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'Praise the Lord': A tale of 2 Koreans (Norimitsu Onishi, DECEMBER 19, 2005, The New York Times)

As the two Koreas have moved closer in recent years, the complicated relationship between defector and missionary has come to symbolize, perhaps more than anything else, the yawning gap of a half-century division. While the North remains communist, the South has grown into the foothold for Christianity in Northeast Asia.

With a Christian population of nearly 30 percent, the South has the world's second largest missionary movement after the United States, with 14,000 people abroad. An estimated 1,500 are deployed in China, evangelizing secretly and illegally among Chinese and North Korean defectors. South Korean missionaries shelter North Koreans and have brought thousands to the South; others train them to return home to proselytize, as well as smuggle Bibles into the North.

For the South's missionaries, converting those of the North, where Christianity first spread before the peninsula's division, dovetails with their dream of a reunified peninsula. "Oh Lord, please send us, for our brethren up North," reads a verse in the most popular hymn among missionaries working with defectors, "Evangelical Song of Unification." It is also part of a larger dream of spreading the Gospel along the Silk Road back to its source.

Behind these movements, though, are personal ties between defector and missionary, complicated by a balance of power tipped in the South Korean's favor and the inevitable mix of religion, politics and money.