North Korea: Where Is the Church?

Reporters from South Korea accompanying Red Cross delegates to the Communist capital of Pyongyang for a dramatic, unprecedented exchange of visits between north and south interviewed Kang Ryang-uk, a former pastor and high-ranking Communist official, currently chairman of the North Korean “National Unification Democratic Front.” He may be the last Christian minister left alive in North Korea, a circumstance he undoubtedly owes to the fact that he is, reputedly, an uncle of Premier Kim Il-sung. Kim is to North Korea what Mao Tse-tung is to China.

Asked about Christians and the church in the north, Kang promptly attacked the United States. “We cannot tell how many Christians there are,” he said, “because all the churches were destroyed by the U. S. bombers during the war, and many Christians have abandoned their belief.”

Pressed about his own faith, he sounded confused and evasive. “Well …,” he said, “my belief has never changed. It is the same as in the past.” “Do, you believe in the existence of God?”

“I’m a pastor,” he replied. “How can I doubt it?”

Reporters asked if he intended to build new churches since all the old ones were destroyed. “I don’t know,” Kang said. “I think we could build a new one if the Christians wanted to do so. The republic’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion.”

“Do Christians have meetings here?” “I don’t think so, but I don’t know if they do in the provinces.”

“How about the supply of Bibles?”

“Not many people want them, because all the churches have perished,” he said.

Now 70, Kang was a respected Presbyterian minister in the north and had been assistant pastor of the largest church in Korea, the Central Presbyterian Church of Pyongyang. After the Communist takeover he was caught in the crossfire between his conscience and his powerful Communist relatives. He was terrorized by both rightist and leftist pressure groups.

In early 1946, rightists broke into Kang’s house to attack him as a relative of the Premier. His son and daughter were killed. Some observers believe this incident persuaded him to move to the left and try to help the church by collaboration rather than resistance to Communist power. He organized a Christian League to foster Christian cooperation with the Kim Il-sung government, but the league’s subsequent history gives little comfort to those who advocate Christian adaptation to Communist control as the best pattern for church survival. The league was never able to be more than a puppet front-organization for Communists’ manipulation of Christians as they proceeded to squeeze the church out of organized existence.

The Red Cross talks between North and South Korea have stirred intense excitement in the south, where some two million refugees, including thousands of Christians, have waited for more than two decades to hear whether wives, children, and other relatives left behind in the north are alive or dead.

Before the division as many as two-thirds of Korea’s Christians were northerners, and some of South Korea’s largest congregations are refugee churches. One of the best known of the refugees, Dr. Han Kyung-chik, pastor of Seoul’s 9,000-member Yung-nak Presbyterian Church, has said that had the Korean War been pressed to a successful liberation of the north, he believes that 80 per cent of the north’s 15 million people would have turned to Christ.

SAMUEL HUGH MOFFETT

To Russia With The Word

The founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators says that after five years of effort the evangelical missions organization has received an invitation to send linguists into the Soviet Union. Dr. W. Cameron Townsend added that the invitation from the Soviet Academy of Science was verbal, and that he has had no contact with the government. “We’ve got nothing yet in writing,” he said.

Townsend and his wife visited the Soviet Union in 1967 to lay the foundation for the program, scheduled to begin this fall. He made several trips to the Soviet Union to confer with members of the Academy, as well as with linguists and educators in the republics of Georgia, Armenia, Daghestan, and Azerbaijan. They will be in the Soviet Union until the end of October, working on the plan. “Soviets in the Academy and in the embassy here have been very helpful,” said one Wycliffe representative.

Dr. Esther Matteson, who two years ago did research in the U. S. S. R., plans to enter the country sometime in October; in the spring Dr. Doris Bartholomew will join her. Details on where the Wycliffe linguists will work, how many will be given entry, and how long they will stay haven’t been finalized yet, reported Townsend. But he did say that Dr. Matteson and her colleagues will be working with the Soviet Academy of Science, probably at a university in the Caucasus Mountains.

Dr. Matteson is considered an expert in comparative linguistics and will aid Soviet linguists in dialect comparison studies. She will also begin work on Bible translation.

Referring to the problems of evangelism in that area of the Soviet Union, Townsend said, “We’re bucking up against a double problem—the atheism of the government and the Islam of so many of the tribes in the area.” But Wycliffe translators believe in the power of God to work through the Word.

Townsend gave an example. He left a New Testament with a scoffing Moscow biochemist. Three months later the Wycliffe founder learned the man had become a Christian. “They get the revelation of God and it satisfies their hearts,” Townsend concluded.

Religion In Transit

Fired from his pulpit because his daughter wore a swimsuit in a beauty contest, the Reverend Charles Marshall of Hobbs Street Church of Christ in Athens, Alabama, has been offered a pulpit by 200 breakaway church members.

National Enquirer, a former sex and sadism tabloid, has changed content to self-help and religious articles—with a resultant tripling of the paper’s circulation to three million copies weekly, says publisher Generoso Pope, Jr.

Pepperdine University’s new $25.8 million campus in Malibu, California, has opened with 850 students seeking an education “emphasizing the standards and concerns of the Christian faith.” Funds for the Church of Christ-related college were raised completely by private pledges.

The governing board of the Southern California Council of Churches unanimously opposes a state November ballot measure that would limit farm laborers’ strike and boycott rights. The council, which spawned the controversial California Migrant Ministry, has generally favored unionization efforts by Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers organizing committee.

The Reverend N. Bruce McLeod, the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada, believes that one of his first tasks will be repairing the rift between his church and Canada’s Jews.

Greek Free Evangelicals, upset by a government decision not to license a church summer camp, have urged Premier George Papadopoulos and the Greek Supreme Court to overrule the minister of social welfare and issue the necessary permit.

A Vietnamese minister’s charge that his church, the Protestant Evangelical Church of Que Son, was bombed by either U. S. or South Vietnamese bombers is being denied by U. S. military sources. Twenty-seven were killed and fifteen injured in the incident.

A petition with 180,000 names Protesting liberalization of Swiss abortion laws was presented last month to the Swiss government.

Personalia

Preaching his initial sermon as pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena, California, retired Bishop Gerald Kennedy became the denomination’s first prelate to become a full-time local minister. In his first sermon he held up a cartoon from Punch magazine in which a robed church functionary quips: “I used to be a bishop but now I’m just a high-ranking Jesus Freak!”

DEATHS

LORD GEOFFREY FISHER of Lambeth, 85, former archbishop of Canterbury; in Sherbourne, England.

DALLAS BILLINGTON, 69, television preacher and pastor of the 16,000-member Akron (Ohio) Baptist Temple; in Akron, of a heart attack.

A precautionary guard was placed on Mormon president Harold B. Lee following the Mexico murder of the leader of a group that broke away from the mainline Mormons. The accused murderers—all but one apprehended—were from Utah, and police feared they would make an attempt on Lee’s life.

Dr. Jose´ Aracelio Cardona is the new president of the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico. He has taught at the Seminary for twenty-one years in addition to serving several Presbyterian congregations.

Dr. Charles Seidenspinner, pastor of Ottawa’s largest evangelical church, Central Alliance Church, resigned to become president of Emmanuel Bible College in Kitchener, Ontario.

Bishop Olaf Sundby, 54, is the new primate of the Church of Sweden (Lutheran). He was appointed by King Gustav Adolf, head of the state church.

After eleven years as executive director of the National Association of Christian schools, John F. Blanchard, Jr., resigned to become superintendent of the Portland (Oregon) Christian Schools—a system serving 500 students.

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