When North Korean authorities caught Min-ji selling South Korean DVDs to earn extra money in 2008, her husband, Kun-woo, feared for his life. As a high-ranking member of North Korea’s State Security Department (SSP), he knew his wife’s crime, which was punishable by death, could implicate him, too. In fact, their entire family could be executed because she was selling “propaganda” from the south on the black market. To delay his capture and potentially save his teenage children, Kun-woo fled to Yanji, China. Meanwhile, Min-ji’s relatives, also SSP officials, took in the children and bribed those who oversaw her case to reduce her sentence. So instead of death, she received a prison sentence. Kun-woo returned to North Korea following Min-ji’s release from prison, but he was not the same man Min-ji remembered. He could not stop talking about a book called the Bible and a being named God who hears our prayers. A family he met in China had told him about the Good News of Jesus Christ, and now every time Kun-woo ate a meal with his family, he gave thanks to the Lord. “I thought he was crazy,” Min-ji told a VOM worker. Problematic Prayers In the four

Lee Chul-ho encountered Jesus Christ in 1998 after defecting from North Korea. Desperate to escape the famine that had ravaged his country for four years, he crossed the Tumen River into China, where he met a South Korean missionary who helped him and shared the gospel with him. Upon hearing the Good News, Chul-ho placed his faith in Christ. While recovering from malnutrition, Chul-ho consumed God’s Word, reading the Bible several times the first year. For the next three years, he taught other North Korean defectors about Christ and gradually broadened his ministry to include helping North Koreans at the border as they crossed into China. He also got married during that time. Then, one summer day in 2001, Chinese police arrested Chul-ho and his wife, who was seven months pregnant, as they waited for a group of North Koreans to cross into China’s autonomous Inner Mongolia region. “For the sake of my wife’s survival, I had to tell [the police] that she was not my wife,” Chul-ho said. “I told them that I did not know her.” Despite his attempt to protect his wife, both were detained for several days before being transported to Sinuiju, North Korea. When Chul-ho

When a North Korean man’s relatives invited him to read the Bible, everything changed. Years ago, Byung-woo traveled from his home in North Korea to visit relatives in China. His relatives, who were part of China’s vast underground church movement, invited him to read the Bible while he was there. When he declined, they fasted and prayed for a couple of days, hoping he would change his mind. That puzzled Byung-woo even more than the original invitation. Finally, out of curiosity and a desire to appease his family, he agreed to give the book a cursory read. But the more he read, the more questions he had for his relatives. The Bible translation used the South Korean dialect rather than the North Korean dialect. The two dialects differ roughly 40 percent of the time. Still, the parts he understood fascinated him. Seeing Byung-woo’s interest, his relatives took him to their house church, where church members explained the need for the gospel in North Korea and implored him to start an underground church there. They were prepared to provide him with food and money to sustain him, Bibles to distribute and a bicycle to help him reach more people. Byung-woo grew