Bibles for Laos

20 June 2010

Dear Phyllis,

I’m on the road again. Much to my surprise I am back in Vientiane, Laos today. I had only been home a few days when Mark asked me if I would go back to Laos on a trip for him. We planned for me to leave Chiang Mai Friday night but then the date got move up so I was on a bus headed east a week after I had just gotten off the bus coming back from Laos. But this is a great privilege. What I am doing now is a tremendous honor that the Lord has extended to me. If some one had told me thirty years ago what I am doing today, it would have seemed like an unimaginable dream.

In the Lord’s work, in this part of the world, there are four parts of God’s Chain of Life working together to see hundreds of thousands saved, and the Lord’s Kingdom extended. The first link of this chain are those who give money to finance what is happening here. Most of these funds come from the churches in America. The next link is Bible printing. Most of this is done by New Life League in Japan. The next chain link is logistics – those who actually carry the Bibles to where they are needed. This is the aspect that I am engaged in. The last members of God’s team are really the heart and soul of the work – those on the field who are actually preaching the Gospel and seeing souls won to Christ on a daily basis. These come one soul at a time. If there wasn’t a living church in these countries reproducing themselves at a phenomenal rate, everything else would be pointless. These are the foot soldiers for Jesus. And this is something that every member of the Body of Christ should be engaged in everyday wherever they are living.

In America this chain of life is not necessary. Believers in western countries have plenty of money. Bibles are available anywhere. Publishers via with each other as a business venture publishing and selling millions of Bibles annually. It is big business. There is no need of a logistic chain. Book stores and mail-order are available any place in America. But that is not the case here in SEA (Southeast Asia). In many places, believers have no access to the Word of God unless someone carries it to them. It is an enormous privilege to be God’s postman in physically transporting the written Word to these people in desperate need.

Mark had met a man in Cambodia a couple of years ago who was connected with another man spreading the Gospel in Laos. There was a serious need of Bibles in Laos and Bural had contacted Mark concerning the possibility of sending Bibles in there. Mark asked me if I would go to Vientiane to meet them and make arrangement for delivery.

After an all night bus trip from Chiang Mai to Udorn Thani I got to the Friendship Bridge connecting Thailand and Laos by mid morning, and crossed back into Laos. I checked in the guest house where I always stay and got a motor bike. The arrangement was for me to meet our man when he arrived at the airport. This seemed fairly easy. The international airport in Vientiane is quite small. I had never met Bural before but had seen a picture of him. I stood at the exit for arrival with a sign with his name written on it. Soon he came out. I recognized him by the picture of him and he spotted me standing there with the sign. That was the most critical part.

He introduced me to some other brethren who had come on the plane with him and his man in Laos. We made arrangements to meet at his hotel in an hour and then go somewhere for supper. There is a very fine Christian restaurant in Vientiane that is reasonably secure for talking business. Bural, John, and I went there to eat. What a historic night! I had heard reports of some of their ministry, but that was the first time I talked with them directly hearing of what the Lord is doing.

Roald Lidal had met Bural in Cambodia two years ago. I had heard of that meeting and the subsequent things that had happened, but it was hard for me to believe such reports. Bural confirmed that NLL had printed and sent in 200,000 Cambodian Bibles in the last two years, and he said they are all gone. That is astounding! The figures he told me of what is happening in Cambodia are astronomic. In our discussion I asked him if he knew some of the key men that I know in that country. He confirmed that he was working closely with all of them.

 He had cone up to Laos to talk with a Lao brother who has a large ministry here. The point of my trip was to make arrangements for sending in a good number of Lao Bibles. And I was stunned at the figures we were talking about that night. I had no idea that such things were happening in Laos. They told \me that they were seeing 10 to 15 new churches starting in Laos each month! That would be over 120 to 170 churches started in a year. That would be a huge number in China and unthinkable in Japan or America. I asked, “How many would there be in one church – 10 or 15?” He replied, “Oh no, there are something more like 50 or 60 in each church.” I find that difficult to believe but I do know they are serious about the number of Bibles they want us to deliver as soon as possible. If this is true that means there is church growth in Laos like I have never heard of. He said at the moment, in most places, they only have one Bible for every 10 believers to share. Of course it is impossible for one man to do all this. But that is still a remarkable accomplishment for any one house church group.

