The New Wave of Christian Persecution in China is Producing a New Wave of North Korean Missionaries from the Most Unusual Backgrounds

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Pastor Foley

2018 marked a new wave of Christian persecution in China–a coordinated, country-wide offensive against the church in both its registered and unregistered forms. One battle in that larger war has been the identification and expulsion of South Korean missionaries. As a result, North Koreans, who have typically learned about Christianity from two sources–Korean missionaries and Chinese churches–have also been caught in the undertow of this persecution tsunami.

Chinese churches were once the primary “stations” on the North Korean underground railroad. It used to be whispered in North Korea that anyone escaping into China should look for a building with a cross on top. There, they were told, someone would help them. And the whisper was true. Now, however, China is tearing the crosses down from these buildings and putting their leaders in prison.

Owing to these twin developments–the expulsion of South Korean missionaries and the desecration of Chinese churches–it would seem increasingly unlikely for North Koreans in China to hear about Jesus.

It would seem that way. But we should never question whether God has a Plan B. He always does. The only question is whether what looks to us like Plan B was in fact the Plan A he intended in the first place.

OUT WITH PLAN A AND IN WITH PLAN B. OR IS IT OUT WITH PLAN B AND IN WITH PLAN A?

In this case, Plan B–which looks and sounds a lot like the kind of Plan A’s one encounters in the Bible and throughout church history–involves ordinary, untrained, and in most cases unbaptized North Koreans who wouldn’t on the face of it appear to know a whole lot of what we would consider essential knowledge of Christianity and thus would appear to us to be unlikely missionaries. However, these unlikely missionaries are increasingly turning up in the most unusual places and encountering God in some of the most unusual ways. And God seems to be using them to do some very unusual missionary work.

Movie Disciples

Much has been reported about North Koreans watching South Korean dramas inside North Korea and how these dramas inspire them to defect to South Korea or desire a more prosperous material life. But more and more we are discovering that North Koreans watching these and other videos are desiring a more spiritual life also. It is a phenomenon we’ve labeled “Movie Discipleship.”

“Movie disciples” are North Koreans who begin to believe in and pray to God because of scenes they see in secular movies and dramas that mention God or Christian themes or which show church buildings or Bibles. Often, these movies are not explicitly Christian and the religion featured in them is an afterthought to most viewers. But for North Koreans, the references to religion are becoming more and more of interest.

Even Indian “Bollywood” movies are stirring North Koreans’ hunger for God.

Indian movies and South Korean dramas sometimes show church buildings, crosses, and pictures of Jesus. A character might even say something like, “I pray to God.” Since North Koreans have never seen these things before, they begin to ask their friends about them. In this way, word begins to spread, in the form of questions.

Voice of the Martyrs Korea has been smuggling Christian materials into North Korea for years, including popular Christian movies with high production values. Even older movies like “The Ten Commandments” or “Ben Hur” are extremely popular with North Koreans. A few years ago we worked together with our sister mission, Voice of the Martyrs US, to make an animated story of the life of Jesus called “He Lived Among Us”, which placed special emphasis on the persecution he faced. Now, ordinary North Koreans  are “re-discovering” these movies, as a spiritual hunger spreads. They’re looking for something more than economic success.

Although many ministries broadcast or smuggle in audio or videos of sermons, our organization finds movies far more effective. A pastor giving a sermon can sometimes seem to North Koreans like a North Korean self-criticism meeting or a Kim Jong Un speech. When the same material is presented as a drama, we’ve found North Koreans are more receptive.

This month Voice of the Martyrs Korea also begin to smuggle into North Korea the new movie Tortured for Christ, the story of Romanian pastor and VOM founder Richard Wurmbrand, who remains faithful to God despite 14 years of torture in a Communist prison. We think ordinary North Koreans will be especially receptive to the movie’s message, since they are wrongly taught in grade school that Christian pastors made Communists suffer. But this movie shows the truth. It shows Christians suffering under Communists but still praying for them and loving them. It’s the kind of thing that is sure to get North Koreans whispering.

