The goal: in four days cover 1,200 kilometers (about 750 miles) of rugged, rural terrain during Cambodia's rainy season to visit new work areas not easily accessible by car.
The goal: in four days cover 1,200 kilometers (about 750 miles) of rugged, rural terrain during Cambodia’s rainy season to visit new work areas not easily accessible by car. The solution: for Mike Ryan and three companions, it involved riding 250cc Honda motorcycles to reach the locations.
Mud spattered and sometimes engulfed the vehicles; wooden bridges sometimes lacked a complete covering across a river; and encountering potholes became second nature to the gentlemen who were investigating the success of a project aimed at sharing the gospel in this southeast Asian nation.
“If you tried to drive a car to these places, you wouldn’t make it,” says Ryan, director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Global Mission office. But, he adds, the trip was worth the effort, even with the challenges involved.
Six weeks before Ryan’s September visit, 140 Digital Video Disc, or DVD, players were given to lay church planters and Bible workers in Phnom Penh and elsewhere in the country. The players would be used to present a Khmer translation of the “Jesus” film, which tells the life of Christ, as well as “New Beginnings,” an evangelistic DVD lecture series. Those receiving the players had to find locations in which to hold the meetings and, more importantly, find televisions on which the images could be displayed.
The Cambodian capital city, for many years closed to Christian ministry, now boasts an Adventist membership of approximately 1,000 people. But the new DVD series has attracted 751 people to Bible studies there, Ryan says, and by the time a public evangelistic meeting is launched in Cambodia next year, expectations are that more people will be involved in Bible studies than there are currently church members in the city.
Forty percent of the workers who are giving Bible studies have been Seventh-day Adventists for less than eight months. They were baptized during a series of evangelistic meetings held by world church president Jan Paulsen in January.
Some of these new members have made massive career shifts: a woman, popular in her neighborhood for selling cooked noodles, and who knew people at every level of society, is now leading 55 people in Bible studies, offering the “bread of life” to those she once sold food. She expects to establish a new church from this group, Ryan says.
Along with Phnom Penh, Ryan says that efforts to reach people in the nation’s rural areas are paying off. In communities where there is not much to do in the evening, the novelty of a DVD presentation is often enough to draw crowds.
In one rural area, Ryan notes, an evangelist secured a permit for local meetings, and then found a homeowner willing to share his large screen television. The result was 27 people in attendance on the opening night. Seven nights later—following nightly meetings—attendance had grown to 40 persons.
Ryan reports that in another town the enterprising local church planter set up a television at a main intersection. Crowds of up to 300 gather each night, and vendors—too busy selling snacks during the meetings—are completing their study guides after the event.
The evangelistic series are the result of efforts involving Global Mission, Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries (ASI), and the It Is Written media ministry in California. While Global Mission finds and equips the pioneers, ASI donated the DVD players and materials, including the “New Beginnings” series created by It Is Written. “This is just in its infant stages,” Ryan says of the outreach, which is seeing an average attendance of 40 to 50 people in the meetings. More are planned, culminating in the 2004 event, which will be part of the Adventist Church’s “Year of Evangelism.”
