InsideLearn how the North Korean underground church worships in These are the Generations—the newest book in Seoul USA’s persecuted church discipleship series!

LEARNING FROM THE NORTH KOREAN UNDERGROUND CHURCH AND THE PERSECUTED CHURCH AROUND THE WO

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TEN RADICAL DISCIPLESHIP LESSONSF R O M T H E P E R S E C U T E D C H U R C H I N N O R T H K O R E A A N D A R O U N D T H E W O R L D

The Gospels don’t portray Jesus administer-

ing a gifts test to his disciples and dividing

up the labor according to their skills and

interests. Instead, Jesus trains his disciples

by living with them and having all of them

to do all of the same things he did--healing,

proclaiming, sharing bread, opening their

homes, throwing banquets, and even taking

up their crosses.

μάρτυςmartyr [mahr-ter]“a witness who testifies to a fact of which he has knowledge from personal observation.”

Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

Those are the words

of the Apostle Paul

to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:12. They remind us

that we should not feel sorry for persecuted

Christians. Instead, we should imitate them.

That’s why this issue is devoted to ten radical

discipleship lessons from the underground church in

North Korea and around the world. We’ve learned

a lot about how to do church from North Korean

Christians, and now underground churches

around the world are inviting us to come and

teach them what we know. So this year we

traveled to lead training events in Eritrea, Russia,

Mongolia, and Sri Lanka. At every training event,

we also learned new discipleship strategies from

our students. We’re pleased to share this hard-

won wisdom with you here in the pages of our

Seoul USA newsletter.

If you’d like to learn more about these ten

principles, visit the Resource page on our Seoul

USA website and order the book Church is for

Amateurs for $5 plus shipping. You’ll be able

to study the Scriptural basis of each of these

principles and learn more about how you can put

them into practice in your own church. You’ll also

find two free bonus chapters on church finance

and mission work the underground church way.

So gather your kids, neighbors, and fellow

church members. It’s time to sit at the feet of the

best teachers in Christianity: the brothers and

sisters from the underground church in North

Korea and around the world. Let’s imitate them

as they imitate Christ by practicing ten radical

discipleship principles that can turn our churches

upside down!

From the Editor

P R O D U C E D B Y S E O U L U S A

U.S. Office

14960 Woodcarver Road

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Phone: 719-481-4408

Seoul Office

236-1, Duck Seong Building 1st Floor

Mapo-Dong Mapo-Gu Seoul, Korea

Phone : 02-2065-0703 2

Lesson 1:

Don’t Make it

Easy to Get In

Instead of begging people to come to

church, persecuted Christians throughout

history have treated attendance as a

precious privilege. They personally visit

with those who want to join before they

show up at church in order to make sure

they’re really serious about following Christ

as part of the congregation.

Lesson 2: Sunday is not the Main Service

Instead of begging people to come to church,

persecuted Christians throughout history have

treated attendance as a precious privilege. They

personally visit with those who want to join

before they show up at church in order to make

sure they’re really serious about following Christ

as part of the congregation.

Lesson 3: Train Members to be Generalists, not SpecialistsThe Gospels don’t portray Jesus administer-

ing a gifts test to his disciples and dividing

up the labor according to their skills and

interests. Instead, Jesus trains his disciples

by living with them and having all of them

to do all of the same things he did--healing,

proclaiming, sharing bread, opening their

homes, throwing banquets, and even taking

up their crosses.

U.S. Office

14960 Woodcarver Road

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Phone: 719-481-4408

Seoul Office

236-1, Duck Seong Building 1st Floor

Mapo-Dong Mapo-Gu Seoul, Korea

Phone : 02-2065-0703

Read what Hippolytus, an early church father, wrote about how the church dealt with

seekers in the generations shortly after the apostles.

“Let those who will be brought newly to the faith to hear the Word be brought first to the teachers before the people arrive. And let them be asked the reason why they have given their assent to the faith. And let those who have brought them

bear witness as to whether they are able to hear the Word. And let them be asked about their life: What sort is it?”

Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis:

Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2002), p. 82.

• Leadership moves from person to person each day (or night), kids included.

• Sing the same song each day for the week, memorizing the lyrics and learning to sing it without any instruments helping you out.

• The leader for the night shares from memo-ry the Scripture that’s assigned for the week. Everyone else has their Bibles open and keeps the leader on track.

• In prayer time, each person prays out loud, with the leader closing by leading everyone in the Lord’s Prayer and inviting everyone to share the peace of Christ.

It’s simple to hold daily worship in your own home just like the persecuted church!

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Lesson 4: Receive, Remember,

Pass On“For what I received I passed on to you”—those words

are from the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3. There’s

a reason the underground church holds on tightly to

the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, the Ten Com-

mandments, and the Lord’s Supper: They’re crucial

to growing individual believers to fullness in

Christ. When we ensure that each Christian learns

them deeply, along with the stories of scripture

and the songs of the church across the ages,

we ensure that we’re wading into the stream

of orthodoxy rather than ending up in the

ditch of personal preference.

Pastor Foley’s new release, These are the Generations, is now available through amazon.com! These are the Generations is the story of Mr. Bae, a North Korean underground Christian. Order the book today to learn how for three generations they received and passed on the good news—through wars, persecutions, and prisons—in the darkest place on earth. Here’s an excerpt:

Some stories of faith are so surprising that you can hardly wait to hear how they end. That’s the way I have always felt about my grandfather’s stories. As a eleven-year-old boy in North Korea grieving his death, I would beg my grandmother to whisper his stories to me again and again in the dark winter nights, even though we both knew that to retell or even listen to such stories was an act of treason that endangered our whole family. Years later, when I sat on the cold floor of a North Korean prison in one position each day from morning until 10:00 p.m. for more than a year, I’d turn over the smallest detail of one of those stories in my mind for literally days on end.

And these days, as I work at the car wash in South Korea in obedience to God’s call that I am to raise my daughter as a healer for our broken, divided nation, it is his stories that come to me as my mind drifts heavenward.

I wish you could have known my grandfather. In fact, when I start telling you the story of my grandfather’s life—how God would speak to him in a voice so loud that he would nearly go deaf… how, by God’s grace, he saved his village time and time again by obeying God’s puzzling commands (each more puzzling than the last)… and how he evangelized robbers and invading armies as he sacrificed his body to prevent a church building from being burnt down (while the pastor hid safely out of sight)—I think you will feel tempted to skip to the end of the chapter so you can read how it all turns out.

So I will save you from that temptation by beginning with the end of my grandfather’s story:

And so my grandfather burned all the Bibles just as God had commanded him, and thus the North Korean authorities were outsmarted.

And the Gospel continued to spread.

Excerpted from These are the Generations by Eric Foley. Copyright © 2012 by .W Publishing. All rights reserved. Order today from amazon.com.

ORDER Pastor Foley’s The Whole Life Offering from amazon.com and learn a plan you can follow to ensure that you’re growing in each area of loving God and neighbor throughout the year.

• Begin the year with a month of preparation, reacquainting ourselves with the Bible’s overall plan and provision for growing to fullness in Christ.

• Focus on one practice of loving your neighbor each month. The Whole Life Offering trains you in ten practices, from doing good to your enemies to sharing your bread to opening your home.

• Ground each practice of loving your neighbor in seven ways of growing in love for God. Search the Scripture to determine how Christ performs this work of neighbor-love on you. Learn how the church has undertaken this work across the ages. Spend time working through practices of prayer, worship, and self-denial related to that act of neighbor-love before ending the month serving and giving in this way to others.

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Lesson 5:

Meet in Places that

You Already Use

Underground churches meet mainly in the houses

and businesses where underground Christians

already live and work. That’s because they are

focused on the transformation of the people and

places they already know. If they rented or bought

new places to meet, they’d be missing the perfect

opportunity to sanctify their homes and workplaces

and all those who enter there.

