Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Population: 24,317,004
Location: Eastern Asia, northern half of the Korean Peninsula bordering the Korea Bay and the Sea of Japan, between China and South Korea
Area - comparative: slightly smaller than Mississippi
Government type: Communist state; one-man dictatorship

Chief of State: KIM Chong-il [de facto]; note - President KIM Il-song was reelected without opposition 24 May 1990 and died 8 July 1994 leaving his son KIM Chong-il as designated successor; however the son has not assumed the titles that his father held and no new elections have been held or scheduled.
National capital: P'yongyang
Natural resources: coal, lead, tungsten, zinc, graphite, magnesite, iron ore, copper, gold, pyrites, salt, fluorspar, hydropower
Natural hazards: late spring droughts often followed by severe flooding; occasional typhoons during the early fall
Environment - current issues: localized air pollution attributable to inadequate industrial controls; water pollution; inadequate supplies of potable water
Infant mortality rate: 25 deaths/1,000 live births (1997 est.)
Life expectancy at birth: 70.6 years
Literacy: 99% of those age 15 and over can read and write Korean.
Military expenditures - dollar figure: $5 billion to $7 billion
Military expenditures - percent of GDP: 25%
GDP: $21 billion
Food Production: North Korea is not self-sufficient in food production. Floods, droughts and a cumbersome distribution system have resulted in recurring food shortages. The rural population has undergone continual famine since 1987 with no sign of abatement.

NORTH KOREA
HISTORY OVERVIEW

Mount Paekdu is the traditional site for the birth of the first Korean. Anthropologists have evidence dating the Korean people's beginnings some 3,000 years before Christ. Huge mountains form natural barriers from China and Russia, allowing the Korean people to develop semiautonomously.

Faced with repeated invasion by the more powerful Japanese and Chinese neighbors, Korea developed a policy of isolation towards the outside world. Under the Yi dinasty, which ruled from 1392, until Japan occupied the country in 1910, foreigners were mostly forbidden to enter the country.

Buddhism and Confucian thought migrated from the Chinese emperor's courts to the Korean kingdom, becoming the norm for centuries, until the late 19th century.

In 1894, Japan fought China for influence in Korea. In 1904, it fought Russia for the same reason. By 1910, Japan annexed the country, forcing Koreans to modernize and leave their traditional dress and beliefs. Anti-Japanese liberation movements emerged with little success until 1945, when Japan surrendered to Allied Forces.

Korea was split along the 38th parallel, the northern part under Soviet control, the southern part under US control. In June of 1950, the DPRK under Kim Il Sung, a former guerrilla fighter, invaded the south in an attempt to reunify the nation. This resulted in the Korean War. United Nations forces eventually drove DPRK troops back to the 38th parallel, with a cease-fire pact signed in 1953.

The war over, the DPRK became one of the world's most repressive Stalinist states. Great purges, persecutions, and retrainings followed.

The great leader, Kim Il Sung, became revered as the god of the revolution. Following the Ju'che, self-reliance political philosophy, the DPRK borders were sealed hermetically.

The DPRK lost touch with the world until the late 1980s, when failing economic policies, along with persistent drought and flooding cycles, resulted in famine for the people.

After the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, the country remains in turmoil. Famine continues taking an annual toll. Threats of invasion of the south are common. The world watches and waits for what Kim Jong Il, son and chosen successor, will do.

THE CHURCH IN NORTH KOREA

The Korean church started uniquely. Four Koreans traveled to China in the late 18th or early 19th century to study herbal medicine. Their tutor was a believer, who led them to Christ.  On returning to their homeland, two were killed for attempting to bring in a foreign religion. The third had waited in prayer. He was instructed in a dream to disguise his gospel of Luke as cords around his backpack. He took the paper scroll and rolled it lengthwise, passing through the border post undetected.

When the first Protestant missionaries arrived in the 1880s, they found small communities of Christians awaiting baptism and further instruction.  The church saw rapid growth. By 1907, Korea was a missionary marvel, with over 1,000 self-supporting churches and 120,000 believers. One million copies of the gospel of Mark were printed, with 700,000 sold that year. A great revival sprang forth that year, impacting the whole country.  Most Christians were soon located around Pyongyang, the center of the revival, called the "City of Churches."

JAPANESE PERSECUTION
Persecution began in 1910, with Japanese annexation. Religious instruction was prohibited. No new Christian schools or churches could be opened without official permission. Japanese became the official language of all instruction.

By 1919, hoping to capitalize on the emerging League of Nations to become self-determining, a group of Koreans wrote a declaration of independence from Japan. Fifteen of its 22 co-signers were Christians. This unleashed a wave of savage reprisals. Churches and mission schools were destroyed. Thousands of church leaders, including women, were herded into crowded, filthy jails. Indescribable tortures, beatings, and humiliation followed. Church leaders were forced to worship at Shinto shrines. Rather than bending their knee to idols, many fled south. By 1939, Japan was engaging its military machine. All missionaries were expelled. Christianity was attacked relentlessly during the war years.

