Dear CCAM Partners and Friends,

On New Year’s Day, Pastor Kakada Toun led a delegation of Christians to celebrate Christmas with inmates at Trawpeh’ng Tlawng C-3 Prison in Kompong Cham province. Click here to view our mini-documentary video.

This delegation was made up of the youth group from Russey Keo Baptist Church, a visiting mission team from Australia, and students from Cambodian Christian Arts Ministry School (CCAMS). All of these people had to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to travel 5 hours from Phnom Penh, often on bumpy roads, to get to the prison, share their presentations, and then repeat the same trip back again!

During the program, Pastor Kakada thanked everyone in the delegation who had sacrificed to make this event possible, especially mentioning the anonymous Cambodian Christian refugees living in Australia, Singapore and the United States, who had made generous financial donations.

The Russey Keo youth group performed a dance to a song telling the Christmas story, followed by a drama showing the spiritual warfare in the heavens, as God’s angels protected the newborn Son of God from King Herod’s attempts to murder Him. Students from Cambodian Christian Arts Ministry School performed two dances, “Proclamation Drum Dance,” that calls all people everywhere to receive God’s Christmas gift of the birth of His Son Jesus Christ, and “The New Covenant in My Blood,” that describes Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to pay for the sins of the world. A member of the visiting mission team from Australia preached an evangelistic message, and gift boxes of food and personal supplies were distributed to the prisoners by the mission team.

Inmates who had been at the prison for a long time were allowed to come out of their cells to view the presentations, seated inside a fenced courtyard. Newer inmates watched it from the barred windows of their cells. A few prisoners soon to be released from jail were allowed to come outside the courtyard fence into another enclosed area to join a music ensemble providing music for the worship songs. After each song, dance, drama, or message, prisoners in all three groups clapped enthusiastically, especially whenever John, the youngest dancer on the CCAMS team, performed a solo!

Pastor Kakada has been sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ at this prison for the past six years. Most of the inmates who were allowed to come out of their cells have already believed in Jesus and are attending regular discipleship classes while still in prison. Some of those prisoners spoke personal words to our students, encouraging them to follow Jesus faithfully, not committing crimes like they had done, which condemned them to long prison sentences.

Pastor Kakada reminded the prisoners that, while living on this earth, one’s body may be locked in a prison to pay for one’s sinful deeds, but by confessing one’s sins and believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, one’s soul may be forgiven and set free both now and forever! He asked those who wanted to receive Jesus as their Savior to stand up or raise their hands. Most of the prisoners seated in the prison courtyard were already Christians. However, many voices began crying out from the barred windows on the second floor of the prison, saying “We want to receive Jesus!” So Pastor Kakada led them to pray to the Lord Jesus Christ, as they repeated after him sentence by sentence. When the pastor asked how many of them had prayed, they reported, “A lot of us!”

During the closing song, the hands of those prisoners who were still locked in their cells reached out through the bars of the windows, waving in time with the music, along with the prisoners clapping and waving in the courtyard.

Then as the visitors filed by the courtyard fence on their way out of the prison, the grateful prisoners reached their hands through the barbed wire to shake hands with them and speak words of thanks.

Please pray for God to continue blessing C-3 prison, Russey Keo Baptist Church, Cambodian Christian Arts Ministry School, the Australian Mission Team, and the many donors and mission volunteers from around the world who help support such outreaches!

And all of us at CCAMS pray God’s continued blessings upon all of you, our faithful partners and friends who read these newsletters!

Gioia on behalf of the CCAMS Family