Do the Word

To whom do North Koreans proclaim the gospel?

• To their spouses, but only after they’ve been married for several years
• To their children, but not until they reach the age of 15
• To other family members, but only when they’re exceedingly tight
• Rarely, to their lifelong closest friends or most trusted and longest-lasting co-workers

That’s it?

Yes, that’s it. There are a few documented cases of Christians sharing the gospel with individuals outside of their most intimate sphere of influence, but they are so few as to constitute the most extreme outlying cases–definitely not the norms.

I understand this is hero-deflating, romance-killing news, but before you dismiss North Korean Christians from your fantasy evangelism league, hear me out for the rest of the post.

North Koreans have a saying. You know how Jesus said, “Wherever two or three come together in my name, there am I with them?” North Koreans say, “Wherever two or three come together for any purpose, at least one of them is guaranteed to be a spy.”

Guilt by association is the operative principle of North Korean justice. If you are somehow associated with someone who is doing something the government considers wrong, fail to report it and you’ll be guilty, too–even if you didn’t know what the person was doing in the first place. Even to the third generation in the family of the offender.

So each time you share the gospel–especially with someone you don’t know, and even with  those you do, or think you do–you have a veritable one hundred percent assurance of your entire family within three generations of you on either side paying for your crime. Given that most people you meet are spying for the government in some capacity, it leads one to a certain judiciousness in choosing when to share, and with whom. Call it fear if you like; in my experience I would call it exceptionally good judgment.

But what about children? Why wait until they’re 15 to share the gospel with them?

Because teachers and educators are specially trained to help children inadvertently rat out their parents. There are even prizes offered to children who bring special books and information from home about their families. Sanctity and privacy of family life is unknown in North Korea. Kim Il Sung is the eternal father, commanding infinitely more allegiance than one’s biological parents. As a result, North Korean Christians judge it best to wait to share the gospel with the child until he or she is old enough to withstand and resist the constant and cunning psychological warfare that even adults struggle to combat and endure.

It’s with these nearly inconceivable realities in mind that proclaiming the gospel to one’s own spouse, children, and dearest family members and lifetime associates reveals itself to be a truly breathtaking act requiring the utmost courage and training.

I just finished writing a book that shares the story of a third generation underground Christian family in North Korea. I’m hopeful that we’ll have it available in English before year’s end. There are so many great stories in there about proclaiming the gospel, but space limits me to just one here. So let me choose perhaps my favorite: the story of how the wife in the book began to hear about the gospel from her husband, namely, in confusing bits and pieces as together they grappled with her ongoing illnesses.

I married Mr. Bae. We went on our honeymoon, and later I bore two children. I was happy, and my life was good, like it had been under my parents. But even though I had been very successful and smart and energetic for my whole life, all I was after having babies was ill—all the time. My parents and siblings felt sorry for me. They wondered why I was getting sick and thought it might be caused from some unknown sin in my parents’ past. My whole body was sick, but there wasn’t a specific name for my disease.
My husband said to me, “If it is difficult to live, then pray—with two hands together.” He did not even say “Lord” or “God” or explain what prayer was. He just said that I should confess what I did wrong and pray. Frankly, I thought it humorous. I thought he was being silly. I had been continuously sick, and he told me to pray—with two hands together. When I did, I was healed. It did not last forever—I would get sick again, of course, and still do—but I didn’t laugh any more when I thought about praying.
Sometimes after that first healing experience I would go outside on a moonlit night and do this pray-with-two-hands-together thing. “Why am I sick?” I would ask no one in particular as I clasped my two hands together. “I have done my best to be a good person. Why am I sick, now? Can anyone heal me?” And sometimes I would be healed.
My husband said, “Do not sin.” I didn’t even know what “sins” were. He explained to me that lying is a sin, looking down on people is a sin, theft is a sin, and adultery is a sin. I didn’t even know what adultery meant. He said that heresy is a sin too. I didn’t know what that was either. I asked him what it meant, and he said it was espionage activities. Now that I think of it, I did not know many things.
But even before I had prayed with two hands together, I had lived honestly. I felt like heaven was keeping an eye on me. I could not bear malice, nor could I curse someone. I wondered whether those were sins or not too….
It may sound unusual to you that a husband and wife could sleep together, have babies together, do the pray-with-two-hands thing together, and still not have an in-depth conversation where the wife could ask, “What in the world are you talking about? I can’t understand half of what you are saying.” But it is important to understand that North Korea is unusual like that. Husbands and wives must be very careful when they speak to each other. It takes many years before they trust each other enough to speak about deep matters like faith.

