Ben Torrey has an incredible background. He is the son of R.A. Torrey III, an Episcopal priest and founder of the Jesus Abbey in South Korea. His grandfather, R.A. Torrey II, was a missionary to China. His great-grandfather, R.A. Torrey, was one of the great Moody evangelists. With his own life experiences in the business world, Torrey now finds himself walking in the footsteps of his fathers. He is the director of the Fourth River Project and his vision is to teach and prepare Christians to go and live in North Korea.

EN: You grew up in Korea. How long did you live there?
Ben: I lived in Korea for twelve years between ages seven to nineteen. I went to Seoul Foreign School, an international school, until eighth grade and then I came to the states in ninth grade. And when I was fifteen my family went back to Korea to start Jesus Abbey.

EN: What is Jesus Abbey?
Ben: Jesus Abbey is a community that my parents set up. It’s just a place where different people can live in close community with others. It’s a quiet place for people to retreat, pray and be encouraged spiritually.

EN: Was it difficult for you to adjust to life in America after coming from Korea?
Ben: Yeah, I didn’t know it at the time. It was more difficult for the people around me because I would just miss cues. I mean, this is a common third culture kid phenomenon. I’d look like everybody else and I’d make assumptions about what they knew and they’d make assumptions about me. Unknowingly, I usually ended up stepping on peoples’ toes, letting people down and insulting people.

EN: Did your wife know while you were dating or engaged that Korea would be a part of her life?
Ben: My wife, Liz, knew about my background but neither of us knew how heavily involved we would be with Korea in the future. We actually went to Korea after we had been married 3 or 4 years. She said that was extremely valuable for her because she finally started to understand things about me that had been still a mystery. Seeing me in the Korean context at the Abbey, interacting with Koreans, seeing how Koreans interacted to things, all of a sudden there was something that made sense to her. It was really important for us and our relationship. But at the time I had no interest in ever going back to Korea other than to vacation or to visit. We lived in Korea for a year at Jesus Abbey and then came back to the states when our son was six weeks old.

EN: What did you do after you came back to the states?
Ben: I got into data processing. I just got a job as a trainee at a big insurance company and stayed there a couple years, then went independent as a consultant. I was also involved in the church. Then I became ordained as a full-time minister pastoring the church. Later on stepped out from full-time pastoring to associate pastor and was doing other stuff too. My wife and I were involved in a variety of ministries. We had a big house where the church originally met and then we eventually bought it from the church. We had a variety of people living with us: unwed mothers, girls who got pregnant, women who had been abused by their husbands and alcoholics. It was a really Christian community like Jesus Abbey, but the ministry God gave us was a ministry of shelter.

EN: What took you back to Korea in 2002?
Ben: When my father was 84 years old, in May of 2002, he fell and injured his head and had a brain injury. He had an operation but a couple of weeks later he went into a coma. So I went to Korea for a couple of weeks. I went back to Korea during the summer because the doctors thought he was not going to come of the coma. I saw him at the hospital the night before he died. The next morning, he basically passed away 5 minutes before my mother and I got to the hospital the next morning. So a week later, there was a funeral for him in Seoul. His body was cremated and his body was taken to Jesus Abbey, and a few days later, we had a funeral up there.

EN: Did people expect you to stay at Jesus Abbey after your father passed away?
Ben: During that time people had asked me if I was going to take over Jesus Abbey. Jesus Abbey was also trying to delve its Three Seas project.

EN: What’s the Three Seas project?
Ben: It’s a missions training and conference center. It got its name because of the triple water shed divide for all South Korea—the Han River, Nak Dong River are very close to that. And on the east you’ve got the east coast water shed. The symbolism is very good for that. And the motto is: “As the waters flow from this land to the oceans and to the world, may the Word of God go from here.” The land was leased from the forestry department and a few years before it passed a special law because of the economic difficulties in the area. So they approached the Abbey and said, “We will let you buy a portion of this land that you have been leasing for raising animals like sheep and cattle all this time to build a conference center.” This was an answered prayer for my father. It’s a beautiful piece of land way up on top, 150 acres, way on top of the mountain, gorgeous view. It would be a wonderful place to have a camp site or a youth center. Then this happened and made it possible. So we started that process. But there is a tremendous amount of red tape to get the permits. So that process kind of bogged down and with my father’s injury, looked like it was coming to a halt. I was an administrator at a school and an associate pastor of a church in the states. I didn’t think I had a calling to come to Korea. I couldn’t go unless I had a calling. I wasn’t going to just follow what my father did. I had to do what God wanted me to do.

EN: What did God speak to you?
Ben: This is what the Lord gave me: North Korea is going to open soon and we’re not ready. People will want to flood into North Korea taking the Bible and preaching the Gospel, but they’ll end up doing more harm than good because they think they understand North Korea but they don’t—primarily South Koreans. But it would be true for anybody—Korean-Americans, Americans, Caucasians, whatever—not knowing anything about North Korea. People aren’t informed about their history, what’s happened over the years, the separation over the line. So much has changed. Their culture is totally different and their psychology is different.

EN: How do Christians prepare for the opening of North Korea?
Ben: In order to be ready for that, we need to understand North Korea because what we know about North Korea is just a scratch on the surface. We need to understand deeper. We need to train people and build teams. As these ideas crystallized and matured, my wife and I came to the conclusion that I really was supposed to take responsibility for the center.

