The Vulnerable Ones

Four missionaries slain in a garbage pit, two others die in a bomb blast. A report on modern martyrdom—and on church growth amid adversity.

A blast shattered the calm of the warm tropical night. The tan-walled house, one of three in the Christian and Missionary Alliance compound at Ban Me Thuot, was blown apart. Killed immediately was mission worker Leon Griswold, a retired insurance man from White Plains, New York. His daughter Carolyn, 41, was badly hurt. The local Viet Cong had begun their part of the bloody Tet lunar New Year offensive.

Missionaries in the adjoining residences nursed Miss Griswold through the next day. The Rev. Robert Ziemer and the Rev. C. Edward Thompson realized they were vulnerable to more attacks, even though their concrete buildings were virtually within earshot of American military outposts. They dug a trench out of a garbage pit, just big enough for the whole staff to huddle down for the night.

As expected, the Viet Cong blew up the other two homes. When daylight broke, the two men decided they would appeal to the Viet Cong to get Carolyn to a hospital. They were shot dead on the spot. Then the guerrillas strafed the trench, killing Thompson’s wife and 42-year-old Ruth Wilting, a nurse from Cleveland.

Ziemer’s wife and Miss Betty Olsen, 32, were forced to lead the attackers to the nearby home of Henry Blood, of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Blood and Miss Olsen were taken captive. The others eventually were let go. Mrs. Ziemer and Carolyn Griswold were airlifted to a hospital at Nha Trang, where Miss Griswold died.

Worst in Sixty-Eight Years

Dr. Nathan Bailey, CMA president, called it “the greatest tragedy in the history of our society since the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,” when some thirty workers were slain. All CMA missionary women and pre-school children were evacuated from Viet Nam as swiftly as possible and housed in temporary quarters elsewhere in the Far East. School-age children of the missionaries have been attending a boarding school in Malaysia.

“This is the first time we have had a deliberate wiping out of missionaries,” said Dr. Bob Pierce, retired president of World Vision, the organization that has led Protestant relief work in Viet Nam. Pierce said missionaries in Viet Nam are open to attack because they work among the people but are not shielded by the military. He expressed fear that they may now be targets of a “calculated exercise in terrorism.”

The six dead at Ban Me Thuot form another length in the scarlet thread of martyrdom that has stretched across 2,000 years of Christian history. More people have died for Christian faith than for any other one cause. As the thread unravels it brings grief and pain and even temporary retreat. But historians always conclude that violence and bloodshed impose no permanent harm on the Church. Indeed, such is the stuff of Christianity that persecution always redounds to the ultimate benefit of the true Church. Tertullian saw the truth when at the outset of the third century he recorded the memorable line, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

Children Are Left

Ziemer, 49, son of a noted preacher in Toledo, Ohio, had spent twenty years in Viet Nam. He had translated the entire New Testament into the Raday dialect, spoken by some 200,000 tribespeople in the central highlands. He was the father of three children.

The Thompsons left five children, all of whom were in Malaysia at the time of the attack. The 43-year-old father’s life had been a story of victory in the midst of adversity. He grew up in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. After his conversion during boyhood, his agnostic stepfather abused him severely, and finally he had to take refuge in the home of a Sunday-school teacher. He saved money earned as a hospital aide to enter college, and just three days before he was to enroll all of it was stolen. He got in line to register anyway, and a telephone call informed him that a friend of his mother had left him a legacy. Thompson and his wife were originally assigned to Cambodia and were shifted to Viet Nam not long ago when Cambodia evicted all Christian missionaries.

Miss Griswold, pleasant and attractive, had served in Viet Nam since 1952. She was particularly popular with children and young people. After her mother’s recent death, her father, still vigorously healthy at 66, decided to spend at least part of his retirement in Viet Nam. He was assigned administrative work for the mission at Ban Me Thuot.

The death of Miss Wilting ended a sad episode. She was the fiancée of Dan Gerber, a Mennonite who was one of three missionaries kidnapped by the Viet Cong May 30, 1962, at a CMA leprosarium just outside Ban Me Thuot. Gerber and Miss Wilting had just announced their engagement and were out for a walk when he was seized. She had kept up hope that he was still alive and would someday be released.

The two others taken captive were Dr. Ardel Vietti and the Rev. Archie Mitchell. Nothing is known of their fate. Dr. Vietti, unmarried, was a surgeon from Houston, Texas. Mitchell’s first wife was killed during World War II when a Japanese balloon bomb exploded at a Sunday-school picnic in Port Angeles, Washington. His second wife lost a sister and brother by the same bomb. The Mitchells have four children.

