Do the Word

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. 

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.