Exclusive stories from the mission field
“Because she was so desperate, she wanted to commit suicide by drinking insecticide,” a ministry leader said of a schoolteacher in Vietnam. She had a handsome young husband, was raising two young children and was in so much pain that she wanted to kill herself. “When holding the bottle of insecticide intending to drink it,” the leader said, “her two children were holding her and hugging her and crying.”
Pei, a widow in Laos, was secretly discipled at a local missionary’s church for five months before she developed the strength of faith to tell her daughter and son-in-law about her conversion. “After saying only a few words about Jesus, both her daughter and son-in-law immediately began to violently criticize her,” the local ministry leader said.
Family members of a woman in Laos who died earlier this year had let her waste away in poverty, refusing to care for her because of her faith. Workers for a local ministry arranged her burial, inviting villagers they had ministered to in various community and gospel outreaches.
The way a businesswoman in Laos drew people to Christ was the way the salvation message often spread in the first century: redeemed merchants and traders planting gospel seeds as they went about their everyday business.
The parents of Kimsan, a 15-year-old boy in Laos, gathered up all his belongings, stuffed them into a bag and threw it at his face.
Filled with sorrow that his wife had left him, a young man in Laos was walking through Buddhist temple grounds when he felt something like a small bird hit him in the chest.
A strange strength came over him, and relatives said that later he became violent and unable to communicate coherently.
His parents and other villagers were unable to calm or communicate with him; they built a cage and locked him inside.
Doing dangerous drugs with her boyfriend by night and earning a decent wage by day, Sarah dismissed a male friend’s talk of eternal life in Christ.
In their native Philippines, they were too busy climbing the economic ladder in their urban metropolis to pay much attention to ancient things.
Things changed, though, when Sarah ran into her friend – and the gospel – in a place that seemed like another planet.
In a Vietnamese village where everyone worships the gods, goddesses and spirits of their ancestors, the gospel seemed a rude intruder. When a young man found Christ in another village and brought it back to his family, the God of his salvation message seemed to them a foreign imposter.
Then the Holy Spirit began to stir their hearts.
A police officer in Burma (Myanmar), fired from the force after 10 years on duty due to a drug offense, was listening as a native ministry leader spoke of Christ at his prison.
The leader provided the inmates with food as well as spiritual nourishment, and the former policeman, Nyan, sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit.
As the ministry team left, the preacher had no way of knowing his impact on Nyan’s life.
Relatives hostile to Christian faith, flooded roads that damage motorcycles, government restrictions on travel – all can instill fear in both native missionaries and new Christians in Laos.
In one of the world’s last bastions of communism, a 2016 religion law known as Decree 315 threatens to cripple efforts to spread the gospel. Gathering together, holding worship services, traveling and planting churches where none existed require prior permission.
Native missionaries are confronting a new level of fear and intimidation.
