Displaying items by tag: South Korea

220 younger leaders from China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong gathered from 25-28 March in South Korea, for the first-ever Lausanne East Asia Younger Leaders Gathering. Young leaders from every region of East Asia found friendship across and within dividing lines and rediscovered the power of faithful communal witness, focusing on ‘The Essence of the Gospel - Unity in Diversity’. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population live in East Asia, with its full spectrum of political, cultural, geographical, and religious diversity. Their history is fraught with longstanding animosity between nations; but Christianity in the region is full of cross-pollinating friendships. The Korean translation of the Bible was born in China and one of the first leaders of the Korean church was discipled by a Japanese Christian. Today the East Asian Church is utilising the hands and feet, ears, brain, mouth and heart, to bring the gospel to East Asia and beyond - no matter the cost.

On 15 August North and South Korea celebrated their liberation from Japanese occupation in 1948, South Korea celebrated its 70th anniversary as a state founded purposefully as a Christian state, and North Korea also celebrated its formation. Seventy years is a significant time period for God: see A process towards reunification of the north and south was started by a joint declaration in June 2000, which was reaffirmed in April 2018 by the Panmunjom Declaration for peace, prosperity and unification of the Korean Peninsula. The two countries agreed to work towards a peaceful reunification in the future.

Kim Yong Chol, a top lieutenant of Kim Jong-Un, is meeting with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in New York, in one of three sets of parallel talks aimed at salvaging a summit between Kim and Donald Trump. Lower-level officials have been meeting at the inter-Korean border and in Singapore for other pre-summit negotiations. South Korea's president said, ‘Kim Jong-un believes a face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump could put an end to the history of war between the two nations.’ Pray that this hope is realised. He also said that Kim had reaffirmed his commitment to ‘complete’ denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula when they had a surprise meeting at the demilitarised zone. Pray for Pyongyang and Washington to agree on a roadmap of talks that will resolve their differences.

President Trump cited 'tremendous anger and open hostility' from North Korea as reasons for cancelling a landmark meeting with Kim Jong-un on 12 June in Singapore. In a letter to Kim he said, ‘It is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. The world and North Korea have lost a tremendous opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is truly a sad moment in history.’ His announcement came two days after he hosted South Korean president Moon Jae-in in Washington for talks widely seen as a salvage effort to ensure the summit went ahead. A statement from Pyongyang referred to vice-president Mike Pence as a ‘political dummy’, and said it is just as ready to meet in a nuclear confrontation as at the negotiating table with the United States.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently made a top-secret visit to North Korea as an envoy for President Trump and met that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The extraordinary meeting between one of Trump’s most trusted emissaries and the head of a rogue state was part of an effort to lay the groundwork for direct talks between Trump and Kim about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. On 18 April respected international media outlets reported that South Korea is considering replacing the current armistice with a formal peace treaty with North Korea. This announcement as South Korean president Moon Jae-in prepared to meet Kim Jong-un on 27 April. Negotiating a peace treaty that replaces the armistice would depend on Pyongyang abandoning its nuclear ambitions. See also

South Korea has some of the longest working hours in the world. Government employees work approximately 2,739 hours a year, 1,000 hours more than workers in other developed countries. The Seoul metropolitan government is introducing an initiative forcing employees to leave work earlier. Computers will be powered down at 20:00 on Fridays to stop a ‘culture of working overtime’. The shutdown comes in three phases, beginning on 30 March with computers switched off by 20:00. In April employees computers will be turned off by 19:30 on the second and fourth Friday, then from May onwards all computers will power down by 19:00 every Friday. 67.1% of government workers have asked to be exempt from the forced lights-out. Numerous surveys across the nation have found that stress and long hours of modern office jobs destroy not only health but family life.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US president Donald Trump are to meet in person by May, it has been announced, an extraordinary overture after months of mutual hostility. This news came after South Korean officials had held talks with Mr Trump at the White House. They passed a verbal message from Mr Kim, saying the North Korean leader was ‘committed to denuclearisation’. Mr Trump hailed ‘great progress’ but said sanctions would remain in place. South Korea's President Moon Jae-in said the news was like a miracle. ‘If President Trump and Chairman Kim meet following an inter-Korean summit, complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula will be put on the right track in earnest’, he said. China welcomed the development, saying the Korean peninsula issue was ‘heading in the right direction’. However, correspondents say the North has halted missile and nuclear tests during previous talks, only to resume them when it felt it was not getting what it demanded. The dramatic announcement came days after a high-ranking South Korean delegation had met Mr Kim in Pyongyang. See

Over five billion people across the world are not followers of Jesus, and two billion have never even heard the Gospel. Most will never hear unless somebody tells them. Pyeongchang has welcomed the world for the 2018 Olympic Games. 92 nations are participating. The world's best athletes are competing side by side with people from every corner of the world. They represent every possible worldview, religious background, and political system. Many - maybe most - of these athletes, families, and fans have never heard the Gospel. This is a special window of time for Christian athletes and participants to shine His light to those around them. What if the Olympic Games became an open door for the message of Jesus Christ to be proclaimed to the nations? Pray for an anointing of evangelism for every Christian involved in the Olympic Games.