So far, nine Protestant foreign missionaries have died at the hands of the Viet Cong. Two Wycliffe Bible translators were slain in March, 1963. In January, 1966, during a lull in fighting and a temporary halt in U. S. bombing, 29-year-old John Haywood of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade was shot to death in a Viet Cong ambush. Haywood, who was from Birmingham, England, ran a hospital for lepers near Da Nang. The day after his funeral his wife gave birth to their first child.

Evangelism Amidst War

The Viet Nam war has many peculiarities, and one is that missionary activity has continued despite the military escalation. There have been few wars in which organized evangelistic effort has been carried on as aggressively as it is in this one. Says the Rev. Louis L. King, foreign secretary of the CMA, which has done the bulk of the Viet Nam missionary work: “Far from sounding the death knell to evangelism, the war has opened new doors of remarkable opportunity, and people are generally more responsive than they were.”

The CMA has had missionaries in Viet Nam since 1911, and during most of this time the country has been engaged in one conflict or another. A succession of French officials and Japanese occupation forces kept missionaries under their thumbs. The dominating Roman Catholic Vietnamese have also been a hindrance. But Protestantism has shown steady progress, and baptized adult membership climbed from 14,000 in 1948 to 44,000 last year. There were 200 churches in North and South Viet Nam in 1948. Now there are about 400 churches in South Viet Nam alone, most characterized by a little sign over the door proclaiming Tin Lanh (good news).

Although the missionaries are subject to the same temptations as comfort-loving North Americans, the need for a Viet Nam witness has been their overriding concern. Most adjust readily, even to such local delicacies as goat blood and sauce made of rotten fish. “One never hears a complaint,” says the Rev. Gordon Cathey, pastor of the International Protestant Church in Saigon. “The joy of seeing men and women come to Christ and increase in faith is reward enough for the weariest missionary.”

The missionaries do not panic easily, but they do take their vulnerability seriously, as do missionaries everywhere. Through the centuries believing men of every class and on every continent have felt the fury of anti-Christian feeling. The lions that devoured early Christians are well known, but historian Edward Gibbon declared that the number of Protestants executed by the Spaniards “in a single province and a single reign, far exceeded that of the primitive martyrs in the space of three centuries.” The number of Dutch martyrs has been estimated as high as 100,000, and the savagery is said by one authority to have included the tearing of unborn babies from the living bodies of their mothers.

The vision for the evangelization of Viet Nam originated with Dr. A. B. Simpson, Presbyterian minister who founded the CMA, during a round-the-world trip that included a stop in Singapore in 1893. The field work was implemented by Dr. R. A. Jaffray, one of the twentieth century’s great missionary pioneers. Jaffray was the son of the owner and publisher of the Toronto Globe, long known as Canada’s national newspaper, and could have succeeded his father. But he wanted to be a participant as well as an observer and chronicler, and he went first as a missionary to South China, then down the Indo-China peninsula, and finally to Indonesia. He left an area as soon as he felt it had a self-propagating church.

Initial missionary expeditions into what is now Viet Nam included a thirteen-day hike and a cruise down the Red River around the turn of the century. One hitch came in 1897 when agents of a Bible society were arrested and their Bibles burned. But hostility was not generally overt, and by 1911 missionaries had sailed into Da Nang (formerly Tourane) to buy property and set up the first permanent Protestant mission station. The Bible agents had been able to build some good will, and the missionaries inherited it. A tiny thatched chapel was built at Da Nang in 1913.

During World War I, the suspicions of French officials who ruled the area ran high. Jaffray talked to the governor-general in 1916, cleared up a lot of misunderstanding, and won authorization for the mission to work in parts of the country considered French colonies, including Hanoi and Haiphong. “The work in the north prospered particularly well,” says the Rev. W. Alfred Pruett, who got there in 1924. “Eventually every big city and many villages had churches. As I recall, the churches in Hanoi and Haiphong had between 200 and 300 members.” Some of the first CMA missionaries are believed to have befriended Ho Chi Minh in his early days.

A milestone in the history of the Church was reached in 1926, when the whole Bible became available in the Vietnamese language. The missionaries had been fortunate in getting the services of a non-Christian Vietnamese with unusual literary skill who also spoke French. He is said to have given the prose such elegant style that the Vietnamese Christians do not welcome new translations.

The French however were still putting up resistance. And it was not until 1929 that “the tide turned,” according to an official CMA account. “Instead of bitter antagonism to the Gospel on the part of the officials, and in the place of strong edicts prohibiting Protestant propaganda in various places, official authorizations were granted giving the missionaries freedom to reside and labor in many different parts of Annam [Viet Nam].”

