of the body of Christ to flow freely between all parts. In this way, one important consequence will be that the prosperous church will learn to put its faith less and less in its material wealth and worldly freedoms and more in the God who functions equally well in the presence or absence of the same.

Let me make it more stark:

Whether we transfer money to ransom captives from prison or show up ourselves (typically in the form of global NGOs) to do the deed, we overlook–at our own spiritual peril and her physical peril (due to ongoing kidnappings and even steeper ransoms)–the church that God already established in a locale to bear his name and accomplish his purpose.

What needs to be transferred instead from us to her is spiritual wealth. Do we have any to send?

At Seoul USA, our rule of thumb is never to transfer more material wealth than spiritual wealth to the North Korean underground church. Yes, we transfer funds. But they are matching funds–meaning, everyone is giving financially, materially impoverished North Koreans included. But financial giving is secondary–tertiary, even–to spiritual giving. And what we have found in ten years is that we are able to share with the North Korean underground church three things that have made a far greater impact on her ability to ransom her captives than any money we’ve sent or any personal presence we’ve provided:

  1. The wealth of Scripture. We’ve found that though North Korean Christians have clung faithfully and tenaciously to the core truths of the faith in the midst of searing and nearly unparalleled sustained persecution, they value our service in helping them unpack the truths of the Word of God and to support them in applying them in their unique circumstance. We don’t take their place as the church in North Korea. We train them for the role God has given–to them, not us.
  2. The insights of the faithful church throughout history. Turns out Christians have been ransoming captives for two thousand years. Sometimes they got it wrong, of course, but sometimes they got it right–where right means not that everyone gets out alive but that God is glorified and his name is esteemed even by unbelievers. So we help the North Korean church draw on the riches of Christian history which have been largely unknown to her due to her isolation from the outside world.
  3. The insights of other persecuted Christians. Believers in more than 50 countries are persecuted for their faith. Most of them, under the power of the Holy Spirit, ransom their captives without material wealth. Sharing with the North Korean church how they do this is far more valuable to her than us stepping in to pay the bill–and ratchet up the next charge exponentially.

We do all of these functions through our Underground University program. We do this and other ransoming programs with our brothers and sisters in the Voice of the Martyrs family. What our programs have in common is the rock-solid conviction that the global church should always serve, never supplant, the local church–including in the work of ransoming captives. We serve persecuted Christians financially, yes, but not in ways that create dependence or foster the illusion–for us or for them–that material wealth is the coin of the spiritual realm.

And the primary service we provide is prayer. But as we’ll note in the next post, our final one wrapping up this month-long focus on ransoming the captives, is not prayer for the persecuted church but rather prayer with the persecuted church–prayer that recognizes that when we ransom captives, our petition is always to God, not to the purported captors who are the most deeply bound captives of all.

Posted in Ransoming the Captive | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Plan: The Holy Spirit Does Not Mistake Our Lack Of Preparation For Sanctification

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Perhaps the Holy Spirit was the one that inspired the t-shirt that reads Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

What brings that thought to mind for me is the growing number of Christian brothers and sisters I meet at conferences who associate the work of the Holy Spirit primarily with leadings, spiritual sensations, and emotions and who are quite wary (or unaware-y) of Paul’s Romans 12:2 call for the renewal of the mind as a vital and essential means of discernment.

The connection of all of this to the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captives was brought home to me during Mrs. Foley’s and my NK Special Briefing in Honolulu on behalf of Voice of the Martyrs earlier this month.

One sister observed to me after the presentation, “I’m surprised you speak more logically than emotionally when you talk about North Korean Christians.” She referenced other missionary presentations she had seen which were built around emotional songs and photos, and she registered her surprise that I was quite open about the strategic (rather than funding) challenges involved in the work.

Next, a young brother, after hearing about the secure communications and project management technology that are so central to our work, asked me, “Don’t you think if we pray that the Holy Spirit will lead us at exactly the right time to exactly the right location where we need to be to meet up with others to carry out a project? And if we pray won’t the Holy Spirit show us who are the real underground Christians and who are the counterfeit Christians planted by the government as spies and fundraisers?”