Only a few weeks after a team of experts warned Congress that the nation faces an “existential threat” from North Korea from a possible electromagnetic pulse attack, a new report says the rogue nation is mapping a specific plan.

Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner wrote in his “Washington Secrets” column that the White House “is being warned that North Korea is mapping plans for a ‘devastating’ attack on the United States with an atmospheric nuclear explosion that would disable the nation’s electric grid, potentially leading to the deaths of virtually all impacted.”

He said President Trump “is being urged to create a special commission to tackle the potential for an electromagnetic pulse attack, one similar to the iconic Manhattan Project.”

Bedard cited Marine Corps veteran Tommy Waller, an advocate for an EMP commission, now the director of special projects at the Center for Security Policy.

“The first and foremost thing he must write is an executive order establishing his own EMP commission in the White House – a task force that draws from the experience of the previous EMP Commission,” Waller wrote.

Waller said that after “massive intelligence failures grossly underestimating North Korea’s long-range missile capabilities, number of nuclear weapons, warhead miniaturization, and proximity to an H-Bomb, the biggest North Korean threat to the U.S. remains unacknowledged – nuclear EMP attack.”

“North Korea confirmed the EMP Commission’s assessment by testing an H-Bomb that could make a devastating EMP attack, and in its official public statement: ‘The H-Bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons, is a multi-functional thermonuclear weapon with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack according to strategic goals.'”

One of those experts who delivered the warning to Congress, Peter Pry, told WND it is the deep state, entrenched bureaucrats whose loyalties likely lay with a previous administration, that is indifferent to a threat that testimony has confirmed could kill 90 percent of the people in the affected region within a year.

Get the real story about EMP in the ground-breaking “A Nation Forsaken” by F. Michael Maloof, as well as “Lights On” by Jeffrey Yago, from the WND Superstore.

Pry, a nuclear strategist formerly with the CIA who served as chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission until it was terminated in September (the same month North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb, which it described as capable of a super powerful EMP attack), said liberal Democrats still are running a lot of Washington even after President Trump’s election.

“The people who sabotaged the EMP Commission, Obama holdovers, are still at the Department of Defense. They have not been replaced by the Trump administration. This is happening not just with the vitally important EMP Commission,” he said. “Our society, the Trump administration and the people who voted for Trump are paying for the failure of Congress to support Trump appointees quickly.

“At the same time during the Obama administration, he had twice as many appointees appointed to positions in government than Trump has. It’s not President Trump’s fault – these people are undermining and opposing the policies that President Trump has enacted, including the case of the EMP Commission.”

Pry explained Obama administration bureaucrats, who believed Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election, did everything they could to sabotage and undermine the commission.

“They held back money for a whole year. They held back security clearances. They tried to stop the commission’s staff from working, arguing that ‘you need a contract in order to work for the EMP Commission.’ They wouldn’t even let me work, or other staff, pro-bono. We did anyway.

“Had Hillary won, we would never have received any of our funding or security clearances. It was all after she clearly lost and Congress intervened that they relented at the last minute. A commission that was supposed to have been able to work 18 months at EMP ended up with resources and support from the Department of Defense that enabled us to put in six months of work. That’s no way to provide for the national security of the country against an existential threat like EMP.”

An EMP comes from a nuclear explosion at altitude over the United States. The blast would disrupt electronics in line of sight, including those computer and other systems that deliver food, fuel, energy and communications to Americans.

Further, repairing or replacing those systems easily could take months, or even longer.

The result would be a run on food currently in stores, and starvation when those supplies failed, as replacements would be impossible without those delivery systems.

Pry detailed how an EMP attack would be more devastating than an asteroid hitting.

“We have a population of 320 million Americans today – we are only able to sustain that population because of our technology. Our modern technological economy and all of our critical infrastructure that support that economy is keeping 320 million Americans alive,” he explained. “Communication, transportation, business and finance, our industrial capability, even food and water depend on electricity. When you subtract electricity, when you cause a nationwide blackout, blackout the electric grid and all the life-sustaining critical infrastructures, how can you now support 320 million people? How many people can you support?”

Pry said many downplay the threat of an EMP attack by claiming the conditions resulting from the attack would be similar to “time traveling” to a time when people were less dependent on electricity. But in reality, he warned, the “aftermath of an EMP would be an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.”

There would be a ripple effect to the problem, too.

“Gas line pipes are going to blow up – you’ll have firestorms in cities from exploding gas pipelines. Chemical spills, toxic clouds industrial accidents, where fires break out because of the failure of safety … systems,” he said. “This huge chemistry set that is our society isn’t just going to sit there and black out; in many cases, it’s going to detonate and basically turn into bombs. In seven days, the nuclear reactors will go Fukushima and spread radioactivity everywhere.”