SOVIET PERSECUTION
The Japanese surrender in 1945 brought Christians to the streets, shouting out long-banned hymns. Joy was short-lived. The Soviet occupying force had no use for Christians and continued the persecution. At this time there were still some 2,000 Christian churches with over 300,000 believers remaining in the north. Many refused to participate in the election of Kim Il Sung, held on a Sunday. Imprisonment, beatings and death followed. Still, the Church grew in its spirituality. As long as services were not forbidden, believers assembled daily to pray. Some intercessory meetings numbered over 12,000 prayer warriors in attendance.

KOREAN PERSECUTION
When the Korean War broke out, any Christians who were captured and refused to swear allegiance to the state were imprisoned, sent to work in the mines, or executed. All members of the clergy and lay workers were branded enemies of the state and thousands were slaughtered.

In one town, 190 Christians were rounded up. The pastor was asked to renounce Jesus. When he would not, he was hung on a cross over a slow-burning fire to prolong his agony. When the soldiers asked if there were any remaining Christians, all 189 stepped forward. They were marched to an abandoned mine and sealed in with dynamite.

With the closing of the borders, the atrocities grew worse, but now the Korean church had no recourse. In the late 1950s, a Catholic workman was tortured until he revealed the location of a number of Catholics in Wonsan. They were rounded up, beaten mercilessly, then either killed or re-educated. The anti-Christian purges continued. Massive intelligence efforts provided lists of people, gathering places and sympathizers. In one sweep, 500 prayer cells in the city of Yongchun were disrupted. Several thousand believers were arrested. Prayer group leaders were executed, the rest were sent to re-education camps.

By the early 1960s, it was reported that all church buildings were closed and Bibles destroyed. In those years, school children held a contest. They were to find black books in their homes, without telling their parents about the "game." A girl, who later defected and gave this account, gleefully returned to school with a Bible firmly tucked under her arm. When she went home later, there was no one to meet her. At school the next day, she was reassigned to another family. Some 400 children lost their parents that month.

Christians buried their Bibles in small Kimchi jars or hid them in their thatch roofs or under eaves. Informers were everywhere, as revolutionary propaganda took root.

In the 1970s, during a road-widening project in Goksan an underground room was discovered. It served as a meeting place for 27 believers. They were lined up in front of the 30,000 inhabitants of Goksan. Officials chose 4 children and threatened to hang them if their parents did not deny Christ. The parents calmly told their children they would be meeting them in heaven soon. Soldiers hung the children. Then the remaining Christians were told to lie on the road, where a steamroller crushed them to death. This incident was reported in the state newspaper, which claimed that with this last group "all forms of heresy or superstition" had been overcome.

From that point on North Korea was silent. Was there a Church left?

A VICTORIOUS REMNANT
The first announcement of a surviving Church came from North Korean officials in 1984. The Korean Christian Federation, modeled on the Chinese Three-Self Patriotic Movement, invited an outside group for a visit. They claimed to represent 5,000 Christians in the DPRK. 

A second source of information was Korean Christians living in Manchuria, northeastern China. They had traveled into the DPRK and met with fellow believers. They reported a house church with 60 members, led by a man healed of incurable cancer.  One older woman had been praying everyday for the past 27 years in a secret place in her attic. Her knees had worn deep impressions in the floor boards.

By the early 1990s there were three official churches in Pyongyang. Kim Il Sung, who was raised by a Christian mother, built the Chilgol Protestant church in her memory. In 1994, Billy Graham preached in it, sharing the Gospel with Kim Il Sung during his last days. 

The death of the great leader, the defection of the creator of the Juche philosophy, and the desperate food shortages of the late 1990s forced open the sealed doors of the DPRK.

Many Christian organizations were among relief organizations responding to the physical need. They were given opportunity to enter the country and make contact with the underground church. In 1998, reliable sources informed Cornerstone Ministries International that there were as many as 200,000 Christians worshipping in underground churches in North Korea.

Today small numbers of North Korean evangelists are moving across their country, boldly sharing the Gospel. Bibles continue trickling into the country in the hands of new believers. Underground churches have become brave, starting Bible training centers to prepare new evangelists.  Requests for more Bibles and advanced Bible training are filtering to the west. Christian ministries are developing support strategies, given the gradual weakening of the DPRK government.

Please continue in prayer for our brothers and sisters in the DPRK, that God may provide their physical and spiritual food. Pray that God give holy boldness to the evangelists moving about North Korea; that they may preach with power. Pray for peace. Ask God to reunite the Koreas in His way, in His time. Finally, pray for Cornerstone Ministries International, as we follow the Lord's leading to support the North Korean church.

Rev. 05/20/99

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