Hello! My team has been in Cambodia for a little over two months now, and to be honest I didn’t think I would like Cambodia at all. It was the country I was the least excited for, but now I am pretty much a local. I know my way around Kampong Thom, I can spot a tourist from a mile away, I know exactly when to plug my nose at the market and I am starting to crave Cambodian food more than Western food (honestly all I want right now is rice with bean sprouts and tofu). I have loved Cambodia way more than I ever expected to.
My team has been living in Kampong Thom which is one of the 25 provinces in Cambodia. We have been living with our host Sok Eng and his incredibly cute family. His wife, Khema, is the absolute sweetest, one day she came home with a live owl she bought so that it wouldn’t be eaten. They have two kids, Omnor (3) and Harati (16 months), who are the most precious kids ever (when they aren’t screaming or crying). Living with them has been quite the adventure.
Sok Eng started his ministry Mission Development in Cambodia a few months ago, so it is still in the beginning stages. We have been helping out his ministry by teaching English in the community and getting involved with two of the local churches.
In the mornings I teach at a local private school called Clever Child, pretty much all the teachers there attend one of the two churches we have been working with! In the afternoons I help Sok Eng with fundraising things for his ministry and in the evenings I teach an English class to middle school boys at Kampong Thom Baptist (nicknamed KTB, but I’m also sure I’m the only one that calls it that). On the weekends we help teach youth group at KTB, and attend service on Sunday so I am literally at KTB every day. It is a pretty small church with only a handful of families that are regular attendees, and most of those families are at the church everyday too.
In the states I go to a pretty big church (drastically different than my church here), on any given weekend you could slip into service after it has started and leave before it ends and no one would notice, you can easily avoid engaging in church and neglect to be an active member of the community. That just doesn’t happen here, everyone is constantly at the church, doing life together. Everyone shows up an hour early to church to have coffee and talk with each other. Seriously, tell me the last time you intentionally showed up to church early in order to invest in the lives of those around you?
First Corinthians 12:25-26 says “That there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” the church is meant to live in community and be involved with each other. A group of people listening to the same message in the same room is not the definition of an active church.
In America it is so easy to be a passive member of the church, here in Cambodia Christianity is not the norm. Pretty much everyone is a Buddhist and to be a Christian completely goes against the culture here. The church has to completely lean on each other because in choosing to follow Christ they separate themselves from their friends, family and culture. There are no causal Christians here, everyone is all in. America could definitely take some cues from the Cambodian church.