Of the many excellent questions I received during the day, these were the two I found myself  thinking about on the flight back to the mainland. (Well, I was thinking about those two questions and the fact that it was 85 and sunny in Hawaii and snowing in Colorado.)

What occurred to me as I thought was how many of our Seoul USA programs have been created to remedy new–and achingly worse–problems created by well-meaning, purportedly Spirit-led Christians seeking to respond to the social problems they felt called to address. It was a sobering thought: We not only have to create projects to address the persecution of the North Korean government; we have to create projects (often costlier, more dangerous, and more time consuming) to remedy the work of Christians who insist they are/were following the leading of the Holy Spirit and didn’t (and often still don’t) realize the tragedy they are leaving in their wake.

Take, for example, the much-heralded “Underground Railroad,” which spirits North Koreans along defection routes from North Korea all the way across Asia to South Korea.  One legacy of the Railroad is the more than ten thousand orphans in Northeast China without citizenship in any country whose mothers caught the Railroad and left them behind. Another legacy is the 16.5 percent suicide rate of defectors who, dropped off in South Korea by the Railroad, proceed to blow their brains out because life in South Korea is actually more difficult in many ways for North Koreans than their homeland.

Now many of the same organizations who brought the public emotional fundraising presentations of the Underground Railroad are now bringing the public emotional fundraising presentations about orphans in China and struggling defectors in South Korea. One emotion they omit, however, is sorrow; that is, they fail to repent and announce, “In seeking to solve one problem, we created two more–and these problems are worse than the one we started with.”

I was speaking with one Underground Railroad “conductor” about these issues some time ago, and he responded by chiding Seoul USA and VOM for equipping Christians to stay in North Korea and endure persecution rather than hopping on his Railroad south. “Doesn’t Jesus say to flee persecution?” he asked, as though I were missing something painfully obvious.

But one verse of Jesus does not a plan make. And even though I am perhaps likely to be a smidge more charitable than Jay Adams in his assessment that “Feelings and leadings [of the Holy Spirit] may go back to nothing more than sleeplessness, unfortunate combinations of pickles, bananas, and  ketchup, the weather, etc,” I do find fascinating his contention that “the word ‘led’ occurs only twice in reference to the Spirit (in Rom. 8:14 and Gal. 5:18).”

The Spirit leads, in other words, not primarily through spontaneous bursts of inner prompting such as Christ does promise to send in moments of crises, but also in guiding our study of the Scriptures, our learning, and our planning. In the previous post we noted the phrase in Galatians 4:4-5, “the fullness of time.”

Time. The Holy Spirit works in time. Time, to phrase it differently, matters to the Spirit. He guides us not only in split-second moments but along paths that take years to unfold. And these are not only or typically paths of blind trust but of deepening understanding of the mind of Christ.

Jay Adams stresses that nowhere is the Holy Spirit’s shaping of our thoughts and planning  more evident and needed than in situations where someone has harmed us and we are seeking to respond–or, I would add, in cases where anyone is harmed, or held captive, and we are seeking to effect a ransom. Writes Adams:

In 1 Thessalonians 5:15 we are commanded to “Seek after (the same word means ‘persecute’) what is good for one another and for all men.” Here, the idea of hard, diligent effort again comes to the fore. Seeking takes effort: You must work at, pursue, track down the answer like a hound. You may need to go over and over your plans, role playing what you will do and how you will do it, getting counsel and advice, etc.

Jay notes that Paul gives us an interesting test of the Spirit-inspired nature of our plans. He says when the Spirit is at the planning table our plans address problems “in such a way that even unbelievers are forced to acknowledge that it was well done.” Sadly, what we Christians are well known for among non-Christian experts on ransoming captives is the emotionalism of our responses and our propensity for creating bigger problems than the ones we seek to solve. Not a lot of secular agencies or experts are looking to Christians for insights in dealing with intractable social issues, and that’s not because of our principles but rather because of our sloppiness.

How, then, can we ground the leading of the Spirit in our ransoming of captives in something deeper than the pickles, ketchup, bananas, and weather?