These statistics are astounding but the thing that is so miraculous is where this is happening. Roll the clock back 35 years ago, and in our wildest imagination there is no way we could have conceived what is happening there today. In 1975, both Cambodia and Laos looked as bleak as possible. The long extended Vietnam War had come to a close in the worse possible way. The horrible nightmare was over, and reality was worse than our fears. But that was only the beginning of sorrows. What happened in Cambodia was almost unprecedented national genocide. The C&MA denomination alone suffered 80% martyrdom. The Vietnamese came into Laos with thousands of Russian advisors and started a policy of ethnic cleansing by spraying yellow rain toxic chemicals on the villages in the north that had resisted the Vietnamese invasion. Hundreds of thousands of minority people fled Laos across the Mekong River to Thailand. Thousands were drowned trying to get out. The situation could not have looked darker.

In Laos a significant percentage of the population are minority hill tribe people. Among these various minority people the bottom group is the Khamu. The word Khamu means slave. They are treated as less than animals. But the Khamus are the most responsive people in the country. When the Gospel first came into Laos, it was the Khamu who were the first believers. Today the Khamus are the finest believers and are the most open hearted in sharing the Gospel cross culture. The other minority people tend to stay restricted within their own particular culture and seldom reach outside. But the Khamus are different.

The brother who was the basic purpose for my visit, John, is an amazing man. He is a Khamu pastor. His father was a Khamu pastor and he was raised in the church. When the communists took over Laos in the late 1970s, because of his intelligence and unusual grades in school, he was selected to be sent to Moscow to be trained as a pilot. I was shocked when he told me that. I asked, “Why did you go to Moscow?” He simply replied, “Because I was sent.” He had no choice in the matter. Amazingly, he was a helicopter pilot for four years and has 1,500 hours flying time. But then there was an investigation and he was found out to be a Christian. Apparently he didn’t have much of a testimony. When the authorities discovered that he was a Christian, he was faced with the choice of denying Christ or suffer the worse. At that time he chose to raise the flag for Jesus and take a strong stand. He went from being a helicopter pilot to serving a year in prison. But that was the beginning of his life. Today he is a major man of God and seeing huge numbers of Khamu and Lao come to Christ.

 

I asked Bural how they got together. He told me that he was interested in doing dendo (missions) in Laos but knew no one. He was in Vientiane a few years ago and had a dream. In his dream he saw a building with a cross on it. The next morning he set out to find that building. It was fairly close to where he was staying. But when he saw the building he was surprise to see that it was virtually demolished. It was just a shell. As he prayed, he decided to walk around the building and see if he could find some connection. He hadn’t gone far when a 12 year old boy came out of the house next door. It turned out they were Christians. While he was talking to the boy he saw a man walking across the street who smiled at him. That was how the Lord brought Bural and John together. Bural taught John his methods of church planting and amazing things began to happen. John asked Bural if he knew how he could get Lao Bibles. Through Roald Lidal, Bural knew of Mark and wrote him. It was in response to that request that Mark sent me here to set up delivery of the Bibles desperately needed.

 Isn’t Jesus amazing? The Lord saw the need here in Laos. He had raised up the funds through Christians in the states. He has NLL printing Bibles in Japan. Mark has some in Thailand with other outstanding men who will carry them in. And I came over to make arrangement for delivery. That is the Chain of Life. It is all because the Lord of the harvest, with His Body working together, is doing an unbelievable work in these countries that were utterly impossible 35 years ago.

What a privilege to be here. Praise God!!!

                                                                          bill