Faith
From War Widow to Believer: How One Vietnamese Family Changed Hundreds of Lives
Faith Facts
- A Vietnamese widow whose husband was murdered by soldiers during the Vietnam War was baptized in the same river where he died, after her granddaughter’s life was transformed by American missionaries
- The Connor English School in Can Tho, Vietnam now serves 610 children and has become a bridge for Gospel outreach, with many students and their families coming to faith
- American Christians sponsored Vietnamese students through education programs, creating a ripple effect that has strengthened the Church of Christ in Vietnam for two decades
A chance encounter resulted in her husband’s death. Four decades later, another chance meeting led to her granddaughter’s rebirth — and a chain reaction that would impact hundreds of lives for the better.
Tran Thi Ket lived a simple life along the banks of the Hau River, which flows across the Mekong Delta from Cambodia to the South China Sea. It was 1962, and Can Tho was part of South Vietnam, a fledgling republic locked in a brutal, 19-year war with the communist North.
One day, soldiers forced Ket’s husband to row them up the river. Then they shot him.
He was 44 and left behind seven children, from 6 months to 19 years old. Ket, 37, was devastated, said her granddaughter, Ngan Huynh.
“She put his body in a little boat, and she paddled it for hours to a station where the soldiers were located. She just asked them, ‘Why? Why?'”
The soldiers gave no answer. So Ket went home and buried her husband. Later, soldiers shot and killed one of her sons on suspicion that he had collaborated with the enemy. Ket protested the war and, as a result, endured jail and torture.
In 1975, the war ended, and South Vietnam was no more. Ket’s surviving children and their children, including Ngan, did as they had before the communist takeover, eking out a living on the banks of the river.
“I thought my life was just like the lives of many other people there,” Ngan said. Then her mother and stepfather moved about 100 miles northeast — to the former Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honor of the North’s leader — so Ngan could attend high school. To help her family, she took various jobs, including waitressing at a small café.
One day she served a customer named Tom Tune. He’d spent much of his life sailing the waters of the South Pacific as a missionary. He’d come to Vietnam to supervise construction of a medical mission boat bound for the Mekong River in Cambodia. He and a small group of Vietnamese Christians worshiped together, and he was helping some local kids improve their English. Did she want to join them?
Tune met Ngan’s family, including Ket, who had come to despise and distrust Americans. They were reminders of the conflict that took her husband and son.
“But with Tom, it was completely different,” Ngan said. The missionary exuded love and sincerity. He got permission to teach Ngan English using stories from the Bible. She started attending church services.
In 2006, she told Tune that she wanted to be baptized.
“He rented a big bus, and we went straight to the beach,” Ngan said.
Members of Churches of Christ in the U.S. sponsored Ngan through a program called Tom’s Kids. The support allowed her to do something she “could never have dreamed of because my family was so poor,” she said. She moved to Searcy, Ark., and enrolled at Harding University. She graduated in 2011 with a degree in accounting. Then she earned a Master of Business Administration from Oklahoma Christian University.
Rather than search for a job in the U.S., “I felt that I had to do something to give back for the kindness of Tom and all the wonderful people in America,” Ngan said.
“Although I am not their biological family, (they) loved me as they loved God’s children.”
During her time in the U.S., Ngan met Dr. John Bailey and his wife, Rose. Bailey, a longtime Texas dentist, preacher and medical missionary, founded a nonprofit, Body & Soul Ministries, to provide medical services and education for impoverished children around the globe.
The Baileys helped Ngan launch the Connor English School, named after one of their grandchildren, in Can Tho. Since its founding in 2015, the school has grown to two campuses and serves 610 children, ages 4 to 20.
“I can never repay them. I am very happy that the English school can be a place that welcomes children from difficult circumstances — just like I was.”
‘Now I’m an English teacher’
In a brightly lit, immaculate classroom on a Thursday night, a teacher at the Connor English School projected sentences on a whiteboard. Brave volunteers stepped forward to write a verb in the simple present tense in the blank. The teacher gently corrected them when needed — the museum closes, not close, for example — and explained how the noun dictates the verb’s ending.
It was one of nearly a dozen classes, from intro to advanced levels, taught at the school, a pair of side-by-side structures four stories high. Ngan supervises a staff of 42, including 32 English teachers, all licensed by the government.
