Cambodian challenge

Don Cormack, author of Killing Fields, Living Fields, describes to Peter Lewis what life was like before the Khmer Rouge seized control, and tells how the Cambodian church is now faring.

PL: Don, I'd like to start with you. What kind of home did you grow up in?

DC: I was born in August 1945 just as the Second World War was drawing to its conclusion. Six months earlier, my father, a young Scotsman, had been killed on the Dutch-German border. Among his few belongings sent back to my mother was his Bible, in which he had inscribed Joshua 1.9: 'Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.' It was all the advice I ever had from a father I never knew, so I have always tried to live by it. My mother remarried but my stepfather died tragically when I was three.

My first picture of Christ was my mother, always working so hard, sacrificing everything so that her son could escape the poverty.

My father's elder brother had emigrated to Canada years earlier, so when I finished school he encouraged me to 'seek my fortune' over there, which I did, leaving home at eighteen. It was here while at university that I was challenged by the ministry of IVCF. I was baptised in 1967 and drawn immediately towards the missionary movement.

University life during the 1960s was very turbulent. We had everything from Flower Power and Jesus Freaks to radical Marxism. One of the most zealous of these movements on campus was the Maoists with their 'little red books'.

I had no answers for their persistent questions and accusations so I began to inquire into Asian history and culture. I was introduced to OMF and went on to study at Ontario Theological Seminary. I later completed a Masters degree in theology at Regent College, Vancouver. In 1972, I was finally on my way to begin Mandarin study in Taiwan, but at the last moment was diverted for two years to Chefoo School, Malaysia, where a teacher was urgently needed.

When I finally did get to Taiwan in 1974, it was only for a few months. A 'Macedonian call' had come from Cambodia, from Taing Chhirc, the General Secretary of the Khmer Evangelical church, and I was one of a small team asked to go and help with the massive spiritual harvest taking place in the besieged city of Phnom Penh.

PL: When you arrived in Cambodia, what was the state of the church?

DC: We entered into a great harvest, a harvest for which we had not laboured. The church was fully mobilised and making Christ known with unbridled energy. We entered into an unprecedented spiritual awakening following years of near fruitless sowing with weeping.

PL: May I ask you to go a stage further back? Those decades of sowing are very striking, with the sheer painfulness of the growth of the Cambodian church. Tell us a little about that.

DC: From the outset, the tiny Christian community was dogged by persecution and setbacks. It was near constant 'open season' against the followers of Christ in Cambodia. Every decade saw a royal edict, a rebellion or foreign invasion, all hostile to the believers. Whatever the political trouble, the church was a useful scapegoat. They were different so they were an offence.

Hardest of all was the spiritual lethargy and unresponsiveness of the people. They were happy to add Jesus to the 'god shelf', but not to recognise him as Lord of all. In 1965, the church had again been suppressed by the government, who then saw it as part of some CIA plot. What emerged in 1970 was a severely whittled down 'Gideon-sized army' of about 300 Christians, ready for the momentous five years which followed, during which everything the Cambodian people had looked to for security and meaning began collapsing around them.

In the ensuing chaos and spiritual vacuum, the minds of many were concentrated on salvation and divine truths. The returning missionaries were also wiser, more prepared to let the church run its own affairs. From a despised people, the Christians quite suddenly found themselves to be a sought out people.

Preparing for the end

PL: I was surprised to discover that the evangelical church in Cambodia did not begin until the 1920s. I had no idea the church there was so young.

DC: Yes, it took 19 centuries for the gospel to reach Cambodia, a perfectly accessible country.

PL: Possibly the most haunting part of your book is the part describing the events leading up to the fall of Phnom Penh.

DC: Try to imagine yourself in a besieged city, hot, noisy, packed with people, rockets raining down, the constant sound of shelling on the defence perimeter. Everywhere there was a profound crisis of salvation. Everyone was preparing for the end in the only way he or she knew how: in dissipation, in accumulating wealth, in violence and deceit, in flight, in carefree abandon and denial and, for the people of God, in self-forgetful service to their stricken countrymen: their gaze fixed heavenward, beyond vanity.

PL: I have a picture in my mind of the Bible college students pedalling furiously through the crowded streets, teaching, preaching, praying, exhorting, in constant motion, and across the river the glow of enemy fire, and hundreds being baptised in the river. It's an unforgettable scene.

