94-year-old missionary races to save forgotten history of Baptists in Vietnam

At 94, Southern Baptist missionary Sam James is still traveling to Vietnam to preach and support Christian mission work. But as he watched an entire generation of missionaries pass away, he realized something else was disappearing: the story of how Baptist Christianity first took root in Vietnam.

“If I don't write it, that whole history will die,” James told The Christian Post about his new book,Birth in the Midst of War: A History of Baptist Beginnings in Vietnam, 1959-1975.

That realization led James to spend about five years researching and writing Birth in the Midst of War, which documents the work of Southern Baptist missionaries and the Vietnamese Christians who helped establish and preserve the Baptist church during a turbulent period of war and political upheaval.

James was among the first Southern Baptist Convention missionaries to travel to Vietnam and remained involved in the mission field until 1975, when North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon.

During his interview with CP, James explained that he felt a need to tell the story of that generation of missionaries and the first native converts to the faith, after hearing from students and Vietnamese Americans who wanted to understand how Baptists came to Vietnam but struggled to find reliable sources about the movement's early history.

“For several years, I've had calls from Ph.D. students writing their dissertations and master's students and their theses, and they always say, ‘I cannot find any resources regarding Baptists in Vietnam. I know you were there, I know you did a lot of work there, but we can't find anything in print,’” James said.

Vietnamese Americans asked similar questions, he said: “We know there are Baptists in Vietnam, but we don't know how they got there, how in the world did Baptists show up in Vietnam and what did they do there and how was it during the war?”

James, who still occasionally returns to Vietnam for mission work, heard the same questions from younger and middle-aged Vietnamese people interested in the origins of Baptist churches in the country.

Another factor James realized was that he was essentially the last surviving missionary from that generation who could tell the story firsthand.

“So, I realized that that whole history will die if I don't write it,” he told CP. “I'm the only one left to write, and I've written three other books, so I decided, why not undertake this?”

A 'miracle' in the archives

Writing a detailed history of Baptist mission work in Vietnam — from the decline of French influence to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam — proved to be a daunting task.

James devoted about five years to the project, drawing not only on his own memories but also on archives and firsthand documents from missionaries and others involved in the work.

A major breakthrough for the manuscript came about six years ago, when a missionary couple, who had gone to Vietnam long after James, had found boxes containing large numbers of primary source documents previously considered lost.

“It was all of our meeting minutes, the meetings from the very first day in Vietnam, and all of the position papers we wrote, our strategy papers, everything was in those two big boxes,” said James. “It’s a little bit of a miracle how it happened.”  

The recovered material helped James reconstruct the history of the Baptist mission alongside the stories of the people who lived it.

The book includes an overview of Vietnam's history, including its political upheaval, colonization, wars and rebellions, as well as biographical sketches of American missionaries and the first generation of Vietnamese converts who helped establish and preserve Baptist churches.

James said the missionaries were not merely trying to establish an organization.

“We weren't just establishing an organization in Vietnam,” he said. “We were establishing a people who” possessed “a whole moral values system that was very different from the rest of Vietnam.

He wanted the biographical sketches to answer questions such as how the missionaries came to know Christ, what influenced them to become Christians, what led them to Vietnam and how they responded to the challenges they encountered there.

“And then how did they react once they were in Vietnam with the faith that they have with their values system? With all of those things, bringing that into a country that had very little understanding of the Christian faith.”

“It was just a very different culture. And I felt that people who go in there to work need to be known if you're going to understand the history of the establishment of the church in Vietnam.”

James wants readers to see how many of these Baptist missionaries were inspired by groups like Young Women, the Girls' Auxiliary, the Ridgecrest Conference Center of North Carolina, and the Glorieta of New Mexico.

James noted that these entities were “heavily mission oriented” and lamented how Baptists “no longer have hardly any of those organizations in the church anymore,” noting that Ridgecrest and Glorieta were both sold off in recent years.

“We have almost nothing that replaced what gave these young men and women the call to go to Vietnam in a very difficult circumstance,” he continued. “I wanted our Baptist Christians especially to understand that or to see it.”

James also told CP that he wanted readers to see how the Vietnamese responded to Christianity, “to see the change that could come into their life and brought them out of hopelessness in a lot of ways.”

He also pointed to the native Vietnamese who stayed in the country even after it fell to communism, as they “continued to build that foundation that we laid early on.”

“It wasn't just missionaries,” he said, noting that it was “the great national believers” who were “making their mark for the Christian faith in Vietnam.”

“They've been carrying on without any missionaries and have grown our denomination, increased by double in the last two years. And it's largely because of what the Vietnamese are doing.”

A ‘mixed’ influence from the military

Much of the mission work documented in Birth in the Midst of War took place as the U.S. poured large numbers of military personnel into South Vietnam in an effort to stop the spread of communism. 

The Vietnam War, a long conflict that resulted in over 58,000 American deaths and is considered the first war that the U.S. lost, had a considerable impact on Baptist missions.

According to James, the presence of the American military had a “mixed” influence on the mission work of himself and his peers, as “there were so many wonderful Christians among the military and they helped us in a lot of ways.”

“Sometimes when we needed some money to do something, then they came through and helped us out, and they taught English in a lot of different places where we just had like one missionary couple,” he explained.

“Then there would be those guys in a military organization there who would come in and say, ‘Hey, let me help you here, let me do some of these things.’ They would teach the Bible in English and it was just a great help to us. We loved it.”

However, James recounted, he and his fellow missionaries “also had to be careful that we were not mistaken” by the Vietnamese as “people who worked for the American government,” as they were “simply Christians who were concerned and who love them and want to be of help.”

“We had to keep that message constant throughout the whole thing,” James recalled. “Sometimes the military was greatly concerned about the social needs of the Vietnamese people, and they would like to pull us into doing more of the social work in Vietnam.”

“I think they had trouble understanding that we were there simply to lead people to know Christ and then those people would be leading the social needs of the people of Vietnam. … We had to constantly help them to understand what our mission was in Vietnam apart from the war effort.”

Ultimately, James “really appreciated the military,” and spoke well of the chaplains, calling them “tremendous” and recounting that the missionaries sometimes “ministered to them.”

James remembered living near Long Binh, a major American base of operations, and that, from time to time, personnel would be sent there for healing.

“Sometimes, they would have guys who were really on edge; they had seen a lot, and it was very difficult for them,” he told CP. “They would bring them to our house.”

“They'd kick off their shoes and sit down in the living room, sometimes play the piano. We would serve a meal and then they'd go back almost different people with that break.”

‘Change even in the midst of war’

When asked by CP what he hopes readers took away from Birth in the Midst of War, James replied that he wanted people to “see that Christianity can make a change even in the midst of war and make a very wonderful change among people in the worst circumstances.”

“Jesus was sent into the world in order to show people Who God is, to incarnate Him in the midst of a world that had moved far away from Who God is and who had no understanding of Him,” James said.

“There's still such a need for Christians to go into places where there is tremendous need and confusion and war and hatred and all of those kinds of things. And to be to that people who Jesus was to us.”

“If we don't go, they will never hear, and they will never know, and they will die in their circumstances, never having the joy and the peace and the comfort of knowing that they have a God Who loves them and a Savior Who died for them.”