Our SALT participant, Andy, who left for home last month left me a copy of Brian Maher’s 2012 book Cry of the Gecko. It’s an accounting of Christian Mission in Cambodia and documents a lot of precious history that would easily be lost otherwise.

MCC is mentioned more than a few times (including a recounting of the schoolkits incident and an account of how Jon Clemens found out about his child’s birth) but beyond those direct mentions, there are a lot of familiar peer organizations, partners, church leaders, and friends.

It’s definitely worth a read to connect the dots for those who had a part in or want a deeper understanding of Christianity in Cambodia. However, the book does have some organizational issues. Cry of the Gecko can’t quite decide if it’s in chronological order, organized by topic, or follows the meandering nature of storytelling. I sympathize with Brian here as the subject doesn’t lend itself well to one approach – you can’t divorce the stories from the climatic events in the region and it also would also be quite disjointed to not tell the full story of a person, church, or movement when they come up. And related stories, even from years before or after, add context to the history being shared.

This is a groundbreaking work that compiles a lot of stories and facts from first person sources around an undocumented slice of Christian history. It’s also an easy read that feels like a well-cited fireside chat with the author that meanders a bit with the natural flow of storytelling.

I want to highlight a few sections that caught my attention…

• The Credits: I knew it was going to be a good book when I saw that MCC’s own Susie Kauffman was the first person to receive special thanks. Now I think about it, I think I remember her talking about working with Brian on this book during my first term. Susie is the MCC Cambodia alumni with the most non-consecutive terms of service in Cambodia and is generally a fantastic person.
• Ancient Church: Christianity didn’t arrive here with the French colonizers* but over a millennium before by disciplines of the Assyrian church. In 450 AD, representatives from the Indochina region participated in an Assyrian church conference that required at least 70,000 Christians**. Mon-Khmer minorities have records of creation accounts, fall accounts, and flood epics. The Cham people had ancient terms for the trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What we don’t know is what happened to these ancient churches?
• Comrade Duch: Being in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge Tribunal was a powerful experience for me and I remember the anger many Cambodians expressed at Duch’s witness. During the Khmer Rouge regime Duch was the head of S-21, or Toul Sleng, where he oversaw the interrogation, torture, and execution of an estimated 20,000 people. Years later, Duch converted to Christianity, turned himself in after being discovered by a journalist, and was the only one on trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal who admitted his crimes against humanity. The reaction to Duch’s witness at the tribunal was powerful – I remember one person in Prey Veng saying something along the lines of, ‘He thinks he’ll escape Karma by becoming a Christian but he’ll suffer for the next thousand lives for what he did.’ Until he died in 2020, Duch – a convicted war criminal – was the highest profile Cambodian Christian and that definitely shaped public perceptions of Christianity. Having been in Prey Veng during the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, it was very helpful to read Brian’s account of broader discussions about it and get a deeper understanding of how Cambodian Christians processed this.
• Arrested!: There’s a chapter about Brian getting arrested by the Cambodian authorities. I remember this event well because an MCC service worker was also arrested with Brian but I was surprised on reading the chapter on how wrongly I remembered the rest of the details. I had remembered that they were intentionally doing civil disobedience but, actually, they were just protesting the eviction of a poor community.
• Cambodian Christians: The book includes accounts of Cambodian Christians before the Khmer Rouge, during their genocidal rule, and during the 1980s when Christianity was illegal. These are precious, inspiring, and humbling testimonies. Many of them are recorded in English in Brian’s book for the first time (and a few I suspect are recorded in writing for the first time here).

*Not with Colonizers: As Canada acknowledges sins committed in the name of Christianity by residential schools, I think it’s important for followers of Christ to remember that discipleship was not always coupled with colonialism. Starting in the Gospel, powers and principalities have always sought to usurp and twist Jesus’s teachings into their exact opposite. But, as promised in Isaiah 61 and fulfilled in Luke 4, Jesus was sent to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for the captives, and liberation for the prisoners.

**Assyrian Church Conference: Going on a tangent here but – wow – Christians from this region traveled to modern day Iraqi to represent their churches in 450 AD. There’s a lot of attention given to Marco Polo but I don’t think we talk enough about ancient Christians crossing the world without business or state backing.

In any case, there is a lot of information in this book, it’s told in a very approachable way, but it’s not the most organized. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone with an interest in Christianity in Cambodia or, more broadly, Christianity in the ‘developing world’.