Do the Word

What is the best way to smuggle a Bible into a closed country? By enclosing it within the mind and heart of a well-trained Christian. That is how North Korean underground Christians proclaim the Word of God: From memory.

You can hide Bibles in bags of rice, suitcases of foreigners, or loads of other books, but the only surefire way for the Bible to clear any border crossing is in living form–that is, embodied in a Christian who has committed the Word of God extensively to memory.

Westerners and others from highly literate cultures are conditioned to think of memory as unreliable and fragile, yet as we’ve shared previously, the average Christian in the United States owns nine Bibles and is actively shopping for a tenth…yet biblical literacy is on a free-fall even among evangelical Christians.

So it turns out that what is external to us is actually far more fragile than what is internal. And this is why Christians in North Korea–and many other persecuting countries–emphasize memorization of large sections and whole books of the Bible, not just selected verses. And so underground North Korean Christians often end up memorizing more Scripture in just six months than many Western Christians do in a lifetime.

Sure, our Seoul USA organization still covertly distributes bibles and Christian literature in North Korea. But it is not the heart of our strategy. Discipling Christians to be living Bibles, capable of carrying the Word of God in their minds and hearts across every border, into any conversation, is what we’re all about. And it is what the church was all about for a longer stretch of her history than we modern highly literate high disposable income types can fathom.

One final excerpt here before we publish the book this fall on Mr. and Mrs. Bae, the third generation North Korean underground Christians. Here, Mr. Bae talks about his mother and his grandfather, and how the Word of God passed underground from first generation to second to third in his own family. As you read, consider how nowhere in Scripture are we called to smuggle Bibles. That doesn’t make it wrong, of course. But what is unfortunate is our misplaced belief that smuggling Bibles is a sufficient and cost-effective substitute for raising up Living Bibles. Would that more persecuted church ministry was focused on the latter than the former.

Would that most Western churches were, too.

I used to go along with my mother to many places. One day, my mom asked my grandfather if he would accompany us on a walk. She couldn’t talk freely in the house for fear that it had been bugged. At that time, in 1970, the government was on a campaign to exterminate all Christians, so believers were very careful to take precautions against bugging devices.

My mom asked my grandfather, “Dad, did you really hear God’s voice?” When he told her yes, she pressed him for all the details. He shared how God’s voice was especially clear to him when he fasted, prayed, or slept. My mom told him that she’d like to hear God as he had heard. She was sad that she couldn’t hear God, wondering how much deeper her dad’s faith was than hers.

At that time, she was in her thirties and curious about her faith. She kept asking him about Noah’s Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the way people were created. Because there were no Bibles at that time in North Korea, her father became her living Bible. And she learned well. After he died, she passed those Bible stories on to me, all from memory. That’s how we came to know the Ten Commandments and a few hymn songs too.

After my grandfather died and we were exiled to live in the farming area, we didn’t pray before meals. Too dangerous, my mom said. But she still gathered us children together, often overnight, to give us lessons just like my grandfather had given her and her siblings each week—that we should live in accordance with the Ten Commandments and that we should remember what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. She told us stories about Moses too—how his mother placed him in a basket and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. It was fun to hear her tell us these old stories, but her purpose was never to entertain. The point was always the same, especially when we were going through the hardest times: God always watches us wherever we are, and he sees whatever we do. She wanted us to remember that, and she wanted us not to sin.

Excerpted from These are the Generations by Eric Foley. Copyright © 2012 by .W Publishing. All rights reserved. 

Since North Korean underground Christians aren’t able to gather in fives and tens on a regular basis–since, in other words, they must pass information to each other individually in very brief encounters together–then what do they pass on? What is the content of their proclamation?

The three recurring elements that you’ll hear North Korean underground Christians share are the Apostle’s Creed, The Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, they will usually build their personal worship times around these pillars, with the first addressing the question “What do we believe?”, the second addressing the question “How then do we act?”, and the third addressing the question, “How then do we talk to God?”

North Korean Christians would be absolutely astonished to hear that these three elements are largely absent from evangelical Christian worship services. (So would the Protestant Reformers, I suspect. The Heidelberg Catechism says, “What, then, must a Christian believe? All that is promised us in the gospel, a summary of which is taught us in the articles of the Apostles’ Creed.” And as Packer and Parrett note in their absolute must-read, Grounded in the Gospel, Luther’s catechisms, Calvin’s catechism, the Geneva Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster catechisms, the Anglican catechism, and the Catholic catechism all note the centrality of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer to the Christian life. How modern evangelicalism managed to expunge all three from worship–on principle, no less–is truly a mystery for the ages.)

In this series I’ve been excerpting comments from Mr. and Mrs. Bae, third generation underground Christians whose story I’ve written in a book scheduled to be released this fall. I think you’ll be as fascinated as I have been by Mrs. Bae’s description of how she and Mr. Bae and their children worshiped together once they all became Christians, following Mr. Bae’s release from prison on suspicion of Christian activity. Modern  evangelical worship would do well to be so simple, so earnest, so deep, so robust:

From that time on, my family put up a wall against the world. We didn’t attend the mandatory birthday events where all North Koreans place flowers at the foot of Kim Il Sung’s statue. We sang hymns, not secular songs. Of course, we could not permit other people to hear our singing, so we would go sing quietly in the big fields whenever they were empty. Every evening, we locked the door and memorized the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. In every area of our family life, we followed not Kim Il Sung’s teaching but God’s Ten Commandments. We didn’t know what kind of place a church would be or what a church service would be like. But every Sunday, we would gather and memorize the Apostles’ Creed, sing hymns, pray along with the Lord’s Prayer, and repent according to the Ten Commandments. If there was something I didn’t know about a tract, I’d ask my husband. He didn’t know all the answers, but he always did his best to recall what he had heard things from his grandfather and grandmother from his childhood. He himself had witnessed a lot of things, so he always tried to share with me in ways that were interesting.

We confessed if we had done anything wrong. My mother-in-law had taught me how to pray for repentance, how to pray for thanksgiving, and how to pray for the meal. The material from the church had also taught me how to pray. It was very simple, clear, and detailed. What we learned from them became our way of life. We did this every Sunday. We did not know how to close the worship, so we prayed the Lord’s Prayer together and sang a few hymns. One person led the singing, and the rest of the family followed.

Excerpted from These are the Generations by Eric Foley. Copyright © 2012 by .W Publishing. All rights reserved.