The way these North Korean Christians live out their faith has been eye-opening to Foley. These persecuted Christians have no church building, no paid pastors, no Bibles in the pew or available at the local Christian store – “literally no nothing that we in the West consider so essential to discipleship”…

An American pastor has set forth 12 unconventional – even seemingly counterproductive – church planting principles that he learned from a highly unlikely source – North Korea, where the Christian community is completely underground.

Pastor Eric Foley, who has worked for ten years with North Korean underground Christians, says the way church is done in America would get a believer in North Korea immediately killed or imprisoned. Yet despite having to hide their faith, North Korean Christians have a lot to teach American Christians when it comes to church life.

“The major difference that we note between the development of discipleship practices in the free world, in the West or countries like South Korea, is that discipleship practices really do rely on a freedom of religion that takes the form of being able to develop people in a specially purposed building, with a specifically full-time trained pastor, and an abundance of resources,” said Foley, who is pastor of “.W” (DOTW; Doers of the word) Evangelical Church of Colorado Springs, Colo., and Seoul, South Korea, to The Christian Post.

“Those things are absent in the persecuted church mostly, but certainly specifically in North Korea.”

In North Korea, citizens discovered to be Christians are thrown indefinitely into hard labor camps without trial, and some have been even publicly executed for their faith.
Last May, North Korea reportedly executed three leaders of the underground church and jailed 20 other Christians, according to AsiaNews. North Korean police raided a house in Kuwal-dong in Pyungsung county, Pyongan province, and arrested all 23 believers who were gathered there for religious activity.

The 20 believers were sent to the infamous prison labor camp No. 15 in Yodok.
And in 2009, The Associated Press reported that a 33-year-old Christian woman, Ri Hyon-ok, accused of distributing Bibles and “spying” for foreign countries was publicly executed in North Korea.

The communist North Korean government forces its citizens to adhere to a personality cult revolving around worshipping current dictator Kim Jong-il and his deceased father, Kim Il-sung.

Open Doors, a ministry that works with persecuted churches worldwide, has ranked North Korea as the No. 1 persecutor of Christians for nine straight years.

In spite of the fearful punishment for being a Christian, there are about 100,000 followers of Jesus Christ in North Korea.

The way these North Korean Christians live out their faith has been eye-opening to Foley. These persecuted Christians have no church building, no paid pastors, no Bibles in the pew or available at the local Christian store – “literally no nothing that we in the West consider so essential to discipleship,” the pastor writes in the pamphlet, “Church is for Amateurs: A Guide for ‘Fourth Order’ Christians Like You on How to Plant and Lead a Lay Church.”

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12 Lay Church Principles:
1. Don’t make it easy to get in
2. Establish that Sunday is not the main service
3. Train members to be generalists, not specialists
4. Receive, remember, pass on (hymns, Scripture)
5. Meet in places that you already use
6. Train people to become living Bibles
7. Commit to the inseparability of hearing and doing the word
8. Measure the growth of each member weekly
9. Leave the kids in the room with you when you’re doing church
10. Use volunteer lay pastors to lead local churches
11. Tithe … but not to the lay church
12. Do missions often, receive your provision on the road.