They are awaiting North Korea to open up so they can move in and many are prepared to be martyrs

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- Thousands of South Korean Christians are in training to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ into North Korea and also plant churches there when the country finally opens up.

I discovered this on a reporting trip to Seoul, South Korea, when I was taken to a training camp in the hills outside of Seoul where these Christians were undergoing vigorous training on how to live and work in North Korea.

One Christian, who asked not to be named, told me, “We believe that because of world pressure, North Korea will soon have to open up to get much-needed foreign currency and we have many ready and willing to move in there with the Good News of Jesus Christ. They are aware that the country could be open for just a short time, and then it will close tight again, and they will be trapped inside.

“But they are willing to be martyrs for the Gospel because they love the people of North Korea.”

I’ve been to North Korea. It was back in the fall of 1994, and I was part of a small delegation of Christians who were the first group allowed into the secretive country after the funeral of Kim Il-sung, known to his people as “The Great Leader.” We were led by North Korean-born Dr. David Cho (no relation of Paul Yonggi-Cho, the South Korean preacher and head of what is believed to be the world's largest church, Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul.)

I reported daily from the capital city of Pyongyang for the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC and we were taken all over the country, even to the North Korean side of Panmunjom, the "truce village" that straddles the border between North Korea and South Korea in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone that has split this peninsula since the Korean War ended in 1953.

We felt the tension in the DMZ, which is probably the most fortified border on Earth, with more than a million soldiers facing each other with enough artillery to obliterate each other in a matter of hours. Tension constantly runs high there -- more than 50 Americans, 1,000 South Koreans and countless North Koreans have died in skirmishes along the DMZ in the past 40 years, including one recently. The area is dotted with land mines and razor wire and concrete tank bunkers and Communist soldiers dug into mountainsides behind cast-iron "blast doors" to protect them against bombs dropped from American B-52s.