BOLD-SPIRIT BOSSES

For years we and our Underground University (UU) North Korean missionary students have evangelized North Korean workers sent abroad to make hard currency for the regime. Typically the biggest impediment to reaching them has been their North Korean labor bosses, who are specially trained to spot people like us.

North Korean labor bosses are different than North Korean labor workers. Their spirits are bold, their actions confident. Their hands are soft, not calloused or scarred. Their eyes are sharp. Their clothes are warm.

So recently, when we were on a missionary trip to reach laborers, we were surprised to be sitting across from just such a bold-spirited, confident, soft-handed, sharp-eyed, warm-clothed man. Our UU student missionary leaned across the table and whispered that this was not a laborer, but a boss.

“He has the power to have someone killed!” the student hissed quietly to us.

Yet, there our student sat, holding the boss’ hand and telling him about God. The only thing more surprising than the UU student’s calm demeanor was the boss’ calm response. He stated, with boldness of spirit, that he already believed in God.

“When I started to doubt whether the North Korean government was doing the right thing, I needed to cling to something bigger and better,” he explained. “I didn’t know that this being was the God of Christianity, but I trusted and believed in him all the same.”

The UU student excitedly briefed the man that the unknown God he was worshiping was actually the Triune God. It was this God, the UU student explained, that had brought us together in order to reveal himself more fully. 

AN UNWISE (AND THUS GOD-BLESSED) MISSION

“Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called,” wrote the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:26-30. “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”

Who is nullifying whom? To us, it may seem like the Chinese government is nullifying the hard work of many South Korean missionaries and Chinese churches. But Paul says that God himself is the one who nullifies. He nullifies the things that are so that he may nullify our boasting. After eighteen years of North Korea and China ministry, I have learned not to boast about our projects and not to regard anything we do as indispensable, un-nullifiable. If God can raise up children of Abraham from stones, he can certainly raise up North Korean missionaries from Bollywood movies and labor bosses.

Not only can he do this; he already is.

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Richard Wurmbrand’s Marx and Satan: The most relevant book you can read this year

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Pastor Foley

(Here’s an English version of the Foreword I wrote for our new Korean language edition of Rev. Wurmbrand’s book Marx and Satan, to be released in a few weeks. You can find an English language edition of the book here–minus my Foreword, of course.)

What do Marx and Satan have in common?

Some might answer that the commonality is that no one believes in either one anymore, that they are both personages whom the world has outgrown and left behind.

Yet more than one billion people live in countries which continue to officially espouse Marxism, with the largest of those countries, China, emphatically committed to it. The two hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth in 2018 was marked by supportive popular and scholarly appraisals of his work. A new film portraying Marx’s early years received enthusiastic response worldwide. Even a giant new 4.5-meter tall bronze statue of Marx was erected in the town of his birth—a two-hundredth birthday gift from China.

But Marx’s deepest and most lasting impact may not be on the countries that continue to adhere to his ideology but rather on the countries that opposed it. For in the countries that opposed Marxism—the countries of the so-called “free world”—the cost of overcoming Marxism was that they came to have such faith in their own contrasting system of economics and political rights that they ended up adopting Marx’s central tenet: That human beings no longer need God.

Herein lay the commonality between Marx and Satan and the nature of their shared work–not in the economic system of communism, not in the political system of totalitarianism, not on behalf of one side of the Cold War, but instead in the advocacy of the promise that ultimately captivated the nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain and that holds sway around the world today: You shall be as gods.

Today, statistics show the nations of both sides of the former Iron Curtain to be about equally forgetful of God. Atheism has firmly taken root in all political and economic systems. In fact, what either is or soon will be the largest Christian nation in the world is an officially Marxist nation: China. Lest this suggest that Marxism is somehow compatible with Christianity, it is worth noting that the Chinese church is presently engaged in one of the worst waves of persecution in history as the Communist Party of China seeks to remake Christianity in its own image. Marxism is still not compatible with Christianity, and it is no longer afraid of it. It has seen much of the church around the world brought to heel in our day by Marx’s materialism, and it is more than happy to repeat to the church in China Satan’s standing offer, “All this I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me.”

