By Naomi Musch, Living Stones News Writer

“It’s open-heart surgery without the anesthesia.”

Pastor Darrell Grant laughs and his eyes sparkle as he describes what a missions trip is like. He says that you think you’re going to help someone, but God will use the time to do a work on you.

“God,” says the pastor of Superior’s Christian Missionary Alliance Church, “doesn’t rearrange your house. He digs out the footings.”

Grant’s recent return from a heart-wrenching, short-term trip to Cambodia has left him no less affected.

Pastor Darrell Grant of Superior’s Christian Missionary Alliance Church says God works on both the missionary and the spiritually lost during a missions trip.

In October, he and a group of CMA pastors from the Wisconsin Western Great Lakes District embarked on a “vision planting / prayer planting” mission trip to Cambodia where CMA missionaries have had a presence since 1923. The pastors’ goal was to pray, encourage and get a vision from God on how to best come alongside and assist the missionaries who live there.

“Usually when you go on a trip like this you have an agenda,” Grant said, but this time the trip was for the purpose of “observation, collecting data and to see what God would do.”

Grant’s personal goal was “to learn and pray, to be very sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit,” and it seems to have worked. He returned from Cambodia passionate about the spiritual and felt needs of the people there, and now he desires to translate those emotions into the hearts of the people back home.

Arriving in Bangkok, Thailand, the CMA group drove across the border to Poipet, Cambodia.

“Boy, did we enter reality there,” said Grant.

His photographs tell the story of squalor, where semi-modern houses intermingle with tin huts, cows wander the muddy streets, trash litters the rutted roadsides and yards, and oppression hits hard.

“The spiritual oppression was immediate,” he said. Yet, Grant was encouraged by sharing his testimony with the very first national he met based on their common backgrounds.

Of the places Grant visited, Poipet, Battambang, and the Cambodian capitol of Phnom Penh, Grant was most stricken by the plight of the Vietnamese refugee boat people, especially the young girls.

“There is a lot of prejudice there toward the Vietnamese,” said Grant. They are charged a docking fee just to be able to walk on land, and most often it is a fee that the families cannot afford.

They are unable to return to Vietnam since most of them do not have papers proving they are citizens. Some are fleeing the government, and some are considered criminals. They are limited to the fishing trade, and, unfortunately, to selling their children in the sex trade.

“We men felt dirty because of the sex trade,” said Grant as he described how families would push their young daughters, some as young as 12, forward for the men to see. “Westerners are known for the perverse things they come there to do.”

Grant said families there will “lease” out their daughters for two or three months at a time. Chinese businessmen will pay top dollar for a young virgin because they believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. Unfortunately, all this does is pass the virus on to the girls, thus spreading the disease and destroying any chance that they might someday have a better life. They return to their homes on the polluted river and are sold again, except at a smaller price.

Kim Bui, a native Vietnamese woman who has dedicated her life as a missionary to these refugees, shared her vision with Pastor Grant and the others. She dreams of someday opening restaurants that could employ these girls, enabling them to break free of the sex trade.

Bui has nurtured eight churches and five schools. Because the Vietnamese are considered almost subhuman and are denied access to education and employment, Bui is their only chance to receive an education. She is able to assist them up through fifth grade.

It broke the hearts of Grant and the others to know that some of the beautiful young children they saw singing about Jesus in Kim Bui’s school would soon be sold as sex slaves just as their older sisters had been.

“How do they cope with who they’ve become in Christ with what they are going to be forced to do?” Grant asked Kim Bui.

She replied, “It’s a hopeless situation ... except for God.”

Grant believes every Christian should take a short-term missions trip, especially pastors.

“It gets rid of tunnel vision,” he said.

He believes that pastors are prone to getting so locked into the work of their churches that their focus becomes too narrowed.

“We’re called to the whole world,” he said. “(Going) refreshes you, pulls you out of that...

...tunnel, enhances your worldview, challenges you. Americans are prideful about who we are; we think we do everything right and that others should do things the way we do. A missions trip teaches you humility.”

He urges Christians in their local churches to consider sending their pastors on a missions trip every few years, and going themselves.

“You’re never the same,” he said. “It benefits the church — not in numbers — but in quality of relationships within the church and with the Lord!”

Grant said a missions trip brings opportunities to live out the Great Commission by praying, supporting and sending.

He, along with a handful of members from the Superior CMA church, will be going back to Cambodia next summer. He says that people there are open to hearing the Gospel, and that Cambodia is a bridge to Vietnam where “tremendous things are happening.”

In the meantime, he asks that Christians pray for the work of missionaries like Kim Bui and others there, and in particular for the missionaries’ children who are often very isolated.

“The heart and soul of CMA is to get this job done,” he said, “to establish strong national leadership and get out of the way.”