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In 1992, the American evangelist Billy Graham flew to Pyongyang to meet face to face with Kim Il Sung, the founding leader of the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea. Mounting tensions between the United States and North Korea did not prevent Graham from preaching in two of the city\u2019s official churches, meeting with church leaders and seminarians from around the country, and presenting Kim one of his books.<\/p>\n
Two years later, Graham returned against the wishes of the US government. \u201cI was told that war could break out at any minute. That\u2019s how dangerous it was,\u201d he said afterwards<\/a>.<\/p>\n Graham, a staunch anti-communist, was interviewed on national television and visited<\/a> Kim Il Sung University, where he spoke in front of 400 students and faculty.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of my reasons for going at this time was to express my concern for peace in the region and to make whatever small contribution I could to better relations between our two nations,\u201d he said later of his visit.<\/p>\n American Christians have a long and complicated history with this part of the world. For decades, the US has had a significant military presence in South Korea. Prior to the Korean War, which began in 1950, hundreds of missionaries<\/a> spread the gospel throughout Korea, which was one undivided peninsula for centuries.<\/p>\n This month marks the 70th anniversary of the 1953 Korean War armistice, an agreement which ended the military fighting but left the Korean people divided into two isolated countries without a peace treaty. Given the US history of intervention and presence in this part of the world, and following the lead of Korean people working for peace and gaining inspiration from Graham\u2019s courage, American Christians have a responsibility to assist in ending the longest unresolved separation of a people in modern history.<\/p>\n Korea has always been a part of my life. I grew up in Seoul, South Korea, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. From 2014 to 2019, I led six teams into North Korea for humanitarian work.<\/p>\n Hundreds of US missionaries like my parents worked alongside the Korean people before, during, and after the war. While at times complicated by serious failings and misuses of power, missiologists often regard these 140 years as one of the most effective periods of mission history.<\/p>\n Graham\u2019s trips in the 1990s opened the door for Christian humanitarian agencies to serve in North Korea, many of which worked for decades after. Unlike the missionaries before them, these agencies don\u2019t plant churches, don\u2019t do evangelism, and don\u2019t distribute Bibles. But for 25 years, these humanitarian agencies have been at the forefront of relief and development work in the country\u2014from Christian Friends of Korea and its superb tuberculosis work<\/a> to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), where I currently work, providing food and medicine to support children recovering in hospitals and bringing North Korean agricultural experts to the West<\/a>.<\/p>\n The work of these faith-based agencies echoes the ministry of Bible characters who, sensing God\u2019s tug, crossed borders of division with a willingness to take risks and engage face to face with a person or community their people feared or didn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n Jacob went to Esau seeking to heal their broken relationship (Gen. 32:3\u201333:17). Esther risked her life to plead the case of her people before the king. In Jesus\u2019 most famous parable, the Samaritan crossed the road to a stranger in distress, regardless of his ethnic identity or religious affiliation (Luke 10). Following the call of the Holy Spirit, Peter went to the Roman military center of Caesarea to engage a commander named Cornelius (Acts 10).<\/p>\n These stories reveal not only courage, but a virtue rarely practiced in our time: empathy. Because news about North Korea largely focuses on the threat of nuclear attack or tense political relations, few Americans may see the country beyond the risk it might pose to the US. Meanwhile, with 70 years of no peace agreement, no encounters with North Korean people and few at the diplomatic level, Americans have had little opportunity to learn more from the 26 million people<\/a> (a population around the size of Australia) living there.<\/p>\n A lack of empathy for the other side poses the greatest danger in the North Korea and US relationship, one US general told me, not military buildup. \u201cNorth Koreans don\u2019t understand Americans and the way we think,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd Americans don\u2019t understand North Koreans and the way they think.\u201d<\/p>\n As the Bible stories demonstrate, practicing empathy doesn\u2019t mean pretending everything is okay. Meeting North Korea\u2019s leader didn\u2019t change Billy Graham\u2019s mind about realities he disagreed deeply with. But empathy does mean doing more than condemning and criticizing<\/a>. It requires curiosity about the dangerous \u201cother\u201d to engage them as human beings, to understand why they do what they do, and to meet face to face not only to speak but to listen.<\/p>\n Few American Christians will have the opportunity to personally travel to North Korea to serve people with vulnerabilities alongside the dedicated doctors, nurses, and kitchen workers there. But all of us can work to provide what Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach calls \u201ccritical yeast,\u201d small but powerful actions that interrupt histories of distrust and hostility.