Lesson 6: Train People to Become Living Bibles Christian literature is for training, not toting. Under-

ground church members learn whole books of the

Bible and many hymns by heart so that scriptures

and music can be shared anytime, anywhere, by any

Christian—even at a zoo in Africa.

At a one week intensive discipleship training for Eritrean

underground church leaders in Africa this summer, a member of the Seoul USA teaching

team was stunned to see Eritreans acting as living hymnals everywhere they went—including the zoo! Here’s a page from her training notebook. Hear her tell “the zoo story” and “the gospel message” at www.seoulusa.org/eritrea.

Too many of us have accepted the idea of church equals a building. While I love old cathedrals, does this model make sense if it is the building that causes persecution instead of the Gospel? In Sri Lanka, buildings can be a source of conflict, inciting people against Christian churches. Although there

is a persecution by the Buddhist population against Christians, the building themselves represent an

offense that is unrelated to proclaiming the Gospel. The insistence to build in a community that has few Christians is seen as an offensive move against the local village. It isn’t representative of loving your neighbor and instead feels like an unwelcome outsider pushing in on the families and communities and insisting they change long-held family beliefs.

Fortunately, this isn’t the model of all Sri Lankan church planters. Unlike many Sri Lankan pastors, this underground pastor is getting along well with his neighbors because he holds church on his farm. He isn’t trying to build a building. Instead, he’s trying to build his congregation to fullness in Christ. He knows the best way to do that is to live, work, eat, and play together. A farm is the perfect place for him to disciple his family and church members. And though his Buddhist neighbors would prefer that he leave, they observe closely how he and his family live and act—something they would never see if the church was tucked inside a building. You can read more about the conflicts facing Sri Lankan pastors at

www.seoulusa.org/srilanka.

• What was the intent of this “mission”?• What happened?  Why?  What are the implications for our

growth in Christ?• What lessons did we learn?• Now what? Where is God leading us next?

Lesson 7:

Hear—and do—the Word

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them

will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the

rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on

that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on

the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does

not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the

sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew

and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

In countries where Christians must worship underground,

the rain, floods, and winds of persecution are continual. The

only way the church’s house to stand is to build it on the

hearing and the doing of the word of God.

Lesson 8: Measure the Growth of Each Member Weekly Think it’s impossible to measure spiritual growth? Underground

Christians disagree. They are deeply committed to ensuring that

every Christian is continuing to grow in the knowledge and love

of God. That’s why at Seoul USA’s Doers of The Word discipleship

programs throughout China, a regional overseer drops in regu-

larly and evaluates each disciple and the program leader to dis-

cover if they have memorized the assigned scriptures and songs

and undertaken the “do the word” field assignments, and—most

importantly—whether the fruit of the spirit is apparent in their

life. When was the last time your pastor dropped by your house

to test your family?

How would you tithe if you knew that it would immediately tip off the secret police that you were a Christian? In Pastor Foley’s latest book, These are the Generations (available through amazon.com), Mrs. Bae shares how North Korean under-ground Christians are faithful to tithe as they go about doing the word:

Let me tell you how we tithed. No church exists in North Korea. There is no place or pastor we can offer our tithe to. But my mother-in-law emphasized the importance of tithing. So even though we did not know how to offer our tithe, we always did—by using it to help others.

When the poor could not pay for medi-cine or treatment, we just took care of them. We gave them medicine even if we suffered a loss. We bought rice for the hungry people, and we let them pay us back later. We gave our extra clothes to others. When we bought

groceries, we did not receive any change from old ladies or mothers with children. When they weighed vegetables on the scales, we just trusted them. We did not question it.

Excerpted from These are the Generations by Eric Foley. Copyright © 2012 by .W Publishing. All rights reserved. Order today from amazon.com.

