27th October, 2005

DAVID ADAMS

The arrest and imprisonment of Christian leaders. The burning of houses where they meet. The confiscation of Bibles and other books. Beatings, fines and secrecy.

Such is the life of underground church members in Vietnam today, a country of more than 83 million people which has been under Communist rule since the end of the Vietnam War 30 years ago.

Kim Anh and her husband Anthony* are missionaries working undercover for mission organisation Asian Outreach in Vietnam.

MEETING WITH GOD: One of the many house churches that are forced to meet in secrecy across the country. “The Vietnamese people are hungry for the Gospel,” says missionary Kim Anh. “They have been living in a spiritual vacuum for over 25 years and are disillusioned with the lack of progress the country has made. The harvest is ripe but there is still a great lack of labourers to go to the people.”

Anh says that while the re-election of US president George Bush last year made a positive impact on religious freedoms with the subsequent release earlier this year of all people imprisoned for their belief - including Christian leaders and Buddhist monks - the situation for Christians in Vietnam remains tough.

“Raids are constantly made on house churches,” she says. “The leader of the meeting and the house owner are typically invited to the police station for interviews (and) the ID card details are taken of all present...Bibles and Christian books or materials are confiscated. Much persuasion is used on the house owner to stop the meetings. Christian students can be expelled from school for witnessing to their friends or denied places in schools.”

One church leader has estimated that as many as 90 per cent of church pastors have been arrested for preaching the Gospel and says tribal people have been "kicked out" of their own lands for being believers.

Even the government-registered “open churches” have their activities severely restricted with bans on planting or building new churches and evangelising.

It’s estimated that there are around 100,000 people who form part of house church networks which borrow official church buildings for meetings or meet in private homes.

“The Vietnamese people are hungry for the Gospel,” says Anh. “They have been living in a spiritual vacuum for over 25 years and are disillusioned with the lack of progress the country has made. The harvest is ripe but there is still a great lack of labourers to go to the people.”

Anh says that more and more Bibles are being brought into and printed in Vietnam.

“The Vietnamese are avid readers so the production of Christian literature is a target area.”

Kim Anh joined Asian Outreach immediately after completing Bible college. She had known that the Lord was calling her to mission but says she didn’t know where until the missions director at the college suggested Vietnam.

“I just knew he was right,” she says.

In 1992, she travelled into Vietnam with teams carrying much sought-after Bibles.

“Although the Bible itself is not an illegal book, the authorities control the printing and the distribution of Bibles...” she says. “Many times when we delivered the Bibles to Christians they were received with tears of joy.”

In 1995, the mission decided to plant a team in Vietname and together with three other adults and three children, Kim Anh moved to Ho Chi Minh city.

“Our role was to find out the needs of the church and to work together with the local church to meet those needs,” Anh says.

Welcomed by the church, they quickly found the great cry was for discipleship materials and training and in subsequent years that was expanded into five main areas: training pastors and church planters, launching church planters to establish new churches, providing Bibles and literature, social and relief work and leadership development.

There were set-backs. After only 10 months in Ho Chi Minh, Anh says her team fell apart and she was left behind as the other team members withdrew.

“The pressures of missionary life in Vietnam were enormous and most mission organisations lost their first teams and up to three or four teams,” she notes.

But Vietnam was to hold another surprise for Kim Anh. The man who was to become her husband - Anthony - was at the time one of the senior pastors in a large underground church network - which today as 400 house churches throughout the country.

When her mission team collapsed, he was released from his pastoral dutures and started working alongside her for Asian Outreach.

“He had a missions call upon his life from a young teenager but there was no training for missionaries so he was trained as a pastor,” Anh explains. “But throughout his ministry life God always led him into mission opportunities in Vietnam even during the years that Vietnam was strictly closed.”

Their focus now is on church planting and raising leadership among Christians. This involves organising mobile training for church planters, printing literature through official channels and organising seminars for leaders. They also administer micro-loans for small businesses and agricultural ventures, dig wells, build schools, support ministries to reach street children and raise student scholarships, all the while working closely with local churches and networking with other missionaries and mission agencies.

Anh says that while life in Vietnam’s cities is improving with educated people able to earn between $US300-$US400 a month in Ho Chi Minh, in the north of the country “poverty is more evident and the people desperate and aggressive in their dealings”.

“The people work hard with very little reward,” she says. “Education in the north is still very low (and) there is a large gap between the few who have received higher education overseas and the masses who have only reached grades five to seven.”

Life, says Anh, is even tougher in the tribal-dominated highlands.

“The food is poor quality and sparse,” she says. “The people are prone to illness and fear sudden death. There continues to be a great need for a pure water supply with building wells, building schools and toilet amenities.”

While there is a sense of economic optimism in the country, Anh says there remains an “underlying sense of hopelessness, particularly among young people”.

“How to get ahead in a society that views development as a political threat?” she asks. “The great dream is to study or emigrate abroad and find a better life.”

* Kim Anh and Anthony’s names have been changed to protect their identities.

www.asianoutreach.org