Christ in Cambodia

Religion | Once immersed in Western Christianity, a Southeast Asian pastor plants churches the old-fashioned way | Paul Chesser

A woman carries her baby in front of an abandoned church in Phnom Penh

SVAY RIENG, Cambodia— As 40 Christian house-church leaders discuss their work, smoke from an outdoor cooking fire wafts through the windows of the home near the Vietnam border in which they are meeting, and a wayward chicken rushes through the living room. Their host is Pastor X. Raksmey, who has planted 35 Cambodian churches since 2003.

The U.S. State Department estimates that only 2 percent of Cambodia's 14 million people are Christians. While the country has shown more tolerance for religious freedom than its communist neighbors in Laos and Vietnam, most citizens in the Buddhist-dominant society are wary of the faith they consider a Western implant. But Raksmey is homegrown.

When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, it jailed Raksmey, a soldier during the early-1970s rule of Lon Nol. He slept in chains and by day worked in the fields, sustained by little more than occasional small portions of porridge. Under the Khmer Rouge 1.7 million Cambodians died: Some were killed outright and others perished from starvation, disease, or overwork.