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Christian Groups Press Bush About North Korea
...Some in Midland prefer to say Mr. Bush naturally shares their view of the world.

"God has put a man in office who has a heart for the nations, and for the pain and suffering that is happening all over the world," Ms. Younger said near a "sponsor's tent" as she recalled a talk with Mr. Bush about Mr. Kang's book when she visited the White House early last month.

Because the president's "hands are tied" at times, she added, "we are his arms reaching out to the nations."

To help press the human rights case, Ms. Fikes and a delegation from Midland traveled to Seoul in June, where they met the leaders of both major South Korean parties, they said, and invited several ministers and human rights advocates back to Midland for the concert.

The festival was a showcase for their efforts. Before the music began on Saturday, Mr. Kang spoke to the crowd through a translator about his decade in a prison camp.

The daughter of a Korean-American missionary, the Rev. Phillip Jun Buck, said her father had been arrested in China for trying to help North Koreans. "I know that president Bush and his community cares for cases like my father," she said.

Later, the festival screened part of a documentary, "Seoul Train," about North Korean refugees. The protagonist, the Rev. Chun Ki Won, told the audience through a translator a secondhand account of a North Korean Christian whose fingers were cut off by authorities demanding the names of other believers.

It was such accounts of persecution - though in southern Sudan - that first moved the Midland Alliance, once a strictly local group, to take an interest in foreign affairs. Ms. Fikes invited a group of refugees to address the 2002 Rock the Desert festival, where they worked with a Christian group for troubled teenagers to build a copy of a Sudanese village. They burned part of it in a mock raid to demonstrate the refugees' plight.

Soon after, Ms. Fikes, a former schoolteacher, decided to advertise on the alliance letterhead that Midland was Mr. Bush's hometown. She learned that foreign embassies were suddenly quick to respond.

Before long, she was traveling monthly to Washington and entertaining the Sudanese ambassador at her house. In the months leading up to the January peace agreement that ended the civil war there, Ms. Fikes and her group held private talks with both sides.

Her husband, an oil entrepreneur, pays for her travel.

"The Midland Alliance has had a major impact in the Sudan," Gen. Lazaro Sumbeiywo, a Kenyan who helped mediate the peace, wrote last week in an e-mail message.

"I believe the saying that 'the closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat' is quite effective," General Sumbeiywo said. "It has therefore made a major difference - a positive one - to have their letterhead identified as the home of President Bush."...