By: Dawn Araujo: dcaraujo@bsugmail.net
"Man on a Mission"
Word count: 1,982
Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. –Romans 12:11
Twenty-six-year old Aaron Bradley beams into the camera. He’s dressed up today: He’s on his first weekend excursion to the countryside. Instead of his usual California uniform of flip-flops, cargo shorts and faded tees, he’s sporting black slacks and a button-down. Next to him, a leathery-skinned Khmer man wearing an east-meets-west combo of krama and baseball cap tries the same. But his face expresses more curiosity than the joy of his companion. Bradley spotted the leathery man while traveling along a dirt road in the rural Preah Vihear province of Cambodia. He decided to stop and talk.
But Bradley does that.
“I love living, speaking and loving the unreached,” he says. By “unreached” he means the nearly 2.7 billion people worldwide he says have never heard of Jesus or Christianity. Spreading the gospel is Bradley’s passion. And he has a habit of talking to anyone who will listen.
Like the time Bradley began telling the cashier at a Denny’s about Jesus. Eventually, many of the waiters and waitresses gathered around to listen. Or the time Bradley used down time during a missed flight to preach the gospel to a stranger at his terminal. The man cried and said he felt touched by the Holy Spirit. Once, while working a garage sale, Bradley noticed a customer grabbing her back every time she bent over. He said he could sense she was a Christian and asked to pray for her back. “I was able to pray for her back and ask the Lord to graciously touch her back and heal it,” he wrote in his blog later that day. “We finished praying and she drove away. I look back and thank God for that woman—she glowed with the love of Jesus! I pray for God's continued touch on her back. What a blessing to pray and minister to her at my garage sale. Thank you, Jesus for that opportunity!”
In light of the intensity with which he throws himself into evangelizing, it’s hard to imagine there was a time Bradley was indifferent to God. But there was. Growing up in the 3,000-population city of Kelseyville in southwestern California, Bradley had more temporal interests. “He was a skater and he was really rather good,” his mother says, “But he never got into it professionally. He probably could have.” Instead of going pro, he joined the Navy.
But after a few years, he returned to California with a new goal. According to his mother, Bradley had been saved and had a new commitment to Christ. “When the Lord finally got hold of him, he gave him a passion,” she says. Bradley enrolled in Horizon College of San Diego, a school focused on training evangelists.
When Bradley graduated in 2007, he began praying, asking God to show him where to go next. In August of that year, he got his answer. “The Lord told him that’s where he wanted him to go,” his mother says of the decision. “Don’t ask me how, he didn’t tell me that, but the Lord told him.”
The location: Cambodia.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. –Psalm 34:18
Cambodia is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. To find the source of its poverty, it’s necessary to look back to a day in 1975 when an army of adolescents and teenagers from Cambodia’s rural hill region marched in to Phnom Penh, the nation’s capitol. Armed with Chinese-supplied AK-47s and orders from a government they called Angka, the guerilla soldiers herded out the city’s inhabitants in just a few days.
These child soldiers were the Khmer Rouge. Their leader was the French-educated socialist Pol Pot. Pol Pot dreamt of a self-sufficient, ethnically pure Cambodian state supported by an agrarian workforce. And that meant everyone would work the rice fields. Cambodia’s cities became ghost towns as all the city dwellers were forced—on foot—to the countryside, prodded along by teenaged soldiers who promised Angka would take care of everything.
But once the people reached the rice fields, they quickly learned that Angka cared little for their wellbeing. The people worked and starved together in labor camps. Those with Western education—doctors, teachers, lawyers—were singled out for torture and execution in the notorious killing fields. Vietnamese immigrants as well as Christian and Muslim minorities were also singled out.
By the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, 2 million Cambodians were dead.
The following decade was marked by the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Cambodian independence came in 1953. But by that time, Cambodia, between the French, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, had been under foreign rule for 95 years.
The new constitutional monarchy was riddled with corruption from the start. The prime minister, Hun Sen, had been a member of the Khmer Rouge—deserting for the South Vietnamese liberation forces just before the Khmer Rouge’s fall. The figurehead king, Norodom Sihanouk, was a mainstay of Cambodian government. As were his policies of selling out the Cambodian people for political gain. The Khmer Rouge had purged the country of doctors and teachers. And more than 30 percent of the population was under the age of 18. There was virtually no workforce.
Today, the average annual income in Cambodia is less than $500. Only 41 percent of the population has access to clean water. And only 17 percent have access to adequate sanitation facilities. Eighty-eight percent of children under 5 will contract malaria. And in the sex trafficking capitol of the world, 30,000 children are sex slaves—some as young as 5 years old.
