From left: Students / Angkor Wat / Businesses in Battambang / Stupa at Choeung Ek Genocidal Center near Phnom Penh
My first trip to Southeast Asia was not to Vietnam, where I was later a pastor, but to Cambodia. It was a short mission trip that lasted two weeks. I went there to teach ministry students a class that counted toward their ordination.
Cambodia is a country that has long fascinated me. I once did a term paper on the communist genocide in that country. In 1975-1979 the Khmer Rouge killed one million directly and another million indirectly.
At a certain point I found that a friend of mine, and his wife, were missionaries there. We had attended church together back in seminary days. They offered me an invitation to teach. I went (with the church I pastored paying for the trip out of extra mission funds).
I would be teaching the class at two sites in different parts of the country. Five days at one point, then go to the other site for another five days. We travelled in my friend’s pickup truck. A translator was arranged-for.
It was one of those great trips that ticked all the boxes. Doing ministry through teaching, seeing Angkor Wat, seeing other places off the beaten path…it was very meaningful.
At the first teaching place, which was in a home in a village, the class was upstairs. For lunch, we went downstairs and sat on the floor in circles with bowls of rice and fish. A village dog would come wandering through. One day a drunken man came in and sat down with us.
I loved it. I wanted a real experience of the country and this was it.
At the other site, they had tables and chairs but served some foods that I definitely did not want to eat. I discretely skipped over that food, but seeing the things they ate was still part of the experience.
But the best part was the students, most of whom were very poor (I heard that some of them earned $60 a month as rice farmers). Still, they were eager to become preachers of the gospel and were already hosting church groups in their homes.
And, of course, there was the sobering part of the trip. I wanted to see some of the sites related to what the country went through under the Khmer Rouge. We went out to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. It was only one of many killing fields throughout the country. It had a prominent stupa (Buddhist shrine) which was a tower that housed thousands of skulls and other bones from the victims.
Later we went to the Tuol Sleng prison. It was right in the middle of Phnom Penh. It was a school that had been converted into a torture prison, mainly for extracting confessions from fellow communists suspected of disloyalty. I thought “The devil eats his own.”
The country had been so brutalized that someone said it suffers from collective PTSD. I believe it.
On a later trip, Alice and our two youngest sons were with me. I asked them if they were willing to see the genocide sites. They were. I wanted my sons to see the evils that mankind was capable of. It has been estimated that communism has been responsible for 100 million deaths when you add up the killings of Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Pol Pot, and others.
There are other things that keep the country down. There is the continuing influence of communist China which seems to view Cambodia as easy pickings to exploit.
There is also Cambodia’s own corrupt government. It had a longtime prime minister who was essentially a dictator. He kept arranging for elections to go his way. After his most recent ‘election’, he turned the job over to his son.
There is also a spiritual oppression–the folk religion that keeps people in fear. On the surface it looks like Buddhism, but it is really about trying to appease territorial spirits. The country is full of altars to appease these spirits.
Cambodia, perhaps more than any other country, has been damaged by events of past and present.
How best to help it?
Charity has poured in from all over the world. Churches and schools are built with funds sent in from foreign countries. There are many NGOs (non-governmental organizations) there.
But for all this outside help, I believe the real answer is to develop from within spiritually.
I believe the most hopeful thing is the spreading of the gospel. That seed that had been planted, mainly among the very poor, is the seed that will defeat evil. As the seed grows, freeing people from spiritual bondage and a debilitating past, there is hope.
Now it might seem paternalistic and condescending for an American to think this way about a Southeast Asian country. But I really do believe in the power of the gospel to succeed where mere charity or where UN programs fall short. Romans 1:16 says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes…” The benefit starts with the spiritual, which is the most important thing, and then goes on from there.
This is not just for Cambodia, but for wealthier and more developed countries like America. We have our own great needs and faults and don’t recognize them. The answer will not come from programs, or government spending, or scientific advancement. The worst human problems are not solved through those things. The gospel has the power, and it is made available to whosoever is willing to receive it.