Sarah Yoon was born in Los Angeles to an American mother and a South Korean father of Northern descent. At the age of five, she and her family moved to South Korea, and later to Yanbian, China. “When you work in North Korea, you don’t stay there 24/7…you build relationships. You go in maybe for a day, and then they’ll invite you back for three days, and they’ll invite you back for a week … you get the picture.” Yoon made it very clear the relationship between the government and other people. “[T]he government there works very closely with everyone. It’s very much on a relationship basis … it’s more about who you know rather than what you do,” she said.
Yoon and her family started their stay in North Korea’s Free Economic Zone in a seaside city Rajin. They were there for five years until Yoon’s father was to help treat cerebral palsy patients in the nation’s capital, Pyeongyang. “My dad is a chiropractor, and he became a physical therapist through crash course training because there was a need for cerebral palsy to be treated,” said Yoon.
Yoon described how her family was not left to their own devices in Pyeongyang: “When we go into North Korea we don’t go alone. We have guides, or minders. We like to call them guides. They’re always with us — always with us. In Rajin, we had a lot more freedom where we could walk in the street alone, and we could go shopping alone, but in Pyeongyang, they lived with us. We couldn’t drive our own cars, so we had to hire a driver.” And yet, there was still a relationship constructed out of such contact with these North Korean personnel. “We got really close to our minders, and one of our minders in Rajin, the countryside, had a daughter with cerebral palsy. That’s how my dad got into treating it,” she said.
Yoon said that Christianity is not new to Korea. “A lot of people don’t know that Christianity came to the Korean peninsula in Pyeongyang, before the war,” Yoon said. “That was called the Pyeongyang revival, and, from North Korea, it came down to South Korea. A lot of schools were founded in Pyeongyang, a lot of Christian schools founded by missionaries. There have been people whose grandfathers and mothers went to those Christian schools.”
Unfortunately, there is a stifling embargo on sharing the faith openly. “Nobody has told us that they’re Christian,” Yoon said. “You can’t tell people that you’re Christian. Not only is that illegal, but it elicits different responses from the government.
“There are three official churches in North Korea that the government officially recognizes” Yoon said. Yoon said that there is a history for Christianity in the line of the North Korean leader although that fact is not well-known. Yoon described the parish of the churches as comprised of “people descended from Christians that the government knows.”
The church Yoon’s family attended would often have a sermon on civic duty and appraisal of the leader. “There were times he would preach about the country, and about the leader, and how you should be a good citizen — expected things. We would mainly be there as a ministry for people if that makes any sense. To pray over those people who were there.”
Yoon had much to say about the spiritual state of North Korea: “My parents say that this field in North Korea is not a field that is ready for planting. The work that needs to be done is to till the soil.” Yoon admited that, because of the history Christians in other Asian countries have made, North Korea has evidence that equates Christians to “U.S. imperialists trying to take over the country.” “It’s not all rooted in lies … If you say that you’re a Christian, the response is, ‘You’re a US imperialist trying to ruin my livelihood, and this country that I love.’ We were just there trying to show that Christians were not bad people. That Christ, and what we believed in, was about love. Not imperialism.”
Despite the historically bad impression Asians have had of Christians, there is some good news about Christianity in Asia. “When the foreign Christians were kicked out and were supposed to leave, the Chinese church has grown,” Yoon said. “It’s been a pattern. After the foreign Christians were kicked out, the Chinese church has grown.” While, for family safety reasons, Yoon’s family did not work with more inconspicuous parishes, Yoon has hope for the future of Christianity in Asia. “You must believe that God never leaves that place, and my parents’ message is always, ‘God is alive in North Korea.’”
“It’s not a forsaken land,” Yoon stated. “God never really leaves His people. God never leaves anyone. There is no people group where He is not present, even if a Christian has never stepped foot into the land or Jesus had never preached. God is still alive and I think that’s the only thing we can ever hope and grasp and lean on, is that God has a plan and He is alive. We don’t need to be there for things to start happening.”