Confessions of a Vietnamese Baptist preacher.

I was born in Bac-lieu, Vietnam, in 1954 to a Buddhist family who participated in ancestor worship. During my childhood years, we lived in the government compound in Soctrang about 150 miles south of Saigon.

My father was the driver for our city's mayor. I was twenty years old in 1975 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and because I had served in the military police force for the South Vietnamese government, I was placed in a reeducation camp, where I stayed for almost a year. After this imprisonment, the officials instructed me not to return to live in Soctrang. I was forced to live in a rural area and do manual labor. I grew tired of country living and returned illegally to my parents' home. The government officials frequently searched the home, looking for me. They also pressured my parents to turn me in.

In June 1979, I left Vietnam. I boarded a small, twenty-one-foot-long boat and spent thirteen days and nights on the ocean. With the others on board, I was finally rescued by a U.S. Navy ship and taken to Singapore. I stayed there for three months, during which time I filed resettlement paperwork and with the help of the United States Embassy, I flew to Houston, Texas, on September 16, 1979.

My brother, who was living in Houston, met me at the airport, and when we arrived at his home, he instructed me to kneel at his doorstep and thank God for my safe arrival. I knelt and prayed to Buddha. I quickly learned that my brother was now a Christian, and he boldly witnessed to me of his new faith. I argued with him, avoided him, and refused to even listen to him.

In order to learn English, I attended English as a Second Language classes at Sagemont Baptist Church, where a Christian man befriended me. Because of his influence, I soon professed my faith in Christ and was baptized.

Not long after becoming a Christian, I felt called by God to ministry. I eventually quit my job as a machinist and enrolled at East Texas Baptist University in Marshall, Texas. I began college in the spring of 1983 and began my first pastorate that October. For three years, I pastored a Vietnamese Mission Church in Longview, Texas. My greatest difficulty in the pulpit was my stuttering. While I could preach and speak without stuttering, I could not read scripture out loud without doing so. Fortunately, the congregation was gracious and accepting.

In 1986, I moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I married and was ordained that same year. From 1987 to 1990, I served as pastor of Travis Avenue Baptist Church's Vietnamese Mission. During those years, I took the required preaching courses and sought to find my voice as a preacher. My great preaching heroes were George Truett, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, R. T. Kendall, and Chuck Swindoll. Like my heroes, I focused my energies into expository preaching. I offered my congregation in-depth analysis of scriptural texts, and I shared with them the detailed truths I discovered from preparing word studies. I enjoyed this type of Bible study, and I found my own needs being meet in this type of preaching.

From another of my preaching heroes, Travis Avenue's pastor Joel Gregory, I learned the value of sermon delivery. I enjoyed listening to his wonderfully rich voice. I soon began imitating his preaching, both his delivery style and his content. In fact, I even preached a few of his sermons to my own congregation.

In 1990, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and began pastoring the Vietnamese Mission at Immanuel Baptist Church. Today, the mission has over 100 members. We average fifty to sixty in worship each week and have about thirty-five in Sunday School. Most of the adult members work two or three jobs. Their work keeps them busy, so we do not have mid-week services. We meet on Sunday morning for Sunday School and worship, and we often have lunch together, which is followed sometimes by training sessions. Like many of my church members, I also work three jobs. In addition to being their pastor, I work for an insurance company and as a freelance editorial consultant.

When I first arrived in Nashville, I continued using the preaching style that I had adopted as my own. In 1993, after ten years of ministry, I attended a conference in California and heard Rick Warren speak. I found his views on ministry refreshing, and I returned home and reevaluated my own ministry. I discovered that my sermon preparation and delivery suited my own personality and my own style, but my preaching did little for the church members. Expository preaching was not meeting the needs of my Vietnamese congregation. I began to think about the message they needed to hear, and I reflected on how best to communicate the gospel to them.

Most members of my church converted to Christianity from a Buddhist background, and many of them had participated in ancestor worship. As new Christians, they knew little about the Bible or about Christianity. My in-depth textual analysis left them confused, and my expository sermons did not help them to grow in their faith.

I decided that my preaching style should change, and I gradually shifted my sermon content and presentation in order to meet the needs of my people. I now preach topical sermons, which are harder for me to prepare and harder for me to deliver, but these sermons communicate the gospel in a simple, practical way to my church members.

In preparing to preach, I begin with one biblical truth that I want to communicate, and I draw stories from Vietnamese culture and literature as well as from current world events to illustrate that idea. For example, the Sunday after the death of Pope John Paul II, my sermon addressed the theme of honor. I spoke of the great contributions the pope had made and how millions of people around the world mourned his passing. Much honor and respect was being given to this great leader. I then explained that John Paul was being honored because of his great love for people and his commitment to serve Christ. From this illustration, I moved to talk about how we too can find honor and respect.

The strongest emphasis in my preaching is application. I offer to my congregation specific ways in which they can live out the gospel message. I share with them practical guidance. In my sermon on honor, I encouraged my listeners to look at each person as a creation of God and to love that person, regardless of differences or disagreements.

To support the theme of my sermons, I interweave biblical texts throughout my illustrations and my application. I keep my sermons simple. I shape them so that non-believers and new believers can understand what I am saying. I preach in a relaxed conversational style. I ask questions--I verbalize the hard questions that my church members are asking themselves: What is our purpose here on earth? Why does God not spare us from living amidst death and destruction and take us to heaven? I try not to offer simplistic answers to these questions, but I do try to provide encouragement and support.

I also preach in an emotional style. I share my inner feelings, and I find my congregation responds by expressing their emotions as well. When we have good news in our congregation, we rejoice and celebrate. When I preach about sin, I often cry, and my congregation cries with me.

In my twenty-two years of ministry, I have preached hundreds of sermons, but only in the past twelve years have I learned to preach in a way that clearly and simply communicates the gospel message and meets the needs of my congregation. When I was a student at Southwestern, I heard Russell Dilday, the seminary's president, say: "Leaders must be learners." Throughout my ministry, I have thought often about the truth of those words. As a church leader, I am still learning, and as a preacher, my goal is to continue learning as much as I can, from as many people as I can, and as often as I can.

Ngoc Ha is the mission pastor of the Vietnamese Mission at Immanuel Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee.