THE year is 1974. The Cold War in South-East Asia is heating up, and the communists are winning. The United States has abandoned Vietnam. Across the border, Cambodia’s own communist insurgency, the Khmer Rouge, has swept through the country, and only the besieged capital, Phnom Penh, remains free.
In Taiwan, an Englishman, Don Cormack, is studying Chinese for what he assumes will be a lifetime’s work, when the call comes: his mission agency, the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), wants people to go to Phnom Penh. A year earlier, a Cambodian convert to Christianity has somehow made it to the Keswick Convention to plead for help in his home country, where a revival has begun.
Protestant Christianity, introduced into Cambodia by Western missionaries in the 1920s, has limped along for decades, struggling to make inroads and suffering bouts of persecution. In 1970, there were only about 300 Protestant Christians, but, as the Khmer Rouge have closed in and the pro-Western regime has tottered, their numbers are rocketing. By the time Mr Cormack flies in with four OMF colleagues in 1974, their numbers in Phnom Penh have grown tenfold.
Don Cormack
“After hard years of sowing with weeping, which I did not have to endure, I was wading into a field ripe for harvest, a time of a great in-gathering,” he told the Church Times in April, 50 years to the day since the city fell to the Khmer Rouge.
The city was swollen by as many as two million refugees from the guerrillas. Wounded and sick soldiers were everywhere, hospitals were overflowing, and rubbish was piled up in the streets. Every day, the thump of shells and bombs got closer. In these frantic, terrifying months, thousands and thousands of ordinary Buddhist Cambodians became Christians.
Mr Cormack, in his book Killing Fields, Living Fields, calls it a “crisis of salvation that gripped the nation”. As one of a handful of Western missionaries, he found it exhausting and frenetic ministry: “It was like you had a clock ticking loudly.” Every night, he lay in bed listening to the artillery.
“There was a great sense of urgency,” he recalled, which he attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. Despite sneers about “rice Christians” — converting for material benefits — there was zero incentive to become a Christian in the final months of freedom before the Khmer Rouge took over the country, he said. “They knew how the communists, let alone most Cambodians, regarded Christians. But the knowledge that, with death and dying all around and the destruction of their temples and idols, ‘Jesus is alive’ animated them. The Holy Spirit was speaking hope, indicating a way through the panic, fear, and devastation.
“It seemed to them that something was ending and something new was dawning. Uniquely, the Christians appeared so preoccupied with the gospel as to be not all that preoccupied with the fast-deteriorating political [situation] and military crisis.”
Few, he said, realised (or cared) that they were putting a target on their backs for when the Khmer Rouge would inevitably introduce their atheistic regime. But, in the excitement and turmoil of 20th-century Cambodia — which had, since the 1940s, lurched from Japanese occupation, to French colonisation, to being an independent pro-Vietnamese kingdom, to being a pro-Western republic — few also imagined the nadir that would be the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge.
THE youth centre that Mr Cormack ran in Phnom Penh was called Good News, and that really was what they offered the people, he said. “We just let that trip off our tongue now, but then it was good news when there was only bad news.”
By the spring of 1975, there were queues of hundreds of Cambodians outside Phnom Penh’s churches. More than 100 were converting every week, and anyone who had been a believer for more than six months was expected to be leading a house church already. The missionaries and indigenous pastors were baptising as many people as they could, while stashing Bibles and other resources across the city as the Khmer Rouge made their final advance.
Eventually, Mr Cormack and other Westerners were ordered to fly out while they still could, leaving the thousands of new converts behind. Half a century later, it remains the most “agonising” experience of his life: “It throws up feelings of regret, remorse, guilt over wasted time, wasted opportunities, abandoning those you love to unimaginable agony, the pain of bereavement.”
The people who had become his friends, and learnt their language and customs, and had tried to integrate. “But, at the end of the day, when the chips are down, you are out,” he said, ruefully.
Most of the Christians whom he left in Phnom Penh would be dead within the year. Just a few days after Easter 1975, the Khmer Rouge swept to power. Quickly, they ushered in a nationwide genocide, as urbanites, professionals, and intellectuals — almost all who could conceivably be seen as vaguely pro-Western, or even simply not volubly pro-communist — were forcibly exiled to the countryside and murdered in their millions. Christians, along with the Buddhist monks who had resented their missonary work, were specially targeted.
Mr Cormack, back in London, was offered the chance to resume his Chinese studies and old life, but could not get the Cambodians out of his mind. Embarking on an intensive study of the language and culture, he determined to return one day to help to rebuild the shattered Cambodian Church.
HIS book traces an oral history of the Church since its beginnings in the 1920s, and tells of the privations, agonies, and despair of Christians as they sought to survive the genocide. Scattered in tiny collective farms across the rural hinterland, they suffered random, arbitrary violence and murder, committed by communist cadres who stalked the villages. Against the odds, some Christians survived and reconnected with Mr Cormack when he began a new mission in camps for Cambodian refugees on the Thai border, in 1979.
It was here that he began to interview the survivors — including Christians in their seventies and eighties who had stories to tell of the hard pre-war years for the Church — to save their testimonies for posterity. There were many conversions in these camps, even if motives were now more suspect, as many sought to boost their chances of gaining refuge in the West.
Don Cormack and his wife, Margie, in Cambodia, in 1980
Mr Cormack said that he felt compelled by God to record the stories he was told. “I cannot underestimate the compulsion I felt to record such precious testimony from their own lips. To not have done so would have been an act of disobedience,” he says.
Although most of the church leaders had been killed, the Khmer Rouge had ignored most of the older women, Mr Cormack recalled. “Christian grannies and aunties came to the fore: encouraging, teaching, rebuking, and praying.” News trickled over the border and into the camps of secret underground meetings of a remnant of believers, deep in the forests: “Whispered prayers and hymns, Bibles hidden in the thatch, even healings and miraculous deliverances.”
More than a decade later, after yet another new regime deposed the génocidaires but continued to suppress Christianity, Cambodia finally opened up again. Mr Cormack was invited back, this time as an Anglican priest, to plant and lead a new church in Phnom Penh. Returning broke his heart, he said: the friendly and innocent people he had known in the 1970s were gone, replaced by a harder and more materialistic generation, shaped by decades of war and violence.
As he strove to rebuild what had been lost, young Cambodians — a baby boom followed the genocide — were responding to the gospel again. Throughout this time, and into his retirement in the later 1990s, Mr Cormack was determined to write the story of faith in Cambodia.
“I think the best thing I ever did is spend a decade or two writing it all down and sifting through it all. I think that’s the best thing I’ve done for them,” he said. “And maybe that’s why the Lord took me there.”
Today, there are as many as 400,000 Christians in Cambodia, and even the Prime Minister (a former member of a Khmer Rouge cadre) attended the 2023 centenary celebrations of Christianity’s introduction to the country, at a stadium in Phnom Penh. Despite the sorrows and trials, Mr Cormack said that he remained deeply grateful for God’s calling to serve the people of Cambodia. For all that he had given, he felt that had received so much more.
Seeing God call so many people, despite its often coming at cost to their lives, “underlined the truth of the gospel”, he reflected. And, having learned to rely on God in prayer and solitude in Cambodia and the camps, he found that he needed this even more back home in retirement. “With all the memories, the experiences, the regrets . . . just being able to really pray. That’s what has changed me.”
An updated edition of Killing Fields, Living Fields: An Unfinished Portrait of the Cambodian Church by Don Cormack was published in April 2025 by Dictum Press at £12.99 (Church Times Bookshop £11.69); 978-1-8380972-3-3.