Southeast Asia 2020 Update
Currently, BMI has ministries occurring in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Our regional director is Dr. Joshua Nguyen, who lives with his family in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. Joshua is married to Linh, who serves in ministry with Joshua and is also the CEO of a consulting firm.
Joshua trains church leaders throughout SE Asia. In his home city of Ho Chi Minh, Joshua has developed a discipleship movement for business leaders. He also runs a special training program for young professionals called “Marketplace Biblical Mentoring Program.”
During the first quarter of the year, Joshua held several training events in SE Asia. In January, Joshua led a 7 Steps training for B.A. and M.A. students in Yangon (Myanmar) at South East Asia Mission College. In February, Joshua went to Indonesia, where he conducted a 7 Steps training event for 25 Indonesian pastors of a church planting network.
Following the COVID outbreak, all of Joshua’s travels have centered in Vietnam, with virtual training occurring throughout SE Asia. Jonathan Burnham was scheduled to be in SE Asia in March and April with a plethora of training events. All of these have been postponed until he can travel again.
Joshua has been creative in his use of technology. While under national COVID “lockdown” Joshua utilized his Facebook page to do an evangelistic sermon to non-Christian Vietnamese. His message ended up reaching 29,000 people with over 2,000 people requesting follow up communication.
Once the national “lockdown” ended, Joshua led 3 separate mission trips within Vietnam to 5 different mountain tribal groups (H’mong, M’nong, E-de, K’ho, and Stieng). These mission trips consisted of 2 parts: training tribal leaders who then shared the training with their churches; and meeting some basic urgent physical needs which have been caused by the COVID pandemic.
2020 marks the 5th year graduation of the Marketplace Biblical Mentoring Program. MBMP is an intensive one-year ministry training program for a carefully selected small group of young professionals. These young professionals are uniquely equipped to be effective ambassadors for Jesus in their places of business.
Joshua was able to conduct virtual training on “Technology and the Family” with key leaders from Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In addition, Joshua traveled to several Vietnam cities holding “Technology and the Family” training for 36 Vietnamese church pastors who, in turn, taught the material to their church congregations.
Joshua has also been working with the leaders of the Hanoi Bible College. Following the training on the 7 Steps, leaders of the college have been using this training to train local church leaders through their satellite Bible centers in Vietnam’s northern provinces.
Regarding his intentional personal mentoring, Joshua is personally mentoring 4 young business leaders and 6 key tribal pastors.