I did not come to Cambodia to be a missionary.
I came to teach English. I stayed because a man named Dara, who had survived the Khmer Rouge as a seven-year-old child, asked me to help him understand why Christians believe what they believe. He had seen plenty of foreign religion come and go. He wanted to know if this one was different.
Twelve years later, Dara leads a church of two hundred people in Siem Reap. He has planted three daughter churches. He trains other Cambodian pastors in his spare time, with his own money, with extraordinary generosity and almost no recognition.
My role is to equip people like Dara.
The leadership institute trains Cambodian men and women — most of them from provinces where the church is young, fragile, and often led by people with enormous faith and almost no theological grounding. We meet for intensive two-week modules, then spread out across the country and continue by phone, by motorcycle, by whatever means of connection the terrain allows.
One hundred and twenty graduates in six years. Fourteen provinces.
I am one person. Fourteen provinces is not something one person can reach. But Dara can reach his province. His students can reach theirs. And so the gospel moves the way it was always designed to move — not through foreign specialists, but through ordinary people who know the language, know the land, know the people, and are willing to go.
I think about that a lot. About how little I actually do, and how much God does through it.
It is, honestly, the most humbling thing I have ever been part of.