During World War II, when the Japanese occupied the land, missionaries either fled or were taken prisoner. Jaffray died in a concentration camp. Churches were looted, but none were destroyed. After the war missionaries returned to find a new conflict—between the French and the Communist-supported Viet Minh—and more adversity.

Post-War Persecution

The Rev. Le Van Thai, a leader of the Vietnamese church, said then of the Christian workers, “When they have not clothes enough they coil up on a heap of straw. One of them has only a coat and a Bible left, but keeps on living with his little flock.” One Vietnamese preacher told of being accosted at home by armed soldiers, who, not believing he had no money, forced him to his knees, placed bayonets at his throat, and tried to strangle his wife. In 1949 a pastor asked for a dozen books from the American Bible Society “so Christians can study at home when they dare not go to church. So many have either been killed or imprisoned that no one dares to go to church any more.”

Then came the defeat of the French. The Geneva agreement of 1954 sealed off North Viet Nam from foreign missionaries but opened up big areas of the south that under the French had been out of bounds for Protestant missionaries.

Under Ngo Dinh Diem, Protestants prospered. But some hostility still dogged them, and now it came from the dominant Roman Catholics. At Nha Trang, a beautiful Bible school was built on a hill overlooking the South China Sea. Catholics had a monastery on an adjoining hill and got worried about evangelical progress. For one period of eighteen months, Diem would not allow missionaries to enter the country. He was obliged to ease restrictions, however, when American military help began to pour in to try to arrest the guerrilla activity of the Communist Viet Cong.

The current war climaxes the adversity suffered by the Protestants for more than half a century. “The persecution in Viet Nam has not been nearly so severe as Protestants have suffered in other parts of the world,” says the Rev. John Sawin, unofficial CMA historian. “But it has been a significant factor.”

Today the Evangelical Church of Viet Nam has more than four hundred ministers and employees who are nationals. Under their president, the Rev. Doan-van-Mieng, they are prepared to assume full responsibility for further evangelization if foreign missionaries have to leave. But the going is rough, and Protestant workers are now losing their lives with sad regularity. They never know when a military skirmish will threaten them. On Easter Sunday 1966 a Vietnamese pastor and his wife got up early to prepare for special services and suddenly found themselves caught in the crossfire of a new battle.

But the military action has also created new opportunities. A year ago the pastor of a church in Quang Ngai was about to ask for a transfer. He earned only twelve dollars a month, had a wife and six children to support, and had to pay two dollars for a scrawny little chicken for Sunday dinner. The enemy had dug in less than 200 yards from the church. But he decided to stay put, and soon the U. S. Army began securing the area and setting up an effective pacification program. The church blossomed.

The New York-based CMA, which maintains mission work in twenty-five countries at an annual cost of more than $5 million, has given top priority to Viet Nam during the past decade. More than 100 of the 900 members of its missionary task force have been assigned to Viet Nam. World Vision has also become increasingly active, establishing schools and orphanages and importing relief supplies. Mennonites too have been stepping up relief work. The National Association of Evangelicals has helped to establish servicemen’s centers in at least half a dozen big cities and has lent support to a unique lay-leadership and vocational-training school at Hue. Billy Graham, John Haggai, Oral Roberts, Merv Rosell, and a number of other evangelists have traveled to Viet Nam to hold preaching missions. Viet Nam Christian Service has some sixty-eight doctors, nurses, agriculturalists, and other specialists doing volunteer work.

More American Help

American servicemen have helped to build churches in Viet Nam, both Protestant and Catholic. And some American communities have taken responsibilities for special projects; in Omaha, for example, the World-Herald raised more than $17,000 for an orphanage.

CMA missionaries have always shown special compassion for the mountain people, who are in most respects very distinct from the Vietnamese and as a result are ostracized by them. There are numerous dialects among the twenty-eight mountain tribes, most of whom are animists. The Vietnamese themselves are nominally Buddhist, as the whole world learned when monks began burning themselves in the streets. But it was the interest in the mountain people that prompted CMA workers to set up work in the central-highlands town of Ban Me Thuot.

And now Ban Me Thuot has been immortalized. The names of Thompson, Griswold, Ziemer, and Wilting join those of Carlson and Elliott, of Polycarp and Justin, of Stephen and James, in the numberless ranks of those who have died for the faith. Generations to come will learn of the Viet Nam martyrdoms and be inspired to risk their own lives for the ongoing work of the Church. They will feel the spirit of the sixteenth-century English reformer Hugh Latimer, who at the stake exhorted a fellow victim, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”

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