March 2024

Below is an article by Matt Schwan, who came with us on a trip to Taiwan, Cambodia and Vietnam. He wrote this article for his church, Living Water in Dalton, OH, about his experience:

Early this month, I returned from a mission trip to East Asia with Go Forth Ministry, an outreach organization based in Dalton. Six of us, including our own Bradie Ramella, spent two weeks visiting Taiwan, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Our purpose: to bring the Word of God to a people group forbidden from reading it. 

You may remember Khoa Dinh, one of the missionaries Living Water supports (and the beneficiary of our 2022 Christmas Give). Brother Khoa's ministry in Taiwan plants churches targeting Vietnamese migrant workers, disproportionately twentysomething men who move to Taiwan for a few years to work. As they find Jesus in Taiwan through Brother Khoa's ministry, they eventually return home to Vietnam and—cautiously—share the gospel with their families and friends. (Vietnam's communist government is not exactly keen on freedom of religion.) 

We visited three of these churches in Taiwan and were incredibly blessed by the strength of our Vietnamese brothers' and sisters' faith and passion for God. When our trip's leader, Jaren, preached a sermon through an interpreter to this small, literally upper-room gathering, a young man came forward to receive Christ for the first time—and was quickly smothered with hugs and applause. 

From there, we flew to Cambodia and then to Vietnam, bringing with us some illegal contraband: 188 Bibles. While we had prepared for a number of scenarios if caught, the customs agent at the airport—praise God—never once looked up from his phone as we casually walked through the "Nothing to Declare" lane. Once in Vietnam, we handed the Bibles off to our contacts for discreet distribution. 

The Bibles we smuggled in are printed in the language of the Hmong, an indigenous ethnic group dispersed throughout East Asia whose language is one of over 150 spoken in Vietnam alone. Missionaries in the 1950s created Hmong's written language, and I was floored to learn that today, a reliable predictor of whether or not a Hmong person is a Christian is whether or not they can read. 

As our brothers and sisters in Vietnam risk life and liberty to speak the name of Jesus to the Hmong people, the gospel is doing what it always does: raising literacy, releasing from poverty, healing the sick. 

And, I pray, it will also set the captives free. Our last day in Vietnam, in downtown Saigon, I stood with our Vietnamese contact in front of prominent statue of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's founding communist dictator. Our contact leaned over and said to me, quietly, "One day we will tear down that statue, just like the statues of Lenin."

I replied, "That will be a good day." 

"I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." - Jesus (Matthew 16:18b)