<\/p>\n For many US Christians, the first step in embracing a role as \u201ccritical yeast\u201d is by learning, lamenting, and praying. This starts by educating ourselves about the Korean War. Many of us know far too little about the conflict that falls between World War II and the Vietnam War. But for the Korean people and Americans with Korean heritage, the war changed their lives and those of their loved ones forever.<\/p>\n In 2020, 100 Korean American Christian leaders signed a statement of lament<\/a>, asking American Christians<\/a> to mourn the aftermath of the Korean War. Four million people died (including two million Korean civilians and 32,000 US troops) and millions of Koreans were separated from their families by the war and remain so even to this day, with the people of North and South Korea nearly completely isolated from each other.<\/p>\n Peter Cha at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Soong-Chan Rah at Fuller Seminary, and Eugene Cho at Bread for the World were among the statement drafters. \u201cWe believe that God is faithful, and that the arc of the universe in God\u2019s victory in Christ bends toward justice, reconciliation, and beloved community,\u201d they wrote. \u201cWe pray that someday all Korean people will be able to return to the birthplaces of their ancestors, to meet face-to-face across the peninsula, and to recognize each other as sisters, brothers and image-bearers of God.\u201d<\/p>\n Second, US Christians can provide critical yeast through financial and prayer support to faith-based humanitarian agencies, which are a face of compassion to vulnerable people in North Korea. Such organizations worked in North Korea for over two decades until the COVID-19 closure of North Korean borders in 2020. Due to hostility between the US and North Korean governments, staff and volunteers from organizations like MCC, American Friends Service Committee, Samaritan\u2019s Purse, and World Vision are among the few Americans who have regularly visited North Korea.<\/p>\n Through working alongside North Korean counterparts in areas such as health and agriculture, these Americans challenge the narrative that reduces the country to a hostile enemy by interfacing with North Koreans as fellow human beings, traveling through the country together and eating together. Supporting such individuals and their organizations in work with their counterparts is one way we can strategically extend our resources and compassion to people with vulnerabilities in North Korea.\u201d<\/p>\n Third, US Christians can consider the American government\u2019s involvement in the Korean peninsula and the responsibility we bear as citizens to influence public policy. As the Korean American statement drafters put it succinctly, \u201cthe prophetic call of the church is to speak truth to power, and that can call us to political action.\u201d<\/p>\n Due to its role in the Korean War, the United States must be a signer of a peace agreement to end the war. Christians can pray for, raise awareness of, and rally around the signing of such an agreement. And we can support laws like the Divided Families Reunification Act<\/a>, which supports family reunion opportunities for American families and their relatives in North Korea.<\/p>\n While isolation and punitive pressure efforts (including sanctions) on North Korea have been vigorously applied, especially regarding human rights and nuclear weapons, they have failed to change the situation<\/a>. Diplomacy guided solely by pressure, which doesn\u2019t seek to understand how the \u201cthreatening other\u201d thinks, is dangerous and lacks moral imagination. As Nobel Peace Prize winner and Christian political leader Nelson Mandela of South Africa put it, \u201cWhen we dehumanize and demonize our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.\u201d<\/p>\n The fact that the United States and North Korea have no diplomatic relations\u2014no ongoing channels of communication, negotiation, and trust\u2014is dangerous. Disagreements, misunderstandings, and threats can easily escalate into conflicts and increase the risk of war.<\/p>\n Indeed, the US has diplomatic relations with many other nations it is in high tension with, such as China. One critical yeast moment occurred in 1971, when an American ping-pong delegation visited China. \u201cFriendship matches\u201d led to cultural exchanges and planted seeds for eventual diplomatic relations, like Republican president Richard Nixon\u2019s visit in 1972 with totalitarian leader Mao Zedong. The leaders met at a time when China had nuclear weapons, and the relatively recent Korean War\u2014which the Chinese call<\/a> \u201cResisting America and Assisting Korea War\u201d\u2014had led to the deaths<\/a> of 180,000 Chinese soldiers.<\/p>\n In 1995, just 20 years after the Vietnam War, the United States established diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which is still a communist state. Since then, Vietnam War veterans including the late senator John McCain have become leaders in reconciliation initiatives between veterans on both sides. If China and Vietnam, why not North Korea?<\/p>\n Fourth, we can provide critical yeast by following the lead of courageous South Korean Christians working across the divide. To be clear, just as American Christians disagree about how to address the history of racism, South Korean Christians deeply disagree about how to engage North Korea. For some the North is perceived as an enemy nation. For many in the younger generation, it is another country. Meanwhile, others view the North as a family member to pursue healing with.<\/p>\nCrossing borders of division<\/h5>\n
Providing critical yeast<\/h5>\n