The Bible Man in Vietnam

00:00 – Introduction by Joy Kita; guest Ron Pearce
01:10 – Bible Man’s background: pastor, evangelist, church planter, arrested by religious police
02:00 – Imprisonment for three years; church grows from 1,000 to 4,000 members
04:30 – Attempt to bribe the guard; he only has $28, guard asks for $50
05:10 – Escapes from the truck, holding onto his Bibles
05:50 – Guard tries to shoot; Bible Man flees across hills, pursued by police
06:30 – Uses bus ticket diversion; rides a motorcycle to evade capture
07:00 – Bible Man’s ongoing ministry: growth to 21,742 believers, 25 new churches, 200 families trained as church planters

Welcome to our podcast series, ​“Stories From the Field.” I’m your host Joy Kita and with me today is Ron Pearce.

RON: Hi, Joy.

JOY: Hi, I am hearing that we are going to talk about Vietnam today.

RON: We are and I am going back into the archives. This is a story from quite a few years ago of a man that I met and we call him Bible Man. There are many stories around this gentleman that I have gathered over the years but I am going to give you one of the first ones that in my interviews came to the surface and I think you’re really going to like this one. Bible Man had a wife and seven children. He was very, very strong in the Lord. He was a good pastor, a great evangelist, a tremendous church planter and he was pressured because of this by the Ka-Mang police, the religious police in Vietnam for years and years and they wanted him to renounce his faith, they wanted him to walk away from the Lord, all of this but he refused. Finally, they put him in prison, they captured him and I forget right now exactly what for but they captured him for something. Probably just for aggressive evangelism and they put him in prison for three years and he said it was just torturous in the prison. And he said that when he went into the prison he had about 1000 members in his church, alright, 1000 members. They put him in prison, his family thought he was dead, they didn’t hear from him, nothing for three years. When he was released from the prison the church had grown to 4000 in size.

JOY: His church had grown?

RON: His church had grown to 4000 members in size. Therefore, it had spread out, it was growing and you could tell that he planted good seeds in good soil and this was the result. So this was a tremendous man of God. But he knew that they needed to have Bibles and there were very few Bibles around in those days and there were none in his area so he would have to go and search for them and find them. And I remember him talking about him having these two bags of Bibles that he carried with him, he had found them and he was taking them back to his village and all of a sudden, he was arrested by the police, they put him in a truck and they were taking him back to prison.

Joy- Had he just got out?

RON: He just got out. He had just got out and they caught him with his Bibles in his Bible bag and he was headed back to prison. So he’s sitting there and he’s telling the guard beside him, because he was in the middle and there was a guard on the passenger side and one driving on the driver’s side, so here is his going back to prison and sitting in this truck and he was trying to dissuade or persuade, whatever it was, the guard from taking him back to prison and persuade him to let him go and the guy wouldn’t do it.

JOY: Well because as much as they don’t mind going to prison, he just got out and he’s trying to get Bibles to his church, right?

RON: Exactly, he had two bags of Bibles and these were his pride and joy and he had to get them to his 4000 people and he understood the value of the Word of God for growth and stuff like that. So he says I tried to bribe the guy and I wanted to have him let me go so I asked him what it would take and he said $50. So he looks, all he had going into prison, all he had from probably trying to buy Bibles or whatever, he had $28. So here he is with $28 and the guard said not enough, not enough. Well, it was right at that moment that all of a sudden they hit this huge bump in the road and the truck, he said, was just rolling from side to side, etcetera. Well, he took this opportunity and he jumps out of the truck over the guard.

JOY: No, he didn’t! Escaping!

RON: He jumps out onto the road and he held on to his Bibles, he said, ​“I held on to my Bibles!” and he rolls in the ditch and the truck is still jostling around, they are trying to get control of it. He is okay, he picks himself up and he’s running down the road backwards. So here he’s going and the guard thought okay, we can’t let this guy go, he couldn’t get out of the truck, it was still going too fast and so he takes his gun and tries to shoot him but he had to hold onto the truck with both hands so he couldn’t shoot him with his rifle. So here he is heading across the road over the hills and dales, well the report goes out to everybody that they got this Bible Man and everybody comes after him. So they are chasing him, they are chasing him on motorcycles, and they’ve got the whole force out looking for him. He heads to his village and he bought a bus ticket to go in this direction but he never got on the bus. He bought the ticket and then he got a ride on the back of a motorcycle, still holding on to his two bags of Bibles.

JOY: So he did that on purpose?

RON: Yeah, he was smart enough that he bought the ticket so that when the police would come they would think he was on this bus. So the bus pulls out and they go to the station and ask was this guy here? Yeah, yeah, and he had two bags of Bibles and he bought a ticket on this bus. So they are chasing after this bus that didn’t have him on it.

JOY: So basically like James Bond is what you’re saying.

Ron- Exactly! He’s on the back of this motorcycle rejoicing heading back to his village. So my conversation with this guy was really something. I am thrilled with this story. But this is the greatest servant of God in regards to this. So I’m going to read to you the last bit of my notes, okay? With a growing and numerous number of believers growing in this region, several years ago they did a survey on it and this would have been probably four years after my interview with him. Get this, exact numbers, he now has in his region 21,742 believers. He started another 25 churches, he has 200 families who have dedicated themselves to be church planters in the jungles around there, and this man is now centering his ministry, at that time, to trying to get Bibles for his people while he’s motivating everyone else to go out and do the evangelism. He knows the value of God’s Word. When I heard this and over the years got that number of 21,000, I thought to myself, this is one of the greatest heroes in my travels around the world. He is fearless, he is a man of adventure, he’s a man that knows the power of God’s Word, he is a life that is a living example for all the new believers and all the other people to leave what they’re doing, like these 200 families that were going into ministry to be church planters. This is an example of what life can be like today with Jesus. And that’s why I like the Bible Man story.

JOY: Well, I don’t even have anything to say because that was such a great story. You guys have been listening to our series ​“Stories From the Field.” Thank you, Ron.