Christianity in North Korea is growing rapidly, a Parliamentary expert who fled the brutal regime has told en in an exclusive interview.
Timothy Cho is the Inquiry Clerk to the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea and an expert on the underground church there. Now 33, he escaped from North Korea aged 17.
Speaking to en, he related what life is like there now. One of the reasons that people are going hungry is North Korea’s enormous expenditure on arms, he says. With each nuclear missile costing $US 800million, cutting those tests and launches would free up huge sums to spend on food.
Cho says that, by necessity, all churches operate underground. They continue to share the gospel, but only after they have built a relationship of trust with those they want to reach. Some churches in South Korea support those in the North, where churches are in small cells from five to a maximum of 30 people.
Those discovered and sent to the labour camps face a grim existence. They are separated from the other prisoners and regularly beaten and tortured, for example by being used as human guinea pigs for the effects of physical contact with chemical weapons. But although their bodies are destroyed their faith is not. Cho says they know true peace, so they smile a lot – which makes the guards beat them even harder.
Despite this treatment, Cho points out that Christianity is growing rapidly in North Korea, so much so that the state is actually afraid of it. Schoolchildren are taught not only to idolise the Kim family, but also that missionaries are kidnappers. The government is terrified that anyone reading any literature of freedom – especially the Bible – might rise up against it.
Finally, Cho points out that the world has over the past two years had to adjust to the loneliness and isolation resulting from the pandemic – but North Korea’s Christians have been placed in a state-enforced lockdown for 50 years or more.
North Korea is well known to UK Christians as undoubtedly the worst nation in the world for persecuting Christians; it has been number one on Open Doors’ World Watch List for many years. There are estimated to be about 400,000 Christians in North Korea. Those discovered following Jesus by the authorities face either instant death or languishing for years in the country’s many brutal labour camps, where up to 70,000 North Koreans currently subsist. And the state is quite prepared to attack missionary pastors based in other countries, for example Han Cheung-Ryeol who was assassinated in 2016 after sharing his faith with over 1,000 North Koreans.
