Christian Ministry Heals Bodies — And Souls — In A Buddhist Nation
MOUNG RUESSEI, Cambodia — On the grounds of a Buddhist temple, a crowd gathered in the shade of a mango tree.
Adolescent monks, adorned in bright orange robes, peeked out of their dormitories, leaning past the doorways to listen closer.
Mike Meierhofer, gesturing with one hand and holding a Bible in the other, welcomed the audience.
“We thank God very much for you being here with us,” the Dallas preacher told the group, a mix of Christians, Buddhists and Muslims. “Sometimes Buddhists think, ‘Well, I shouldn’t come because I’m not a Christian. They don’t want me there.’ We want everybody to come. Jesus loves all Buddhists and Muslims and wants all of them to come to be with him, too.”
This was not the first time the Walnut Hill Church of Christ minister had the opportunity to preach on temple grounds.
Meierhofer, president of Cambodia Christian Ministries, made his first medical mission trip to this Southeast Asian nation in 2009.
He returned in 2010 and spoke to a crowd next to the front doors of a Buddhist pagoda and temple.
“This is unbelievable,” Meierhofer recalled saying when he returned to Texas. “I had never seen a mission field like this.”
In 2011, one of the nonprofit’s board members — Ron Thrift — spoke inside a Muslim mosque.
“They gave out Bibles,” Meierhofer said. “One of the guys asked (Thrift) when he was done, ‘How long ago is this?’ And he said, ‘2,000 years.’ Ron was a little bit nervous, because the guy got upset, but then he said, ‘Why did it take you 2,000 years to tell us about this?’”
Staff with Cambodia Christian Ministries conduct eye exams using a Bible. (Photo by Audrey Jackson)
Following Jesus’ example
Cambodia Christian Ministries models the medical missions it hosts after Jesus’ example, Meierhofer said, referencing Matthew 4:23:
“And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.”
About 93% of Cambodia’s 17 million people are Buddhist, making it essential that the Christian nonprofit work within government systems to spread the Gospel.
“We contact the local government and say, ‘If you allow us to come into your village to help the sick, you have to find people to sit and hear the Gospel,’” said Sokhom Hun, the nonprofit’s director of operations in Cambodia. “‘If you cannot find some people to come to sit and hear the Gospel, we’re not going to come.’”
Hun once dreamed of being a doctor.
A survivor of the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, Hun has suffered imprisonment and torture.
Others did not survive, including 16 of his relatives.
Wide-ranging estimates place the death toll between 1.2 million and 2.8 million — or 13 percent and 30 percent of the Cambodian population at that time.
But Hun’s experience with pain left him with a passion for healing.
“After the war finished, I came to Phnom Penh, and I went to medical school, but my education level was too low,” Hun recalled. “But I still dreamed. Even if I am not a physician or nurse, I wanted to be involved with the medical field.”
After immigrating to the U.S. in 1981, Hun and his family were baptized in Texas.
More than two decades later, he heard the term medical mission for the first time from a fellow believer.
In 2008, Hun attended Global Samaritan Resources conferences hosted by Abilene Christian University to learn more.
The following year, Meierhofer returned from what would become Cambodia Christian Ministries’ first medical mission trip.
He began urging Hun to return to his homeland as a missionary.
“I said, ‘You have to come back here,’” Meierhofer recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t do it by myself. I’m a not preacher, so you gotta help me, brother.’ So we partnered up, and in late November of 2009, he moved over to Cambodia.”
By the following June, Hun had begun laying the foundation for Cambodia Christian Ministries, which includes a Bible school, yearly preaching seminars, a well-drilling ministry and a free clinic as well as two yearly medical mission trips.
Since then, Hun and Meierhofer have led more than 30 medical campaigns to 20 of the country’s 24 provinces, preaching to crowds as health care professionals oversee patient care.
“The medical mission is very helpful to the outreach ministry,” Hun said. “Because Cambodian people need doctors.”
An answer to prayer
A team of seven Americans and one Brazilian — including a first-year medical student, a cardiologist and a dentist — joined Hun and Meierhofer on Cambodia Christian Ministries’ most recent trip.
They partnered with 15 health care professionals in the Cambodian military to provide medical services to five rural villages in four provinces.
Navy Huon, the Christian representative for the Preah Netr Preah district, thanked God for the group’s arrival in her rural farming community.
“I prayed to God and asked for something like this for five years,” Huon, who speaks Khmer, said via a translator. “Today God answered my prayer.”
“Most of the people that come here, they could not go to the dentist or hospital because it’s very expensive,” she added. “Because here in this area, if you need to take out a tooth, they charge you $10 or $20.”
Dr. Thaddeus Tolleson, a cardiologist from the U.S., had also waited years.
He heard of Cambodia Christian Ministries’ trips from his brother, Mike Tolleson, who volunteered on the smaller 2024 fall trip. The larger medical campaign, which happens at the beginning of the year, costs the nonprofit $55,000 for transportation, lodging, medicine, food and supplies.
“I’d wanted to do something like this for a long time, but just like a lot of people, I talked about it and never did it,” said Tolleson, a member of the Glenwood Church of Christ in Tyler, Texas. “But something about this just fit with the skills that God gave me to hopefully help.
“When Jesus went anywhere, he addressed people’s physical needs and then met their spiritual needs,” the doctor added. “I think that’s the best model for people. It’s hard to talk to a hungry man about his spiritual needs. God comes to the hungry in the form of food.”
Meeting needs in ‘The Eyes of God’
Together, Tolleson and the other health care professionals saw 6,832 patients during the nine-day campaign — a scale of need that surprised the cardiologist despite his 32 years of experience.
“These are people that have literally never seen a doctor, have virtually no access to health care,” Tolleson said. “You could bring a group like this over here every month and not meet all of the needs.”
But the needs were not limited to physical ailments in “The Eyes of God” — the literal translation of Preah Netr Preah — nor any other village the team visited.
As the doctors and dentists oversaw patient care and assessed physical ailments, Meierhofer, Hun and their ministry partner Mark Banks gathered the crowd to share a different kind of healing — everlasting life.
At the end of their time in each village, the three men offered to baptize anyone who believed.
“We have a God who created us, who is very loving and merciful,” Meierhofer told the crowd as Hun translated. “God saves us by his grace when we put our faith in his son, Jesus.”
One after another, people came forward to be baptized. Some climbed into the water before the previous person could step out.
By the end of the trip, the Christians had baptized 44 people.
This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.
Audrey Jackson, a 2021 journalism graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, is The Christian Chronicle’s managing editor.