In the .W model in the Whole Life Offering book, I propose a seven-fold planning process in which, before we act, each Work of Mercy (including ransoming the captives) is grounded in the length and breadth of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. Those seven steps are:

  1. Searching the Scriptures
  2. Learning the response of the faithful Christians who came before us
  3. Worship
  4. Prayer
  5. Self-denial
  6. Serving
  7. Giving

So in our four-part Scriptural strategy of ransoming the captive, the second step is to plan, which Jay Adams reminds us, is a time-consuming process designed not only to solve the problem at hand, and not only to avoid creating new problems.

It’s designed to transform us, too, because, after all, we are the ones whom the Spirit is equipping to serve as ransoms, in re-presentation of the only Ransom that ever set anyone  free.

Posted in Ransoming the Captive | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Presence: You Can’t Be A Ransom If You Don’t Show Up In The Form Of The Captive

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Building on our preceding post we’re now laying out a four step Scriptural process for ransoming the captive. And there’s no way around it: Being a ransom–rather than paying a ransom–means showing up in person to our captive captors. (Remember, we’re ransoming the one who is most captive, namely, the captor himself.)

This is of course after the manner of Christ, who, as the Apostle Paul explains, appeared in person in “the fullness of time”:

4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

We’ll have more to say about the fullness of time in the next post, but this remarkable passage from Galatians conveys another, equally amazing, truth:

Christ does not just show up as ransom. He actually shows up in the form, condition, limitations, and restrictions of those whom he is ransoming.

This is a little examined aspect of Hebrews 13:3, which says:

3 Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.

This means something more than just standing at the window wringing your hands waiting for their release. Just as Christ did, it means being found in their likeness. So not only are you showing up, but you are showing up as them, with them, like them. That was a defining characteristic of early church ransoming: Whenever a Christian was held captive, people didn’t show up to protest outside the prison, and, even more fascinatingly, they didn’t show up to bribe the prisoner’s way out.

They showed up to bribe their way in—to be present with the captive:

When the imposter Peregrinus Proteus is imprisoned because of his Christian leadership activities, every effort is made by his community to get him out of prison… When this proves impossible they descend upon the prison in droves, bribe the guards in order to spend the night with him, bring food and raise money; others come from other cities as far away as Asia, sent at common expense…to help, defend, and strengthen him. For, adds Lucian… “They show incredible speed whenever such public action is taken; for in no time they lavish their all.”

Talk about making an impact on one’s captors!

Think about it like this:

If Christ had descended, heavens parting, in the form of God, alighting on the temple mount, he would not have had much difficulty getting people to pay him heed. Likewise, with Christians imprisoned for their faith, with young girls held in brothels, when we show up in the form of rich Westerners, we’ll have no shortage of people we can ransom with our big fat wallets.

But the problem is, as Christ knew, overwhelming one’s captors (or buying them out) can’t end the cycle of captivity. It only perpetuates it. Worse, it accelerates it. Because captors’ hearts don’t soften in the presence of ransom payments and shows of force. They harden.

If, however, you show up in the actual form and likeness of those you are ransoming (and this doesn’t mean wearing a disguise–Philippians 2 doesn’t say Jesus was God wearing a human costume; it says he became man), then captors see two things:

  1. God in Christ mirrored through you;
  2. Them–the captors–mirrored through you, too.

This enables you to cry out with the most powerful cry of missionary identity, “We too are only men, human like you.” And it allows you to appeal to captors as their fellow, not their ticket to an early retirement.

Meditate on that thought and you’ll quickly see the futility of Westerners jumping on airplanes and catching flights to the nearest North Korean concentration camp: We can try our hardest, but we still won’t look like North Korean prison camp wardens. It will never be very convincing for us to say, “We are just like you.”

So put away your wallet, because money can’t end captivity. And put away your plane ticket, because you’re going to have a hard time incarnating yourself convincingly in the form of a Thai peasant outside a brothel. Instead, turn to the next post, where we learn that it takes more than presence to effect a ransom.

It also takes a plan.

Posted in Ransoming the Captive | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments