By Tom Holland –
When she found a Bible at home, a seven-year-old girl – thoroughly indoctrinated by her North Korean school teachers – immediately wanted to turn her parents in to the authorities.
Instead, her parents tied her to a chair – to keep her from running off to the police – and explained to her the gospel. She ended up accepting Jesus and today is grown up and serving the Lord.
“She is associated with one of the most dynamic and effective Christian ministries inside North Korea,” says Eric Foley, CEO of Voice of the Martyrs.
While South Korea retains the fame of revival, North Korea is outpacing the South in growth of the church. Joshua Project estimates the evangelical church in South Korea is growing at 0.7% per year, while in North Korea it is growing at 6% per year, much faster than the global average.
In South Korea, there are unsettling trends. Some 87% of young people don’t trust Christians, and 69% of people in their 20s have no religious beliefs, according to Radical, a YouTube channel.
“Korea is experiencing what a lot of other countries are experiencing, that they’re losing the young generation,” says Annie Cho, an immigrant from South Korea working in a church in Santa Monica.
Meanwhile in North Korea, there are an estimated 400,000 Christians, despite the extreme danger. The Kim regime considers faith in God an existential threat.
North Korean Christians have developed secret codes for prayer. When hidden in the hills and mountains that cover 70% of the land, North Koreans belt out hymns of praise like no one in the West. They experience miraculous healings with regularity, Foley says.
“I never would have guessed, but it’s kind of crazy to think that of the two Koreas, it’s the church in the South that’s in decline because in the North – where Christianity is outlawed – there’s a whole different story taking place,” says Steven Morales, narrator of the Radical video.
This is the paradigm: prosperity tends to deaden people’s faith, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed. Meanwhile persecution fans the fires of revival, just like it did for the 1st Century Church.
Even if the South’s fervor is fading, it is still a powerhouse for Christianity. South Korea has three times more churches than convenience stores, one church for every 650 citizens. Where thousands of Christians are in labor camps in the North, thousands are in mega churches to the South.
South Korean churches send missionaries all around the world, into countries that white missionaries can’t get in, like Afghanistan. Moreover, the Korean missionaries are willing to die for their faith.
Luke is a convert from Islam in Afghanistan. When he met a Korean couple, they invited him into their home and printed out the first chapter of John. He had never met Christians before. It was under the time of the rule of the Taliban.
Eventually, he got saved after observing their lives. At that time, two Koreans working in a construction company in Kabul in 2011-14 were killed by a Muslim extremist. It saddened Luke’s friends, but they met the news with resignation.
“As Christians,” they said, as narrated by Luke. “This is what we choose. Our purpose is not just to come and build roads but also to speak about the truth to others, to take suffering even to the point to being killed for our faith.”
Luke says hundreds of Koreans came on building projects but also visited all the villages evangelizing. Today, Luke is an Afghan pastor serving refugees outside of Afghanistan.
South Koreans also are evangelizing North Korea. Peter leads a ministry that sends Bibles into North Korea via helium balloons called Operation Dandelion, as reported by a CBN video from eight years ago.
The orange balloons contain the Gospel of Mark and are sent aloft at night when the winds are right. Eventually, the balloons deflate bringing the Bible book to the ground in random parts of North Korea. This has been a ministry since the 1990s. Recently South Korea has cracked down on the balloon launches to placate the North.
It seems to be working. In 2000, 0% of North Koreans had seen a Bible. In 2020, 8% had seen one, according to Foley.
“The church in North Korea is growing faster than the church in the West or the church in South Korea,” Foley says.
How do the North Koreans pray and not get caught?
They’ll simply invoke the “Great Leader,” a title that officially refers to Kim Jong Un. But the Christians, in their hearts, are referring to God.
A sample prayer: My sister is really sick, but we’re so blessed to live here where the Great Leader knows and cares about each one of us who are sick. I want to bring to the Great Leader’s attention because I know he would cure it instantly.
With language that doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow from the political police, North Korean Christians can pray right in front of the authorities.
“A lot of times you hear stories about people in the Middle East turning to Christ because Jesus shows up in their dreams,” Foley says. “We don’t hear many of those among North Koreans. What we hear is stories of miraculous healings; often that’s the first experience of saying, okay, that doesn’t make sense.
“What brings them to faith is that faithful witness of the Lord Jesus,” Foley adds. “They experience God in ways we could never imagine because we are so busily distracted by all the other stuff that we thought we needed to have. They have only Christ revealed through his word, and for them, it is sufficient.”
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About this writer: “Spiderman” studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near in Los Angeles.
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