Church Officials Hug North Korea’s Communist Dictatorship

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Did you know that the World Council of Churches (WCC), perhaps with financial help from YOUR church, recently visited the most brutally repressive and anti-Christian country in the world? And are you surprised that the WCC had a wonderful time, praising North Korea’s hospitality, and continuing its decades-long silence about that hard-line communist country’s continued enslavement of its people?

Here is my response.

How bizarre, that the WCC is urging removal of international sanctions against the nuclear weapons program of Stalinist North Korea, while pushing for MORE international pressure on democratic, pro-U.S. Honduras, because it will not restore the presidency to a far left admirer of Hugo Chavez who tried to subvert Honduras’ constitution. At times, it seems like the WCC, and its member U.S. church agencies – United Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal et al – live in a surreal parallel universe where wrong is right, and light is dark.

U.S. church denominations continue to plow hundreds of thousands of dollars into the WCC. What a tragic, needless waste! Someday, the Lord will reform the WCC or shut it down, replacing it with new instruments that more genuinely foster Christian cooperation. We pray, and work, for that day!

Meanwhile, the WCC, with help from the U.S. National Council of Churches, was recently lobbying here in Washington, D.C. to restore Honduras’ ousted leftist president, Manuel Zelaya. Former President Zelaya organized a mob of supporters to seize some election ballots for a referendum, ruled illegal by Honduras’ supreme court, to facilitate the president’s seeking another term. This ex-president is a big fan of anti-American Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.  So naturally the WCC and NCC want him back! Crazy.Here’s my article about it. And here’s another article I wrote about a similarly ridiculous anti-Israel, church-sponsored event.

IRD religious liberty director Faith McDonnell continues to sound the alarm about persecuted Christians around the world, doing what our church, ought to be doing, if they weren’t so busy supporting North Korea and undermining Honduras. Here’s her latest piece for World magazine about an Anglican archdeacon in Sudan who was gunned down, probably by Islamist supporters of Sudan’s radical Muslim theocracy. Villagers threw themselves on top of the archdeacon trying to save him but were themselves murdered. Horrible. If we think that we U.S. Christians have problems, we must always remember Sudanese Christians.

Recently, United Methodist Duke Divinity School in North Carolina hosted a forum where Global South Christians, such as the Sudanese, were discussed by a distinguished expert on international Christianity, Philip Jenkins. Read Eric LeMaster’s coverage here. Eric is the nephew of IRD’s late president, Diane Knippers, and has been doing some writing for IRD.

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