North Korea as part of efforts to "free Christians" in the Communist nation from persecution, an influential Dutch evangelical newspaper reported Monday, December 19, ahead of its January publication.
Over 1,800 believers in the Netherlands are participating in the prayer action. which was launched by Christian rights group Open Doors in November, said Dutch newspaper Uitdaging (Challenge) in its preprint version obtained by BosNewsLife.
"The many prayers have already results, I feel it," Open Doors’ Prayer Coordinator Klaas Muurling was quoted as saying. "North Korea is much more in the news, something great it going to happen there," he told Uitdaging.
"It’s fantastic that through prayer you can have a share in freeing the North Koreans Christians," Muurling added. The prayers were expected to be welcomed by American missionaries from Florida who have arrived in the Netherlands to encourage Dutch churches to "love Jesus with a new fire," Uitdaging reported.
Although the action began at Open Doors headquarters in the Netherlands, it reportedly spread to other countries, including South-Korea, Canada, United States, South Africa, Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, France, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway.
APPEAL FOR PRAYERS
The action began after an appeal for prayers from refugee Soon Ok Lee, who described her
horrific experiences in a North Korean prison camp in her book ‘Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman.’
"The prison was a place where the animals that do not have tails lived. That is what the prisoners were. It is beyond human comprehension how the Communist Party could treat people this way," she wrote about her seven year ordeal. "How can the Communist system, in the time of no war, contradict its teachings by torturing people who share the same bloodline?"
Thousands of Christians and dissidents are believed to be in prisons and labor camps across the country, where Kim Il Sung, the man recruited in 1945 by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to found the Communist North Korean state, stamped out Christianity and the traditional Buddhism and Shamanism.
STATE RELIGION CREATED
He also installed in their place an ideology resembling a state religion, which rejects any outside influence and which critics say promotes hatred and distrust of outsiders. That ideology preaching self-reliance, is known as ‘Juche’, of which the late Kim is the central figure – so much so that the North Korean calendar begins with the year of his birth in 1912.
After Kim Il-sung died in 1994 his son, Kim Jong-il, continued his religious policies as General-Secretary of the Korean Workers Party. Open Doors believes however that prayers can change the situation.
It noted that seven years of prayers for the Soviet Union led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and that a decade of prayers for the Islamic world led to "a growing interest among Muslims to know more about Jesus," Uitdaging quoted the group as saying.
NORTH KOREA "WORST"
North Korea ranks number one on Open Doors’ World Watch List of countries where persecution of Christians is the worst.
”Diplomatic pressure does not help in this closed country," said Open Doors Netherlands Director Tjalling Schotanus in published remarks. ”The persecution cannot be described with any pen, so our only hope is that God intervenes Himself…What is impossible for humans is possible with God," he said.
The government of North Korea has denied the existence of prison camps, some of which reportedly can hold up to 50,000 prisoners. North Korea also rejects charges of human-rights abuses and has accused the United States and its allies of using human rights as a "political tool in a campaign to overthrow" the government in Pyongyang. (With BosNewsLife Chief International Correspondent Stefan J. Bos, BosNewsLife Research and reports from North Korea).