After Action Review.  Army soldiers often do what is called an “After Action Review” every

time they return from a mission. They ask them-selves four simple questions in order to make

sure they pay attention to what they learned. You can use these same questions every time

your family does any kind of ministry project or volunteer opportunity together. Just like your un-

derground brothers and sisters, take the time to examine how the Holy Spirit used that opportunity to help you grow in Christ. Ask yourselves:

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μάρτυςLesson 9: Leave the Kids in the Room with You When You’re Doing Church

Persecuted Christians know that imitation, not giant play areas or

colorful Sunday School curriculum, is the key method the Scrip-

ture commends for discipling children. That’s why the persecuted

church usually worships all together in the same room. Kids see

how their parents act as Christians. They learn the same songs

and stories their parents learn, at the same time, in the same way. As they get older, they teach their younger brothers and sisters to do the same thing.

Lesson 10: Use Volunteer Pastors to

Lead Local Churches The underground church around the world and throughout

history has had to learn ways of worship that do not depend on

full-time local church pastors. Fathers, mothers, and household

leaders became the natural overseers of churches that met

in homes. If pastors visit, they supplement--not replace--the

pastoral oversight of the family head or neighborhood lay

leader.

Cute (But Powerful) Church Videos! Check out www.seoulusa.org/kids to see how Seoul USA team members are us-ing these persecuted church strategies to train their children to memorize scripture and song. Hear one of the Korean dads be-ing imitated by his three and five year old sons in their family wor-ship time as they learn the song assigned for the week. Watch one of our youngest American children prove that you’re never too young to memorize straight from the text of the real live adult Bible!

In Eritrea, women have been drafted into important positions of church leadership. That’s because the Eritrean government imprisoned many of the pastors and drafted most of the men into long-term military and civil service. What would happen in your church if today the pastor was imprisoned and the men were forced to serve away from home as soldiers and government workers, receiving no pay? That’s the situation the church faces today in Eritrea. When Seoul USA conducted a one-week intensive discipleship training program this summer for Eritrean church leaders, we were initially surprised to learn that all but one of the trainees were women…but we were even more surprised to observe how well trained these women were! Several had faced interrogation. Others were under constant surveillance. All of them knew that being Christian leaders meant that their children might become orphaned. Yet there they were in class each day before we arrived, singing songs, studying the material, and planning how they would share what they learned with other church members when they returned home!

In 1907 the Great Pyongyang Revival brought an explosion of Christianity to the Korean peninsula in

what missionary William Blair called “great oceans of prayer beating against the throne of God.” A mere fifty

years later, Pyongyang—and all of North Korea—plum-meted into the most oppressive darkness Christians have

ever encountered in world history.

In the midst of the near total extinction of believers on North Korean soil, the great oceans of prayer have been parched. But a tiny stream has continued to trickle down through Christian history, on into the present day: a single North Korean family continues their faithful struggle to receive and pass on the gospel from generation to generation, through labor camps, prisons, interrogations, and the greatest

challenge of all—everyday life in North Korea.

These are the GenerationsBy Pastor Eric Foley with Mr. and Mrs. Bae, third generation underground North Korean Christians

Order today at www.amazon.com

Seoul USA serves as a bridge between the Korean church (both North and South) and the church in the rest of the world. We bring the gifts of the Korean church to the church in the West and the gifts of the church in the West to the Korean church. We have a particular focus on mobilizing the church around the world to support the underground church of North Korea through our Voice of the Martyrs Korea ministry.

We are members of the International Christian Association, composed of over 30 independently operated Voice of the Martyrs ministries actively working to support persecuted Christians in 52 countries.

Want to Get Involved?If would like to receive this newsletter regularly, volunteer with Seoul USA, learn more about books and DVDs like

the ones described in this issue, or donate financially, please contact us at:

In Korea:236-1 Duck Seong Building 1 Floor, Mapo-dong Mapo-Gu, Seoul KoreaTelephone: 02-2065-0703E-mail: susa@seoulusa.orgWebsite: www.vomkorea.co.kr and www.seoulusa.co.kr

To support this work financially from Korea:

Hana Bank 223-910003-98705Account Holder: VOM Korea

In the US:Phone: 719-481-2296 E-mail: pastorfoley@seoulusa.org, Web: www.seoulusa.org

The Voice of the Martyrs Korea, a Ministry of Seoul USA

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