EN: Could you explain the Fourth River Project?
Ben: The Fourth River Project serves as an umbrella network all over the world to pull together people who have knowledge of North Korea so that these people can interact, share with each other, encourage people to do research–particularly in graduate schools and research institutions on North Korea so we can learn everything we can and then begin to develop the training material. So, eventually when the center is built it will become the home of the Fourth River Project.

EN: When you developed this heart for North Korea, what was God showing you personally?
Ben: I realized that God was using all the experience I had in the past, which included a lot of training in comparative cultures—particularly in the business world. I’ve done a lot of work with multi-national corporations and how people from different countries work together in teams. And having a cross-cultural, bi-cultural childhood with a strong sense of different cultures and how they interact. All of these things molded for The Fourth River Project and I had assets that no one else had. As we were going along and I was connecting with schools getting across this message that we need to research and learn as much as we can, trying to build a center kept bogging us down. I was starting to research on the Web and I came across NK missions. And I sent them an email about what I was doing and I was able to connect with others who had the same vision as the one God had placed on my heart.

EN: Were there any challenges you faced while developing the Fourth River Project?
Ben: In the spring of 2004 and I didn’t know where to go, what step to take next, and nothing was happening in Korea with the center and some people who we thought would help out weren’t interested anymore. I was just at a loss.

EN: What did you do at that point?
Ben: I felt like the Lord was telling me to get people to pray for North Korea. So, I said, “All right, I’ll organize a prayer event for North Korea in Connecticut.” I got a few friends and there was a Korean church that I had come in contact with so I got them involved in the event and I got together with some Korean pastors. So, we started planning this and a close friend of mine from our church said, “You know, it would be really neat if we could get a North Korean refugee to come and speak.” And I thought, “Yeah, that would be really great but where are we going to find one?” But he said, “No, seriously, let’s pray about it.” So we prayed.

EN: Was your prayer answered?
Ben:The following week I spoke at the Connecticut Korean Pastors Association and one of the pastors came up to me and said, “There’s a professor from North Korea who attends my church in New Haven.” This pastor introduced me to Professor Hyun Sik Kim and his wife. They were very suspicious of me at first. But Mrs. Kim had read my father’s books and so that was very interesting to her. I knew nothing about them, but as I started to share the vision and burden I had they got more and more excited and then they started to share the vision and burden that they had and it was exactly the same—the need for people to prepare and to get the message across, particularly to Koreans that North Korea is not the same as South Korea.

EN: What message is that?
Ben: North Korea and South Korea don’t speak the same language. The culture is different. And in order to evangelize in North Korea you have to come with a new knowledge and a new approach. We need to share the little knowledge that we have. In some ways it’ll be easier for second generation Korean-Americans because they’re more American in their culture. Professor Kim even pointed out that culture in North Korea is similar to American culture than South Korean culture. For instance, North Koreans are blunt–they say what they think, the way Americans will. They don’t beat around the bush. Whereas in South Korea you can’t talk that way, you need to work around the edges.

EN: What has been happening in North Korea?
Ben: More recently, in the last 3 years they started a new industrial zone in Ke-sung. Ke-sung is just across the DMZ. It’s below the 38^th parallel. Before the Korean War it was part of South Korea. It’s a big city. A major city. And they’ve been developing that as a free trade zone for South Korean companies to set up there. All the construction work is being done by South Korean companies. They put a highway through the DMZ for the first time. It opened [in 2004]. The South Korean businesses will be employing North Korean workers. South Korean businesses send a lot of work to China because Chinese labor is cheaper than South Korean labor. The attraction is that it’ll be even cheaper labor in North Korea than in China. Right now, whatever is manufactured in North Korea can’t be sold in the states but people are trying to work to get those laws changed. It’ll probably happen.

EN: What a great opportunity for Christians to go into North Korea.
Ben: Yeah, Ke-sung is developing and it’s a wonderful opportunity for Christians who are employed in these Korean companies. This is precisely the vision that God gave me—that people who share the Gospel are not going to be missionaries and preachers, they are going to be people doing their jobs, who have a sense of their work as exactly that. That’s a major aspect of what we’re trying to communicate at the Three Seas Center over time.

EN: Christians need to be well-prepared in order to go into North Korea.
Ben: There’s going to be a collapse, an economic collapse, a political collapse and I don’t know when and how it’s going to come. If Christians are ready, we will be invited to go in and help them re-write their laws and help them establish biblically-based economics, family structures, and social structures and ultimately build a Christian nation. If we’re not ready, it’ll be the United Nations and other people going in.

EN: Do you think other religious groups are getting ready to go in?
Ben: The Moonies are in there. They basically paid their way in. They built a huge automobile plant there. Others are ready. This is why we need to be ready to get in and move fast. We need to move in a big way with people ready to demonstrate Christ’s love, not people who are coming in to build buildings and to start seminaries—but to demonstrate Christianity. But we also need to realize that we need to be ready to move and to move fast and that means mobilizing thousands of people all over South Korea and of course in the U.S. and elsewhere as well. If we fail to be prepared, then we must be prepared to fail.

Posted: May 23, 2007
*This interview first appeared in Encounter Monthly Journal, February 2006 [This interview has been revised]