Some of the teachers, including Yen Nguyen and Kim Chau, once were Tom’s Kids.
“I couldn’t even speak English when I met Tom. Now I’m an English teacher.”
Nguyen recalled Tune patiently guiding them through the stories of the Israelites and their wanderings in the wilderness before they reached the Promised Land. Supporters of Tom’s Kids helped her and Chau travel to Singapore and earn degrees from Four Seas College of Bible and Missions, a ministry training school overseen by the Jurong Church of Christ.
Nguyen found the Christian Evidences classes particularly meaningful. She wasn’t used to discussions of faith in an academic setting.
Now, she said, “I’m really, really convinced that there’s a God.”
Government rules restrict Bible teaching at the English school. However, Ngan said, “We have had some students who studied with us, grew up and later joined us in studying the Bible.
“I especially want to help children who are facing truly difficult circumstances, to be a bridge that helps change their lives so they can know that God’s love is always somewhere beside us if we seek for him.”
‘This has greatly strengthened our church’
On his first day in Vietnam, Steve Hawley told one of the English teachers, “You can help me learn Vietnamese.”
Tom Tune quickly corrected him: “You are not here to learn Vietnamese. You are here to help them learn English.”
“He was absolutely right,” said Hawley, a teacher and coach at Westbury Christian School in Houston and member of the Westbury Church of Christ.
Hawley had met Tune more than three decades earlier. Tune’s son, Mike, preached for the Maple Hill Church of Christ in Lebanon, Tenn., which Hawley attended when he taught at nearby Friendship Christian School. The church supported Tom Tune’s mission work in the Cook Islands, and Hawley invited the missionary to speak to his classes at Friendship Christian.
Hawley made his first trip to Can Tho in 2011 at Tom’s request.
“Tom was insistent that the best way for the church to become financially independent was for the young people to learn English so they could get better jobs,” Hawley said. Having an administrator with degrees from the U.S. was helpful, Tune told him, but a visiting educator from the U.S. would be a big draw for potential students.
“People are attracted to Westerners in the sense of wanting to speak and practice English,” Hawley said.
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam has become a popular destination for tourists from Europe, Canada and the U.S. The tourism industry is booming, and as Ngan put it, “Parents want to see that foreigners can understand their child when they speak English.”
Hawley spends about a month per year in Vietnam.
“The best thing I do here is have conversations with the older kids, which is what they need. I really work with pronunciations, which are very poor when you have learned English from people who have never been outside of Vietnam.”
The Connor school charges tuition, but Ngan helps children in need, including those who worship with the Church of Christ in Can Tho, to attend. Her mother, Huynh Hong Hue, known as “Miss Eight,” also is a top-notch recruiter and promoter for the school, Hawley said.
“Almost every person in our church has studied at the English center. This has greatly strengthened our church. We have two precious little girls who are coming now because the grandfather, who is Buddhist, told me last summer, ‘We see how the young people from the church who study at the English Center act. That is how we want our granddaughters to act.'”
“There is no better advertisement.”
God’s gentle miracles
For Ngan — now 41, married and the mother of three girls, ages 7, 5 and 4 — meeting Tom Tune in that café in Ho Chi Minh City two decades ago was not a chance encounter.
“I believe in my heart that God is the Almighty One who has done things that humans could never imagine. God turns the impossible into the possible in such a gentle and wonderful way.”
“When I returned to my old village after studying in America, the neighbors came to congratulate me, my grandmother and my mother. My mother told them the story of how I became a child of God and how God’s people … helped me go to school so that I could gain knowledge to use for my future.”
That story has power, Ngan said, and it’s led to interest in the Gospel. After her return, many of Ngan’s family and friends were baptized.
Then, as the Can Tho Church of Christ worshiped on a Sunday morning in 2010, Ket and 13 other people asked to be immersed. Tune baptized Ket in the Hau River, the same waters where her husband died.
Ket passed away two years later at age 87. Tune, age 83, died a year after that. Mike Tune, now retired and living in Lebanon, Tenn., continues the work, making regular visits to Vietnam to encourage the church.
“It’s thrilling to watch Dad’s dream come alive in so many ways,” Mike Tune said.
As for Ket, “My mother often tells me, ‘God has wiped away her tears.’ God has lifted her burdens, and in God we have greater value.”
