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Vietnam: Good Opportunity for Ministry
VIETNAM (November 17, 2000) - For one man, it was a coming home of sorts. For another, it was a dream come true.
Two Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) administrators, Jim Gustafson and Art Greco, recently took a trip to Vietnam through the invitation of the internationally known organization World Concern. Each came away with a great respect for the culture and a dream of some day reaching people for Christ in that country.
The son of missionaries to Laos, Gustafson spent most of his childhood in Asia. He went to school in Dalat, Vietnam, with other missionary kids from Southeast Asia until his family returned to the United States in the early 1960s. Now, as executive director of the Department of World Mission, Gustafson believes development projects can serve as a means for sowing seeds for Christ, just as development projects have influenced nearby Thailand and Laos.
"It goes beyond the personal," Gustafson said. "To me, it's organizational. We're in Thailand and we're also in Laos. That area is a place that is central to the culture, a southeastern area near Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, which is where God created man (in that culture's Genesis story). It is a culturally significant area and we could easily make inroads with Vietnam through agriculture," he continued.
"World Concern approached me a couple of years ago and said they were in Vietnam and working with Laos," Gustafson recalled. "They were registered with the government, and so we worked with them through one of our Thai foundations. World Concern wanted to show us what they were doing and invited us into Vietnam. He wanted to show us what could be possible through our partnership and I thought that was great - it was a very significant linkage."
Gustafson said another entity, an agricultural development organization/Issaan Development Foundation, will be moving its operations close to where ECC and World Concern ties already exist. The strong connections with already established entities give Gustafson hope that practical projects in Vietnam can help the country and impact the spirituality of individual lives as well.
"As a non-government organization, you get permission by asking the government to be there as a non-government organization," Gustafson said. "They know that it's a Christian organization, but a non-evangelistic organization doing development work and caring for holistic needs. What happens is that personal linkages develop with people and you find that ministry and mission go hand in hand with meeting people's needs. I found the people in Vietnam to be amazingly free and open. They're more social than any group I've seen in Asia and I felt no resistance, no hardness. They were very open to development work of all kinds."
Greco didn't grow up in Vietnam, but a mentor in ministry, Do Van Nguyen, was a significant religious figure there. In 1972, Pastor Do helped establish a relief organization that provided food, housing and medical help to 100,000 refugees, eventually being decorated by President Richard Nixon for his efforts. He died in 1990 after pastoring the Vietnamese Evangelical Covenant Church in Beaverton, Oregon.
Greco's dream of visiting Vietnam began 12 years ago – he nearly traveled there in 1997. "I still love Pastor Do," said Greco who serves as director of evangelism and prayer in the Department of Church Growth and Evangelism. "However, my interest in Vietnam is no longer primarily about wanting to say thank you to a friend by doing something for his people that he always talked about doing," Greco said. God has placed a desire within him to reach out to the Vietnamese people, "and it feels good to be addressing it," Greco said.
"We want to make a long-term investment in people," Greco said. "And we can do it because the Covenant definitely has a strong name in mission because of the development work we've done in the past. We're highly respected."
Leadership training is the biggest need for Christian groups in Vietnam, both men agree. The ECC has aided certain ministry areas such as Magadan, Russia, by sending ECC pastors and professors from North Park Theological Seminary to teach short courses to help educate leaders. Gustafson believes that kind of training approach can be used to train leaders in Vietnam, which has few institutions. "To develop non-institutional grassroots leadership programs is really important," Gustafson said.
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