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

Fascinatingly, it wasn’t until Mr. Bae went to prison for his faith that Mrs. Bae heard the gospel message in anything resembling an understandable presentation.

But that’s another story for another day. In North Korea the gospel always takes a long time to tell, even to your wife.

Among our core convictions at Seoul USA are these:

• North Korean Christians have the primary responsibility to proclaim the gospel to   North Koreans;
• North Korean Christians have the best knowledge and insights on how to accomplish this work;
• The North Korean church is not a subset of the South Korean church, nor is it an incapacitated entity in need of foreign missionaries to “lead the charge” into North Korea.
• The North Korean church has maintained a witness inside North Korea as well as wherever North Koreans are found, since the inception of the North Korean state;
• Sadly, almost no one seems to listen to the North Korean church when it comes to North Korea ministry.

When North Koreans encounter Christians in China and Russia and come to learn about Christ, they often realize that the wordless melodies they were taught as children, and the bedtime stories they received from grandmothers and grandfathers, were actually Christian hymns and stories from the Bible disguised so as to avoid detection by their NK minders. And so they reclaim their family’s faith and join with brothers and sisters in Christ whom they have not yet met who are still inside of North Korea, and they coordinate together to witness to the saving grace of Jesus Christ wherever North Koreans are found.

Although many people in the rest of the world assume that all North Koreans have the goal of escaping from North Korea and that all North Koreans’ problems are solved once they arrive in South Korea, the reality is very different. Many NK defectors living in South Korea tell their family members who remain inside of NK, “Stay there. Things are no better for us here.”

That is because as a population group, North Korean defectors living in South Korea have the highest rate of suicide of any population group in the world—16.3% compared to 5.2% among South Koreans, already vying with Japan for the highest rate of suicide in the world. 8.8% of North Korean  defector middle school and high school students are dropping out, compared to 1.4% of South Koreans. The crime rate for NK defectors is twice the national average. Nearly 20% of NK defectors fail to stay in a job for more than a month. That’s made more understandable by the reality that a typical North Korean defector can only understand about 60 percent of what a typical South Korean person says.

The result? 70% of NK defectors want to leave South Korea for the United States, Canada and Australia instead of staying here. And 33% of NK defectors wish they could go back to North Korea rather than continuing life in the south.

So even though South Korea is democractic and economically one of the most prosperous and Christian countries on earth (eleven of the twelve largest churches in the world are in Seoul, for example), North Koreans face a crippling prejudice in South Korea.  They continue to struggle with the mental and physical ravages of the life they endured inside of NK. North Korean defectors who, having come so far, find that even worldly freedom can’t bring happiness.

For their part, South Korean Christians are for the most part baffled by the idea of submitting to North Korean leadership of mission to North Korea. South Korean churches, for example, can’t wait to evangelize North Korea when it “opens,” and seem inclined to believe that the strategy is theirs to set, rather than seeing themselves as in a supporting role of an existing North Korean church. They would hasten to add that they are training North Koreans for the work–using South Korean evangelism and church planting strategies, of course.

But when it comes to serving the Lord, NK Christians inside of North Korea and NK Christians on the outside can and do work together to proclaim the gospel to their North Korean brothers and sisters. And we can learn an awful lot by letting them lead the way.

Take the unique North Korean defector gospel proclamation strategy of balloon launching, for example.

