As the founder and CEO of global outreach organization World Help, Vernon Brewer has seen it all. Yet the extraordinary resilience of North Korea’s Christians still leaves him in awe.
“If what they believe, they call Christianity, we’re going to have to stop calling what we live ‘Christianity’ in America. Because what they live is real. It is life threatening. When Jesus says, ‘Count the cost.’ These men and women have counted the cost.”
Simply being a Christian in the communist north is a crime. Owning a Bible can result in lifetime imprisonment. Yet tens of thousands of believers are living every day inside one of the world’s most closed countries.
Vernon has traveled to the Korean peninsula multiple times, meeting some of the bravest people you can imagine.
“I met one seventeen year old boy who escaped to China so he could find food and make money, and send it back into his family. While he was there he became a Christian in a Chinese house church, and he felt like he needed to share his faith with his family in North Korea.”
“Unfortunately, he was caught bringing two Bibles into the country in his backpack, and government officials beat him and tortured him. Every time they hit him. he told them that Jesus loved them. One of the guards asked him why Jesus was worth dying for, and the boy was able to share the gospel with the man and the guard even ended up becoming a Christian because of that seventeen year old boy!”