Mekong Floating Ministries: House Church!

This last week has been pretty spectacular. I was able to join some of my students for a youth rally conference that was being held in town all of last week. The conference drew youth from five different provinces in Cambodia, and about 200 students were there worshiping God. The believers here are so passionate and it was an awesome experience to worship Our Creator with them. When my friend Ratanak was helping lead worship with some other students he rushed offstage and grabbed my hand and dragged me up on stage to dance with them for the whole group. Even though the songs are in Khmer, what I can do is sing the Hallelujah choruses and jump and clap my hands, it was a lot of fun. There was a small team visiting from America that were able to spend the whole week with them and then headed up to Angkor Wat. The last night of the conference there was a big bonfire and worship session that lasted for over two hours. It was powerful to be a part of and although I couldn't understand everything, it left me feeling very encouraged and helped me to build some stronger relationships.

Prayer time right before musical worship

The bonfire

This past Sunday I woke up and was out the door before seven on a moto with Sina heading to a village about 25 kilometers from Kampong Chhnang. Sina leads 8 different house churches that are all very young, two of the groups we visited were less than three weeks old. We only visited four different houses that day, but were on the go for about twelve hours. The first group we visited was the oldest and largest with about 25 people in it. They had people who were able to teach and even provided everyone with a small breakfast of bread and rice.

The next group was much smaller, but I’d been there before. The man who had been completely paralyzed before that Sina and some others had been praying for was there, his name is Taud, but I'm probably spelling it wrong. When I saw him a month ago he still could not walk but had control of his upper body. When I saw him two days ago, there was no sign of sickness left in him at all, he was completely healthy. What I was not expecting was for Sina to say, “Okay Mark, you can preach now.” I should have known beforehand that they would ask me to say something, but I was not expecting to preach for the house churches, even though they were smaller, about 8-10 people. I opened up to Matthew 4, the passage I used at Tree of Life two weeks before and started talking with them about discipleship as my friend Chandy translated. None of the people there were present for the service beforehand so I figured I was in the clear. The same thing happened at the next church we went to, also a similar size. At the last church we prayed for a man with a gigantic boil in the middle of his foot and an old Buddhist woman who could not use her legs. There was a boy there who was mute whose older sister was trying to help him read and sing. The love she had for her brother was one of the more touching things I've seen here so I had to get a picture of that.

This week Rachel and Ellis are headed to Cambodia, their plane lands in Phnom Penh very late this evening and Mark will be there to pick them up. Pray for their time here and that God can use them in powerful ways as a team for the three months that they will be spending here in Kampong Chhnang. Thanks so much for reading and God bless you, Brother Mark out.