Preaching the Gospel in the Hermit Kingdom – by Isaac Stone Fish
North Korea is a
difficult place to spread the Gospel. In
the last year, at least three Christian activists working on the border have
been stabbed by poisoned needles, likely wielded by North Korean assassins; one, a South Korean pastor who helped smuggle
North Koreans out of China, died by the time he reached the hospital. Dozens
of missionaries have languished in Chinese prisons, arrested after leaving
North Korea or while attempting to enter.
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Despite the perception
of North Korea as a country hermetically sealed to the outside — and despite
the very real risks — dozens, if not hundreds, of Christian missionaries operate inside the country, sometimes living there
for months at a stretch, in the capital, Pyongyang, or in the Rason region, near the country’s Chinese border. Some run factories, distributing bread and soy milk to the poor. Others work
for NGOs or universities, like the Pyongyang University of Science and
Technology, North Korea’s first privately funded university (launched in 2010),
which is bankrolled mostly by evangelical Christian movements. Its founder
James Kim, who has spent prison time in North Korea for proselytizing, likes to say that he has “unlimited
credit at the bank of heaven.”
Of the five NGOs that
formed the consortium that the U.S. government worked with to deliver food aid to North Korea
until 2009, four are evangelical Christian organizations. One of them, World
Vision, only hires candidates who believe in Jesus. Heidi Linton runs Christian
Friends of Korea, an organization that has sent more than $55 million dollars in
food, supplies, and medical equipment throughout the country since 1995. Linton
explains to North Korean patients and hospital staff that the donors give out of their love for God. “You don’t
go into a lot of detail at that point, but we love because God first loved us,”
says Linton. “No, we cannot give Bibles, we cannot give tracts, but we
can live out for them what it means to be a Christian.” Asked how many people
have been converted, she demurs: “We plant the seed and God brings in the
harvest, in his time and in his way.”
So how do you bring the
morals and values of Christianity to the world’s most closed country? With
infinite patience. A missionary from the United States with almost 20 years of
experience working with North Korea explains: “We’re not allowed to visibly
pray. You can’t bow your head, and you can’t close your eyes. But when you’re
praying you’re talking to God,” she says. “All the education we’re giving them
is designed to make them think the truth — of all sorts.” Linton brought four ambulances into North Korea emblazoned with
the Christian Friends of Korea logo, which includes a prominent cross. “They’ve
told us multiple times that we need to change our name and our logo,” she says.
“And we said, ‘No, that’s why we’re here.’” Proselytizing inside North Korea
“has to be done almost exclusively in a one-on-one setting, where you talk to
someone, typically someone you know very well, about faith,” says Todd
Nettleton, director of media development at Voice of the Martyrs USA, who says
that the organization and its partners dropped 1,467,600 Gospel fliers via balloons into
North Korea in 2011.
“The picture we have of
missionary work, where you go and try to talk to as many people as possible, or
where you’re on a street corner handing out missionary tracts, is so far from [what is allowed in North
Korea] it’s not even on the same planet. It’s painstaking, risky work.”
* * *
Part of the allure to
missionaries is that Pyongyang used to be one of the great seats of
Christianity in Asia and an example of successful proselytizing. “We harken
back to the late 19th century when missionaries were being stoned out of
Pyongyang, literally, and it took years of work before they were allowed to do
actual evangelism,” says Linton. Known in the 1920s as the Jerusalem of the
East, Pyongyang had a flourishing evangelical community; Billy
Graham’s mother spent three years in missionary school there. In the 1940s, an
estimated 25 to 30 percent of the adult population of Pyongyang was composed of church-going
Christians. Missionaries also worked in South Korea, planting
the seeds for Christianity that thrived under its military dictatorship and after
the democracy movement succeeded in the late 1980s. Today South Korea is one of the world’s most Christian countries; as of 2008, Seoul
boasted 11 out of 12 of the world’s largest Christian congregations, and South Korea is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries it sends overseas.
Not so in North Korea. When Kim Il Sung, the first
president of independent North Korea, consolidated his power in the early 1950s
after the Korean War, he decimated the Christian population, which he saw as an
independent power source and a threat to his rule. By the time of his death in
1994, there were few Christians in North Korea, if any. Comic books featured
stories of Christian missionaries injecting North Korean children with deadly
infections.
Little is known about Christianity in North Korea
under Kim Il Sung, because so few North Koreans defected. When his son, Kim
Jong Il, took power in 1994 and famine hit, hundreds of North Koreans fled to
South Korea; thousands more began traveling back and forth across the Chinese
border searching for food, acting as conduits of information between North
Korea and the outside world. The famine and the death of Kim Il Sung also “coincided
with the opening of North Korea to NGOs, hence the increased presence of
missionaries” eager for a chance to preach the Gospel in the closed country,
says Marie-Laure Verdier, a Ph.D.
student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London who is studying Christian organizations
working in North Korea.
But Pyongyang didn’t go
soft all of a sudden. Under Kim Jong Il, persecution of Christians likely worsened “because of increased efforts of evangelization by missionaries on the
border,” says Verdier. “From
the viewpoint of the Kim regime, Christianity is seen as a great challenge and
a great danger, an alternate order of things,” says Greg Scarlatoiu, executive
director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Take Je Yell Kim, a
Canadian dentist who spent a decade in Rason and set up a
church service for expats in the region; he was sentenced to three months in a
North Korean prison in November 2007 for charges related to “national
security.” Aijalon Mahli Gomes,
a teacher from Massachusetts, walked across the North Korean border in January
2010. He spent eight months in prison, where he reportedly attempted suicide, until former U.S. President Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang and secured his release. Often, cases go unreported to avoid
jeopardizing the delicate diplomacy among North Korea, the Christian
organizations, and the imprisoned aid workers’ home governments. A letter sent
out to a missionary email network in late 2007 announcing Je Yell Kim’s arrest
asked members to refrain from speaking to the press. They did refrain, and his arrest
wasn’t reported until his release.
Missionary Robert Park,
who worshipped at the same church as Gomes in South Korea, walked across the
border in December 2009 shouting “God loves you and God bless you” while
carrying a Bible and a letter beseeching Kim Jong Il to relinquish power. The
government released him 43 days later, claiming via the Korean Central News
Agency that Park was now “ashamed” of his biased views and was now convinced
“there’s complete religious freedom for all people everywhere” in North Korea. Park now lives
in Seoul and advocates for North Korea’s human rights situation to be labeled
genocide. He has spoken of
sexual abuse at the hands of his captors and says, “What
I suffered as a human being I would never recommend for anyone else.”
The threat of violence or imprisonment hasn’t
stopped the evangelical movement; it has just made them more cautious. Chinese
border cities like Yanji, the capital of China’s Korean autonomous region, and
Dandong, through which most of the official trade between China and North Korea
passes, act as bases for hundreds of
American and South Korean evangelical Christians who help North Koreans get out
of the country and who attempt to get themselves inside. One missionary living on
the border spoke off the record because he didn’t want to upset the Chinese
regional authorities, which he likened to “a sleeping dog.” Proselytizing is
illegal in China, too, and the Chinese government, at least publicly,
supports North Korea’s effort to forcibly repatriate defectors. In March 2011,
I visited a Western cafe in Yanji where missionaries congregate and saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt from
Wheaton College, the evangelical Protestant liberal arts university outside Chicago.
I asked one of her tablemates whether that’s what had brought them to Yanji. “Food’s
great here, isn’t it?” he replied.
* * *
Despite the danger
missionaries face, it’s far more dangerous for North Koreans who come into
contact with Christians or evangelical paraphernalia. Defectors have
spoken about seeing friends and neighbors executed for the crime of simply
owning a Bible. North Koreans themselves are often converted or co-opted to
smuggle the Gospel into North Korea at great personal risk. On a 2011 visit to
the border, I saw food packaged with a Christian symbol for delivery into North
Korea. “People come across the border, we make them Christian, and then we send
them back,” said the missionary associated with the food distribution.
“We had a North Korean
Christian several years ago who took five Bibles in with him, and he was
beaten, literarily to death, when they found out that he had the Bibles on
him,” says Nettleton.
But the majority of the
missionaries involved with North Koreans work with them only when they’re
safely outside the country. “For the ones who come out, Christianity can do
a lot more for them because they need so much healing,” says a Christian
activist in South Korea. Tim Peters runs Helping Hands Korea, an organization
that helps North Korean women and children who have already crossed into China
flee to other countries. He told a story of a man in North Korea who, in late December after
the death of Kim Jong Il, became interested in Christianity. But after speaking
about it in his community, he raised the suspicion of security forces. He and his family fled
North Korea the next day, and Peters’s team near the Chinese border is now helping them. “Because they were discovered listening to Christian radio, if
they were to be repatriated the punishment would be extraordinarily harsh,”
says Peters. In a way, they’ve succeeded: More than half of the roughly 20,000 defectors in South Korea identify as Christians. “North Korean defectors associate Christianity
with democracy,” says Verdier.
Rights groups estimate that of the 24 million North
Koreans, there are only tens of thousands of Christians there today, though
the exact number is unknowable. “My understanding is that the underground church is extremely underground,” says Peters. South Korean churches have amassed war chests of millions of
dollars to bring Christianity to — and build thousands of churches for — their
“brothers in the North” when the regime falls. Ben Torrey, raised in
South Korea by missionary parents, runs the Fourth River movement, an organization
that enhances preparedness among South Koreans and North Korean defectors,
training them “as agents of reconciliation, healing, and problem solving” so
that they can eventually enter North Korea and “rebuild the country on a
foundation of biblical principles.”
Is the
death of Kim Jong Il a propitious time, though, for missionaries and Christian
organizations working inside North Korea? One spokesman at a Christian group
that does extensive work in North Korea said hopefully, “We don’t have any
contingency plans [for the regime falling], but the wheels could fly off the
wagon and the structure could disintegrate. Who knows?” Many Christians who
work with North Korea are worried that new leader Kim Jong Un, in a desire to reinforce
his new mandate, will be even more hostile to them than his father. “We
understand that [the North Korean underground church] is being even more
cautious at present,” says Peters.
Although no one interviewed for this article thinks the country will collapse in the next year, the death of Kim Jong Il has led
many missionaries to think that change could be near. “They seem to be amazing
masters of keeping broken things going, whether it’s in engineering or
institutions,” says Torrey. Things won’t quickly implode but “the foundations are shaking and
cracking,” he says. Steve Chang, a
Virginia-based preacher who sits on the board of several missionary
organizations including the Pyongyang Institute of Science and Technology, says he prays that in the next five to 10 years North Korea will unify or open
to the outside world without a major shock or catastrophe. He is a “key
supporter” of an organization that “has
a very detailed and elaborate contingency plan to quickly establish 3,000 churches” when the country opens.
But until that time comes, there’s work to be done. “For us, [the death of Kim Jong Il] has been
business as usual,” says Nettleton of Voice of the Martyrs. “North Koreans
needed the Bible before he died, and they need it today.”