This is what makes Marx and Satan more relevant today than when it was first published in 1976: In the light of history it is more apparent than ever than Marx and Satan were double agents in the Cold War. Through their partnership which Rev. Wurmbrand details in the book, they ensured that their real work—the work of presenting a world without God as achievable, reasonable, and inevitable—would triumph regardless of which political and economic system actually won. In this way, God imprisoned all—communist and capitalist alike—in disobedience, so that he might have mercy on us all.

But that mercy can only come to us when, as we read this book, we confess, “The times that have now befallen us have come because we—in the West and in the East, in the Communist world as well as the capitalist one—have forgotten God.” As Rev. Wurmbrand would no doubt note were he writing a Foreword for the book today, it was not free market economics that saved us from Marx and Satan, nor was it liberal democracy, nor military strength. It was God.

And it is God who must save us once again from Marx and Satan. We need to read and re-read Pastor Wurmbrand’s book until it is clear to us how deep a partnership these two personages have had. This is not Cold War history. It is about a battle that remains to be fought. Perhaps many will say that no one believes in Marx or Satan anymore. But that likely troubles neither one, since they have always done their main work underground.

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The Five Zones of Persecution

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Pastor Foley
The Five Zones of Persecution

The Bible does not portray persecution as a product of particular political systems the way we are prone to today. Such a portrayal leads us to think of persecuted Christians as beleaguered minorities peacefully minding their own business and beliefs, whispering worship songs and Bible verses under blankets while candlelight illumines their angelic faces; meanwhile, snarling secret police officers let the dogs out in hot pursuit. Such minorities need protection, pity, and money, we reason, and we tell our own governments so.

Instead, the Bible portrays persecution as a turf war where idols and their devotees, with violence rooted in well-reasoned fear of utter loss, defend their hard-won territory and assert their rights of soul control over those they’ve cowed into submission. Biblically, it is the Christians who are on the offensive; the idols and their subjects are the ones engaged in self-defense and always appealing to governments for protection. It is the demons who ask nervously, “What do you want with us, Son of God? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” They then ring up the relevant government authorities and discuss how to subdue the Christian menace, like dispatching so many unwanted bed bugs.

Persecution, in other words, happens whenever and wherever the enemy panics. Where the enemy has things well in hand (in places like America and South Korea where the pursuit of wealth, beauty, and pleasure, the opiates of the people, have reduced our societies–and, often, us–to a mellow haze), he has no need to persecute. He persecutes in the times and places where Christ is advancing at a good clip and even the enemy’s best weapons and troops seem powerless to staunch the flow.

That is why VOMK’s persecution map is different than other ones you may have seen. It does not tote up acts of violence against Christians in an effort to cause us to wring our prayerful hands nervously and thank God that we live in one of the blank, bland spots on the board. Instead, it is a strategy map, one which seeks to identify the patterns of Christ’s advance globally (which take the form of faithful martyr-witness) and the enemy’s concomitant, powerless hand-wringing (which inevitably takes the form of persecution).

Each zone represents a particular type of idolatry into which Christ is penetrating–Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Communism, and Secularism. In our ongoing updates through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and our website, you see glimpses of the martyr-witness being made in each zone and the persecution that is happening in response. For more detailed information about each zone, make sure to watch our video, The Five Zones of Persecution.

I realize it is impolitic today to refer to other religions as types of idolatry and to refer to Communism and Secularism as kinds of religion, but such is the divine classification in Psalm 2 verse 1, which refers to anything other than the worship of God as “rage” and “a vain thing”, inevitably issuing forth (in verse 3) in persecution against us. And according to the Apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 3:12, even our mere desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus is enough to panic the prince of this world into persecuting us, which according to Jesus in John 8:44-45, he does through those whom he has sired, who are by rights required to do his bidding as slaves.

As in the advance of any army, even a steadfastly nonviolent one like ours, there is constantly work to do behind and before enemy lines, and even along the supply trains. In reviewing this map and the explanatory video, let us be encouraged, edified, and exercised to continue to do our part as we marvel together anew, as according to the words of Acts 11:18, “So then, even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life.”

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