Quiet Christianity

Pastor Douglas Shin has learned the cost of good intentions-especially in North Korea. Every time the Seoul-based Protestant missionary goes in with another shipment of food for the hungry, the regime's officials grab much if not all of it for themselves, he says. Once, when he tried to negotiate a visit to the capital, Pyongyang, they demanded that he bring a whole rail car loaded with 60 tons of flour and supplies. He finally bargained them down to a 10-ton food shipment, delivered just inside the border by truck from China. At least they let him hand out some of it to people on the streets.

Shin says every relief group encounters the same problem in North Korea. Regime officials demand more and more kickbacks from humanitarian agencies-and South Korea's church groups are particularly easy marks. "Northerners know how to take advantage of zealous southerners," Shin says. "But in some way both sides use each other."

That willingness to cut deals is making North Korea increasingly dependent on Christians from the peninsula's southern end. While nongovernmental agencies like World Vision and Save the Children, fed up with the North's rampant corruption and lack of transparency, have closed down or sharply reduced their activities there, South Koreans are racing into the void. Lighthouse Foundation, a Seoul-based Presbyterian group that works with handicapped children, is working with the North to build a center for disabled kids in Pyongyang. The Rev. Kim Jin Gyung, a Korean-American protestant, will soon open a $30 million science and technology university in Pyongyang financed by donations from South Korean Christians.

North Korea's few churches-Potemkin temples to give the illusion of religious freedom, critics say-are getting costly makeovers courtesy of religious groups on the far side of the DMZ. Seoul's Presbyterians are spending nearly $3 million to rebuild Bongsu Church in Pyongyang, while Baptist groups are planning to invest a similar sum in nearby Chilgol Church, which was once attended by the mother of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung.

The southerners aren't competing for converts; proselytizing remains strictly forbidden in the atheist North. The real prizes (for now, at least) are trophy assets-the kind that look good on church Web sites and help fill the collection plates.

By that measure it's tough to beat the Rev. Yonggi Cho of Seoul's Full Gospel Church, the world's largest single house of worship, with 780,000 congregants. Early last month Cho and 250 fellow South Koreans attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the Full Gospel's $22 million cardiac center on the banks of Pyongyang's Daedong River. A month earlier the church had sent 23 trucks loaded with heavy equipment, such as cranes and cement mixers, across the DMZ. Construction of the seven-story, 260-bed heart clinic will be financed with individual donations and Cho's own retirement pay, which he says he'll transfer after stepping down next year.