Jeffrey Yago, a licensed engineer and certified energy professional, says the danger of an EMP attack is very real.

“I think in the future of this country, we’re going to certainly see not only more power outages in more areas, but they’re going to last a lot longer,” Yago said during an interview on The Hagmann Report. “I’m not talking about a two-day outage [caused] by a storm or a weeklong outage by something like Hurricane Sandy or Katrina, but we’re talking potentially, these problems could impact major parts of the United States for months, not days.”

Yago believes if America continues on its current path of escalating tensions with North Korea, an EMP attack will be imminent. He suspects China, North Korea’s biggest ally, would rather see North Korea attack the U.S. with an EMP weapon than with a more conventional nuclear missile. A nuclear missile would destroy buildings and other infrastructure that China, the U.S.’s largest foreign creditor, may hope to own one day. An EMP attack would destroy America’s electrical grid while leaving other critical infrastructure intact.

Plenty of experts in the public and private sectors are aware of the EMP threat to America’s power grid. Multiple studies have been published, including “Securing the U.S. Electrical Grid” by the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress in 2014, “Electric Grid Vulnerability” by the staff of two Democratic congressmen in 2013, and “Large Power Transformers and the U.S. Electric Grid” by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2012.

Get the real story about EMP in the ground-breaking “A Nation Forsaken” by F. Michael Maloof, as well as “Lights On” by Jeffrey Yago, from the WND Superstore.

More at: http://www.wnd.com/2017/11/warning-n-korea-mapping-specific-plan-for-devastating-emp/#P7hXxjs1JO0v2m0S.99

Also see: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/09/05/millions-american-lives-could-be-at-stake-as-north-korea-threatens-to-attack-power-grid.html

I trust you have been following the news about the current threat from North Korea that could impact both Asia and North America, especially if Kim Jong Un, fires another ICBM and accidentally hits Japan or South Korea, prompting retaliation and war, or shoots a nuke a couple hundred miles above North America in what is called an EMP or electro-magnetic pulse attack that could knock out power grids and put the lives of millions in the continent at stake.

Please see the article below and pray for a wall of protection around the countries of Asia and North America. The Psalmist reminds us over and over that the Lord is the one who protects our nations. He is our only security in the final analysis. He is our "strength and shield", "a fortress of salvation" and hears our cry for mercy (28:6-8) so let's pray accordingly in this tense time.

I was in Washington DC last week and met with one of the USA's national security people who is an expert on North Korea also a woman of prayer. She said the crisis is likely to get "more intense" and that we should pray there will be no miscalculation on either side. Let's please therefore pray that God would give wisdom and restraint to all the political leaders involved whether in North and South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the USA.

During a national prayer call that focused on the Korean situation last night, I quoted a theologian who penned those famous words: "History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being." Let's trust God together and believe for a peaceful solution to this grave situation.

Please watch and pray over the news from the Korean peninsula. This is the most threatening and dangerous situation the world faces right now and it looks to be worsening.

Pray: that the North Koreans will back down from their provocative actions.
Pray: that Kim Jong Un will either change course or be removed by his own government or by Chinese intervention.
Pray: that a military confrontation that could take the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions would be averted.
Pray: ask that God would give special wisdom and restraint to President Trump, President Xi Jinping of China, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea as well as all other leaders involved in the current crisis that a peaceful solution can be found to ending North Korea's nuclear threats and weapons program.

Please refer to our previous articles on the IPC Prayer Website: http://www.ipcprayer.org/ipc-connections/item/9956-praying-for-north-korea-nov-2017.html

John D RobbChairman
IPC Prayer Connect

Sarah Lee writes: The situation is more precarious than ever. In fact, the crisis we are seeing is one that is unprecedented. The present South Korean government is pushing ahead with near-communist policies at full-throttle. In the midst of the threats being hurled from North Korea, such governmental steering has enraged some people, confused others, and brainwashed even others with false ideologies.

The threats from North Korea saying that it will make Seoul a sea of fire is being ratcheted up even more, and this has greatly contributed to the rapid fraying of a near 70 year old alliance between South Korea and the U.S. Many analysts and experts see this fraying as the first step toward the communization of all of Korea.

Pray: that the tides would turn and that the South Korea-U.S. alliance would be reinforced.
Pray: That the destiny of this alliance — and this nation — cannot be left to the hands of the sympathizers of the North Korean regime.

We are feeling with every cell in our bodies that the only hope for this nation is in Christ alone. We are seeing a new fire being ignited in the prayers of the Korean Church. New prayer gatherings with new strength are rising up throughout the nation. For this, we praise the Lord!

I am thankful that we are able to join in the midst of prayers being lifted up to the Lord in our respective places.

Thank you again, for your prayers in such a critical time.

In His hope and faithfulness,

Sarah