DC: I saw two images juxtaposed together in a surreal portrait of love. On the nearer shore: reconciliation, peace, hymns of praise, scores passing through the waters of baptism. On the further shore: the war, fire and destruction, beneath a shroud of drifting black smoke. And between the two, holding them poised in exquisite tension, the ancient river, silent and long-suffering, flowing steadily southwards towards the sea. The city of man and the City of God - killing fields and living fields together, bearing eloquent testimony to the love of self and the love of God.

Regrets and camps

PL: And then you had to leave, and there you were on that plane circling the doomed city. Can you describe how you felt, especially when news began to emerge of the terrible suffering in Cambodia?

DC: The night when no man can work had come to Cambodia. I was regretting all the wasted time, my foolishness, and now that it was all over I was grieved that I hadn't 'given him more'. If only I had lived and prayed every day in Cambodia the way I did on my last day.

I remember Taing Chhirc coming to see us and weeping together with him. Our flight had brought home to him that he was entering his 'Gethsemane'. Soon he would be killed. There must have been so many things pressing on his mind, but the gracious Asian host he was, he came and saw us to the airport where we had to await the rescue plane. What a lonely journey it must have been for him back to the stricken city. And then there was Setha, to whom the book is dedicated. He had spent the entire last night recording my language book for me. 'You must learn our language so that you tell us the gospel,' he had said. It was bizarre. The country was falling, I was fleeing, and he was about to perish on 'the killing fields'.

These were the thoughts and memories which tormented my mind in those days. After some months on the Thai-Cambodian border, I returned to England to continue Cambodian studies at SOAS. In 1976, I returned to the Cambodian border camps for a further five years.

PL: What was the situation when you returned to the Cambodian border?

DC: Between 1975 and 1979, refugees were fleeing to Thailand from all the countries of Indo-China which had fallen under the shadow of Communism. Among them were thousands of Cambodians. We helped provide food, shelter, medicine and spiritual comfort.

Small churches emerged in all these camps as the refugees, many having already heard and seen testimony to the Living God in Cambodia, confidently turned to him in faith. Following the dramatic overthrow of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, refugees, including the Khmer Rouge themselves, now poured across the border in their hundreds of thousands.

PL: As I read of the passing generation of great leaders, I wondered how could there be any hope for the future, with virtually no leadership remaining. Yet today we hear figures of 20,000 Christians and hundreds of churches across the country.

DC: While there is cause for rejoicing in the figures we are hearing, this is a church which has sprung up very quickly in the euphoria of the heady new political and social freedom since 1990. It has yet to be tested and tried. And if Cambodian church history is anything to go by, it probably soon will be.

Sadly, the church is very fragmented as many Christian agencies, as well as cults, have multiplied across Cambodia. The church was decapitated under the Khmer Rouge. The people of God are like sheep without a shepherd. They are drifting in a turbulent sea of rampant political corruption and instability.

The great growth industries are cigarettes, alcohol, sex, gambling and entertainment, and have transformed Phnom Penh into a tawdry 'vanity fair' with some very rich and irresponsible people dominating a vast underclass of physically and psychologically crippled survivors. The nation is a time bomb.

The church could become the new 'centre' - salt in the all-pervasive corruption, light in the gathering darkness, or it could become compromised, self-absorbed and irrelevant. This is why the right kind of missionaries are needed now to go in and proclaim the wisdom of the gospel before the folly of worldliness fills the present spiritual void.

With a few other groups in Cambodia, OMF is building up a fine international team of serious long-term workers.

PL: You mention a number of agencies in your book. But what can the churches of this country do to help young Cambodian Christian leaders and help with the vast needs of a nation in ruin?

DC: The opportunities are legion in the fields of education, medicine, engineering, agriculture, communications and so on. I cannot begin to describe the enormous social, physical and spiritual deprivation which exists in Cambodia.

We must dedicate our resources, the very best of our professionally and theologically trained and proven young people, our sacrificial tithes and offerings, our constant prayers, our wisdom and experience, our hearts and souls, to those proven and long-term endeavours which are committed to Cambodia for the building up of an authentically Cambodian church, mature in Christ through biblical discipleship and godly example.

Avoid all that is 'hit and run', mediocre, humanistic, inconsistent, triumphalistic, emotive and divisive to the family of God in Cambodia. Third rate for the 'Third World' is not the way of Jesus Christ.

This is an abridged version of an interview held on April 12 1997 at OMF's annual conference in Swanwick, Derbyshire.

Interview with Don Cormack concerning the recent history and present state of the church in Cambodia

Preparing for the end

Regrets and camps

Main Articles

Other articles