“Cambodia is a country torn from war, oppression, and mass genocide,” Bradley wrote in his blog that August. “A country that is considered unreached…out of 14 million people less than 5 percent are reached for Jesus! Millions have never heard of Jesus name. I am excited that the Lord has called me to share the gospel with these wonderful people who desperately need Jesus!”
And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. –Mark 13:10
In December 2007, Bradley left for a one-month trip to Cambodia. He had set up to work with a Christian orphanage in Poipet, a city near the Cambodia-Thailand border. In preparation, he had taken a several Khmer language lessons with an employee at a local Cambodia restaurant and raised money through garage sales and donations.
But as an evangelist, Bradley was up against tough odds. For starters, 98 percent of Cambodians are Theravada Buddhists—the state religion. And Christianity is hardly promoted. A complete Khmer-language Bible did not exist until 1954. And as Bradley wrote in his blog, “Millions have not even had the chance to hear Jesus’ name ONCE!” The government in Phnom Penh espouses religious freedom, but the veracity of that freedom has been questioned of late.
By law, all religious organizations in Cambodia must register with the Ministry of Cults and Religious Affairs and must obtain government approval in order to build schools or places of worship. In recent years, Christian organizations have complained that they have been denied registration without clear explanation as to why.
In June 2007, the Ministry of Cults and Religions reasserted their power over evangelism by reissuing the restrictions on proselytizing originally placed in 2003. The restrictions ban door-to-door activities, using loudspeakers, and the provision of material incentives as rewards for conversion.
Bradley also faced a frail Christian community. He describes the state of Christianity in Cambodia as “not very alive, divided, very immature. With all sorrow I say…in desperate need of revival!” But Bradley was optimistic and spent the month working in the orphanage and sharing the gospel. The work being done by other missionaries and the changes he saw in the Cambodian people had a powerful effect on Bradley.
“It truly was a remarkable time in which it also was a time where I saw the wretchedness of my sinful heart and a fresh new desperation for my savior, Jesus,” he wrote in his blog upon his return to California in January. “For example: The ‘I want it and I want it now’ mindset here in the U.S. doesn't go over very well there and being in that culture God allowed me to see my sin.”
Bradley prayed and fasted during the month of February, seeking guidance and where he should go and what he should do next.
He spent the next seven months as the overseer of evangelism at his church in San Diego. He also tutored kids, did yard work for those who were unable to do it themselves and provided care for the sick in his community. But he kept thinking about Cambodia.
And at the end of July, he went back. Indefinitely.
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. –Matthew 10:37, 38
A Buddhist monk insists that Bradley take a picture of him reading and “sitting like a proper monk.” Bradley, the reading monk and seven of his companions, had already taken several smiling group photos. Draped in his orange robe, he places an open book on the desk in front of him then sits back on a platform and folds his hands, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Bradley obliges and snaps two photos. His weekends are devoted to moments like these. “Excursions," as he calls them. Here, Bradley gets to know the soul of the Cambodian people. He attends services at upstart churches and dreams of one day planting his own. As always, he talks to anyone who will listen about Jesus. He is working toward creating a base for long-term ministry in the northern rural areas. During the week, Bradley studies Khmer at a school in Poipet.
The decision is not without its sacrifices. For instance, there are no In-N-Out restaurants in Cambodia, an issue of particular dismay to Bradley—though he once toyed with the idea of having hamburgers sent through the mail. And he can’t talk to his mom everyday. But she says he tries to call when he can. “It’s not every week, it’s just random. For sure at least once a month,” she says. “I watch him on Facebook and I read his blog.”
The consummate evangelizer, a strong online presence is a key aspect of Bradley’s work. “It’s just so people could keep track of him and feel to be a part of it,” his mother says, “So they know what he’s doing. There’s a lot of missionaries you don’t hear a lot about. This way it’s more personal and that is also his way of witnessing.”
Bradley’s Facebook group “Jesus in Cambodia” has 136 members from across the U.S. There’s one member from Uganda. People from 54 different countries— including Finland, the United Arab Emirates and Spain—have visited his blog to read about his hopes, dreams and day-to-day activities trying to spread the gospel in Southeast Asia.
And as long as there are people to hear the gospel, or to hear about his work, Bradley will keep doing what he’s doing. He believes he has as a two-fold, God-given mission in life: to build God’s kingdom as it says in John 15:8 and to get to know God on a personal level as it says Mark 3:14. He believes only God can determine how long he will stay in Cambodia.
“As long as God keeps me here—maybe one, two, three, five, 10, 20, 50 years—I don't know,” he says. “But just as Paul got his orders from headquarters and returned back to his home church when his mission was complete, so I will follow my Lord where ever he leads me.”
By: Dawn Araujo: dcaraujo@bsugmail.net
