TAN Mission Report March 2026 – Cambodia

In 1973, Delron was privileged to be a prayer counselor at the Billy Graham crusade which was held in the football stadium on the campus of North Carolina State University where he was an undergraduate student at the time. In what might be considered “coming full circle,” he was again privileged to participate in a Franklin Graham outreach fifty-three years later. This time, he was part of the team working with Bibles for the World that provides Bibles for the prayer counselors to give to all who respond to the altar call and free gospels of John to everyone who attends the meetings. This time, the event was not as convenient as walking from his dorm to the stadium; Delron had to travel to Cambodia to take part in the Love Siem Reap Festival, a powerful approach to evangelism which everyone – whether a Christian or an unbeliever – finds attractive. With a full agenda of high-energy performances by top-notch musicians from the local area and artists from the US including Taya, The Afters, and Tommy Coomes Band as the drawing card and a festival setting, the audience felt unthreatened by the fact that a gospel message was to be presented. In fact, over twenty thousand attendees flooded the grounds of an abandoned airport each night of the festival.

The Bibles for the World team of volunteers included twenty-three delegates from their base in South Asia as well as fourteen from the United States. Their task was to distribute eighty thousand gospels of John during the two-day festival. Since busloads of attendees came from all over the nation – some as distant as a twelve-hour bus ride away – the first strategy was to place cases of the gospels on each bus to be distributed when the delegates returned to their homes. Unfortunately, the well-designed plan collapsed when the traffic control team began to direct the busses into the airport itself rather than along the frontage road as planned. With the people getting off at the wrong places and the traffic congestion, it was impossible for the team to get the bundles on the busses as intended. As the situation escalated from confusion to chaos, Delron quoted II Corinthians 14:33, God is not the author of confusion, but of peace and commanded that the confusion stop and peace reign over the situation. Literally, as he spoke those words, the last bus in the traffic jam pulled away from the curb, and the planned traffic flow was restored. The strategy for the distribution of the gospels at the festival itself was to line the exit area and give a booklet to each person before leaving the venue. Since there was a large team, it was possible for them to position themselves so that anyone who got past the first volunteer would be offered a pamphlet by a second or third worker. On each night, the allocated supply of gospels for that day ran out. Delron says that he was heartbroken to see so many of the last people leave the airport without a gospel – until he walked outside to discover that the local Gideons were just outside the gate giving away free copies of the complete New Testament. Even though some people didn’t get the gospel of John, they received it along with the other twenty-six books in their testaments!

Delron says that one of the most impressive aspects of the trip was the opportunity to work with a team of volunteers from the Mar tribe from Manipur State of Northeast India. This entire tribe was converted to Christianity from being headhunters by one copy of the gospel of John that was left by a missionary who risked his life to reach them. The grandson of the first convert is now the president of Bibles for the World, the ministry that sponsored the trip. Bibles for the World was started by his father under the tutelage of Billy Graham as a global outreach focused on giving away free Bibles – and especially the gospel of John – with anticipation that the whole world will be impacted in the same way that their tribe was converted from being headhunters to “hearthunters.”

Delron was privileged to be asked to lead devotions for the team each morning before they began their activities of the day. When a local pastor requested that someone from the team speak at the church on Sunday morning, the team unanimously voted that he would be the one to fill the pulpit. Having heard that the church had been birthed out a children’s outreach and, in addition to the members of all ages, there were many children in the congregation, Delron decided to preach a message on how David was chosen as the next king of Israel while he was still a young boy. The presentation incorporated several of the children as part of a visual demonstration for the message which could be grasped on different levels by everyone in the audience regardless of age or spiritual maturity. In addition to the connection with the fact that David was a young boy when he was anointed king, the message went along with a theme that seemed to be woven throughout much of the worship presented at the festival – the need for a new king over Cambodia which is one of only thirteen nations in the world today ruled by a king. There were no political innuendos in the praise and worship sessions, but there was a surprisingly significant number of the songs which included a call for the nation to surrender to King Jesus!

After the festival ended, the team stayed in the country for a few days to connect with some of the local Christian ministries. One ministry that they had intended to visit is located on the border between Cambodia and Thailand but was temporarily closed due to the current conflict between the two nations. Fortunately, the director of the ministry had come to Seim Reap to participate in the festival; so, Delron and several of the team members were able to meet with him to hear his personal testimony of escaping from the Killing Fields where almost a quarter of the population were tortured and slaughtered during the reign of terror under the Khmer Rouge and how the Lord directed him and his wife to leave the safety and privileges of life in the United States to return Cambodia to help rebuild their ravaged and suffering homeland and share the love of Jesus with their people. Through establishing orphanages and schools and radio and television broadcasts, their ministry has tremendously impacted the nation and even reached some of the leaders of the former regime. Another ministry that the Delron and some of the team members were privileged to visit is a school that was established by an American entrepreneur who “made it big” in the software industry and felt led to invest his time, money, and expertise in bringing the gospel to Cambodia. When Delron heard his strategy, he remarked that it seemed as if the gentleman had read his book, Maximum Impact because his approach exactly mirrors a model presented in the book – reaching a nation from the top down rather than from the bottom up like many ministries try to do. Although we must never forsake ministry to the poor, we must also realize that reaching the leadership of the nation will produce a “trickle down” effect that is far more effective than attempting to “swim upstream” from the bottom. In his attempt to influence the influencers in Cambodia, the missionary opened a high-end school that caters to the children of government officials and wealthy businessmen. The top-notch education is unabashedly presented from a Christian worldview. The school is totally upfront with the parents concerning the policy that the students are expected to respect the gospel messages, although they are not required to participate in prayers or Bible classes. The director of the school testified that the non-Christian parents agree that their children are benefitting and becoming more well-behaved simply through being exposed to the atmosphere at the school. Using the revenue from this exclusive school, the ministry has opened several other campuses that reach out to the less privileged classes of the society, offering tuition-assisted programs for the middle class and tuition-free education to the poorer classes.

Although Cambodia is presently less than two percent evangelical Christian, the ministers have set an ambitious goal of raising that number to thirty percent by 2030 – a seeming audacious target. However, their history of seeing overnight change from Buddhism to Hinduism, Hinduism back to Buddhism, from Buddhism to Communism, and then from Communism back to Buddhism again, it is not as far-fetched as it might seem – especially realizing that all these other conversions had nothing to do with the Holy Spirit who is the agent of change in this new transition. The Love Seim Reap Festival is evidence that the change is beginning!

Delron had one last blessing on the mission in that he was scheduled for an eight-hour layover in Singapore, the home of Terance Tan, a close friend who has been with him on several mission trips. Although Terance now lives in Luxemburg, he happened to be in Singapore to be with his elderly father while hospitalized with would was thought to be a terminal issue. Miraculously, he survived and was released. When Delron contacted Terance, it seemed that they would just miss one another since Terence was scheduled to leave the day before Delron would traveling through Singapore. Amazingly, there was a change in his flight schedule, making his flight on the same day as Delron’s visit.