In the 1980s, the South Korean government launched balloons containing propaganda flyers into NK. Each 40 foot tall balloon could carry thousands of flyers. But when the South Korean government sought to pacify the North during the so-called Sunshine Policy years, they asked the North Korean government, “What can we do to improve relations?” “Stop doing the shortwave radio broadcasts,” the NK government said, “And stop sending the balloon flyers!”

So the South Korean government mothballed the radio equipment and the balloons.

But in the 1990’s, when the growing North Korean Christian defector community begin to seek God on how to partner with their brothers and sisters still inside NK to spread the Gospel, they quickly realized what they needed to do: broadcast Christian messages in the NK dialect every day using shortwave radio, and send balloon flyers—as many as possible—into the North, and do all this as cheaply as possible. Because they had, you know, no money.

So with the support of Seoul USA and Voice of the Martyrs they studied the technology used by the South Korean government and adapted it. They created new balloons out of the plastic used by farmers to cover their fields. They wrote and printed their own flyers. And they launch those flyers—and, now, Bibles—back over the border into North Korea.

Who proclaims the gospel in North Korea? By our reckoning, no one knows how to proclaim it better, more creatively, or more effectively than North Korean Christians themselves.

Teaching the discipleship practices of the North Korean church (and other underground churches throughout history) to Christians in the rest of the world is central to our calling at Seoul USA/.W.  So anytime someone asks me, “How can we help North Korean Christians?” my response is always, “Help them? How about letting them help us?” This always puzzles inquirers quite a bit.

That’s because our tendency is to see Christians in persecuting countries as desperately needing the help of Christians in free countries. For example, Western Christians, when learning of oppression like in North Korea, naturally turn towards petitioning God to release North Koreans from their persecution. “Grant them the freedom to worship you openly,” we might ask. And even though we rarely pray it, our minds complete the sentence, “…just like us.”

But as is so often the case, when we are commanded to remember those who are suffering or in prison as if we were suffering or in prison also, Scripture turns our concepts completely upside down – or right side up, depending on how you look at it.

A careful reading of the verse reveals a call for us to imitate, rather than pity, Christians who are suffering for the sake of the Name. The idea is that they are the seniors and we the juniors in the call to imitate Christ. Our junior status and our need to learn from someone other than ourselves becomes increasingly clear these days given that:

• the average Christian household in the United States owns nine Bibles and is actively shopping for more, yet Biblical illiteracy continues to escalate among evangelical Christians;
• the average American church spends 97 cents of every dollar it takes in on those who give it;
• church attendance in many of the “free” countries of the West is now between two and five percent, and still slipping (as it also is in the United States, where we are now below twenty percent);
• The church is growing in many places where persecution is quite intense.

So it is with no disrespect at all to the churches in countries with freedom of religion that we recognize the importance of thinking deeply about which way the “help” arrow should be turned as we contemplate our relationship to Christians in countries without freedom of religion.

(For a comprehensive consideration of this question, let me point you to my stump speech on the subject, a message called How to be as Free as a North Korean Christian.)

But just as we should not lament the life of North Korean Christians, neither should we lionize them. If we lionize them, we will be tempted not to learn from them. We will find ourselves saying things like, “I could never survive persecution like that…”

And it would be a mistake to let the matter rest there, since the Apostle Paul promises that “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” When someone comes up to me after I speak at a Voice of the Martyrs regional conference and says, “Oh, I’m so thankful I don’t have to endure persecution,” I always ask, “When was the last time you proclaimed the gospel at work or to your neighbor?” And inevitably they respond, “Oh, I haven’t done that.” So persecution is not a possible future for American Christians; it is the present reality for Christians in every country throughout history who are seeking to live a godly life in Christ Jesus. And a good way to learn how to deal with it is to examine the liminal case: North Korea.

And that’s what this six-part series is all about: What can we learn about proclaiming the gospel from North Korean Christians? How, in other words, can they help us?

That is the topic of pre-eminent interest in my life, and I look forward to sharing about it with you more fully in the posts to come. Feel free to ask any question that would be helpful to you by leaving a comment below; I’ll be happy to reply. And in the meantime be sure to check out our Seoul USA website for more information about ministry in, to, from, and with North Korean Christians.