SEOUL – Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American currently being detained by the North Korean government, is a trained missionary who was using his China-based tour company as a platform to bring missionaries into North Korea, NK News can confirm.

Bae was initially sent to China by the evangelical missionary organization “Youth With a Mission” (YWAM) in 2006, according to a post on the website of a Korean Presbyterian Church in St. Louis that supports his mission in China.

“I knew that Jesus wanted me to be a ‘channel’ to the North,” Bae said during a sermon he delivered to a Korean