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. 

It’s understandable to think that North Korean underground church life must be something like Chinese underground church life, with individuals sneaking out of their homes at night to gather together with five to ten other believers in a basement or cave or forest, reading the Bible by candlelight and silently mouthing the words to hymns as they look at each other with blissful but urgent expressions on their faces.

But it’s not. In fact, if you see photos or hear stories of North Korean Christians behaving in these ways, you are either hearing false stories or you’re hearing stories of North Koreans gathering in China, typically with Korean Chinese brothers and sisters. Since it’s  illegal for Korean Chinese people to aid North Koreans, underground or secret gatherings like this do occur.

But in North Korea? Almost never.

There is simply no credible evidence of groups of North Korean Christians regularly gathering in the same way their Chinese counterparts do, and for good reason: In North Korea, individuals are required to report on the activities of their neighbors. What they fail to report, they themselves are then guilty of. If a North Korean saw a neighbor  sneaking out at night, or if a North Korean saw five or six people huddling together regularly in a home, the North Korean would of course report this, even if he or she loved these neighbors. Because in North Korea, you can love your neighbors but if you fail to tell on them, it will be you and your family in the concentration camp, and not many people  anywhere (especially non-Christians) love their neighbors that much.

Also, in any group of five to ten North Koreans, there are almost certain to be two or three spies–even from your own family. As we shared in the previous post on North Korea, this is why the gospel confines its spread tightly along family lines in North Korea, with wives often unaware that their husbands are Christian and children unaware that their parents are believers. When Jesus says that he shows up wherever two are three are gathered in his name, no one counts on that more than the Christians of North Korea.

You may then be wondering, “Are there underground churches in North Korea, or just underground Christians?” If what you are asking is, “Are there gatherings of five to ten North Koreans that meet on a regular basis to hear the proclamation of the gospel?”, the answer is, “Almost none.” But if what you are asking is, “Are North Koreans Christians connected together in any way?”, the answer is, “Yes, though not in named house church networks like in China.” In North Korea, the gospel travels slowly and quietly along tiny spiritual tributaries, from person to person to person sitting next to each other on a bench, walking home from a day in the fields, or even heading to the required government self-criticism meeting. These tributaries do not join together to make streams and rivers but instead remain as tributaries all of their lives. Individual underground believers in North Korea struggle to grasp what it would be like for even five believers to be able to come together to sing and pray and worship regularly.

Take the case of Mrs. Bae, part of the husband and wife pair of third generation underground North Korean Christians whose story I have had the privilege of writing this year, due out in book form in English later this fall, Lord permitting. When Mrs. Bae defected from North Korea following her husband’s miraculous release from prison after his investigation for Christian activity, the one thing she couldn’t wait to do when she got to China…was to go to church.

In the first Chinese city we entered, we stayed with an old lady. Now that we were settled in, I could no longer contain myself. I blurted out the request that I had had on my heart ever since I had heard from my mother-in-law about the large groups of Christians who would come together to sing, pray, and worship in broad daylight—in buildings specially set apart for that purpose, no less. Could we, I asked, go to church?

There are some very large Korean Chinese churches in northeast China, with congregations numbering literally in the thousands. Such places are well known to defecting North Koreans, who are told that if they go to a building with a cross on it, they will receive help. Problem is, my host explained to me, many North Korean defectors are captured at church, since the authorities know that North Koreans head there all the time.

But to me, it was worth the risk. I had waited for so long to be with God’s family in God’s house. I could hardly imagine what a “church” could be like, but, as it turned out, I knew more than I thought I did. What I mean is that church looked exactly like what happens in North Korea whenever Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il come to town. Everyone is gathered together and offering praise, adoration, and prayer. In North Korea, however, the “god” is visible, sitting up front (or present by his portrait in the mandatory weekly self-criticism meetings).

But in church, there was no one sitting up front. And unlike my attendance at self-criticism meetings, here I felt peace, joy, comfort—and God’s holiness. That night the sermon title was “At the End of the World, the Pain Will Come,” which made perfect sense to me in the midst of the journey we were on. The church was so big with so many people. Lights were twinkling everywhere. People were singing from hymnals. The praising songs were so loud and powerful. I just followed what everyone did, in complete awe. It was like I had entered heaven.

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