Exclusive stories from the mission field
Within four days of local missionaries broadcasting the gospel on Facebook live, between 4,000 and 5,000 people responded to the messages. One listener who was equipped to plant three house churches met with local missionaries for spiritual support and supplies, including Bibles, hymnbooks and radios for listening to the ministry’s gospel broadcasts.
The headman of a village in Laos summoned a local missionary to his office. “I heard that you are speaking to people in the village, and you are talking about Jesus, and now people told me that some of them are interested,” the headman told him. The local missionary, pastor of a house church, showed the headman a government booklet stating that Christianity was one of the officially accepted faiths in the country.
When two or three families put their faith in Christ, initially they worship at a local missionary’s church in a nearby village until some can be trained to lead church services at a home in their own community. This can lead to persecution by relatives, neighbors and officials in their own villages, but Christians have refused to renounce their faith.
With about 1,700 people getting baptized and 16 house churches forming over the course of six months, follow-up teaching was crucial. Native missionaries gave trainings to encourage new Christians in their faith and deepen their understanding of basic principles and practices.
A couple put their faith in Christ, and soon the husband was miraculously healed of a serious illness that neither medical doctors nor witchdoctors had been able to cure.
Accompanied by police and soldiers, a district official in Laos told Christians in a tribal village that those who refused to renounce Christ would be imprisoned. He was angry that they had refused to heed a prior warning to quit worshiping Christ. “Christianity is a western religion – it cannot be practiced in our country,” he told them. “I will give you one more chance to renounce Christ. If anyone still wants to believe in God, then just raise your hand.”
Police in Laos recently summoned the residents of six villages to make this announcement: “Since Christianity is a Western religion, any child under the age of 17 is not allowed to believe in Jesus.” “They later made a threat,” a native ministry leader said, “that if they found any Christians gathered in groups of five people or more, they would be nailed by their hands and feet, and then shot to death.”
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.
A 100-year-old church leader has long attended a local ministry’s training seminars, where he has encouraged others with his faithfulness in the face of persecution. “He has endured so much in his walk with the Lord, to the point that he was imprisoned eight times for his faith,” the native ministry leader said.