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Faith Facts
- A rare glacial flood has killed or left missing approximately 6,000 people across Nepal and China, highlighting the unpredictability of life and the urgent need for spiritual preparedness.
- The sudden tragedy serves as a biblical reminder of Christ’s teaching about the necessity of watchfulness and readiness for His return, as life can change in an instant.
- Christians are called to respond with both prayer and action, supporting relief efforts while recognizing natural disasters as opportunities to reflect on eternal priorities.
A devastating glacial flood has swept across regions of Nepal and China, claiming the lives of or leaving missing approximately 6,000 people in what experts are calling an exceptionally rare natural disaster. The sudden nature of the catastrophe has left communities reeling and families searching for loved ones.
The tragedy unfolded with little warning, as massive volumes of water were released from glacial formations, cascading through valleys and villages with destructive force. Entire communities were caught off guard by the rapidly advancing floodwaters.
For Christians observing this heartbreaking event from afar, the disaster carries profound spiritual lessons rooted in Scripture. The suddenness of this tragedy echoes Christ’s own warnings about the unpredictability of life and the certainty of eternity.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly emphasized the importance of spiritual readiness. He taught that no one knows the day or hour of His return, and that life’s circumstances can change without warning. This glacial flood demonstrates that truth in the starkest terms.
The Bible consistently calls believers to live with an eternal perspective rather than becoming consumed by temporary earthly concerns. When thousands can be swept away in a single day by forces beyond human control, the fragility of our earthly existence becomes undeniable.
James 4:14 poses the question: “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” This ancient wisdom takes on fresh urgency when confronted with the reality of 6,000 souls whose earthly journeys ended or were dramatically altered in moments.
Christian response to such disasters should be twofold: practical compassion and spiritual reflection. Believers are called to support relief efforts through prayer, financial giving, and when possible, direct assistance to those affected by this catastrophe.
Yet the tragedy also serves as a divine reminder to examine our own lives. Are we living with eternity in view? Have we made peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ? Are we sharing the Gospel with those around us who may face their own sudden end?
The biblical account of Noah’s flood stands as perhaps the most dramatic historical parallel, when God judged the earth through water while preserving those who trusted in His provision. While natural disasters today are not necessarily direct judgments, they do remind us that God remains sovereign over creation and that this fallen world groans under the weight of sin.
For the families directly affected in Nepal and China, this is a time of unimaginable grief and hardship. Christian believers worldwide should lift these regions in prayer, asking God to comfort the mourning, provide for the displaced, and open hearts to the eternal hope found only in Christ.
Natural disasters also demonstrate the limitations of human power and planning. Advanced technology and modern infrastructure provide no guarantee of safety when nature’s forces are unleashed. This reality should humble us and direct our ultimate trust toward the One who controls the winds and the waves.
The sudden nature of this glacial flood also challenges American Christians to consider whether we are storing up treasures in heaven or on earth. Material possessions, career achievements, and earthly status can vanish in an instant, but a life built on faith in Christ has eternal significance.
As we process this tragedy, we must resist the temptation toward either callous indifference or paralyzing fear. Instead, biblical faith calls us to sober watchfulness combined with confident hope in God’s ultimate goodness and justice.
The deaths and displacement of 6,000 people serve as a stark reminder that this world is not our final home. Christians are called to be pilgrims passing through, with our citizenship ultimately in heaven and our hope anchored in the resurrection promise of Jesus Christ.
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Faith Facts
- The U.S. Congress officially endorsed Robert Aitken’s Bible in 1782, recommending it to the American people during a time when Bibles were scarce due to the Revolutionary War.
- The Catholic Church formally condemned Blaise Pascal’s influential “Provincial Letters” for their defense of Jansenism and criticism of Jesuit casuistry.
- Pioneer missionary Samuel Marsden survived a shipwreck while traveling to establish Christian ministry among indigenous peoples.
This week marks the anniversary of several pivotal moments in Christian history that shaped the faith across continents and centuries. From congressional action in early America to theological controversies in Europe, these events reveal the enduring impact of Christian thought and witness.
In 1782, the Continental Congress took the remarkable step of endorsing a Bible published by Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken. This endorsement came during the Revolutionary War, when British blockades made imported Bibles scarce in the American colonies.
Congress recommended Aitken’s English Bible “to the inhabitants of the United States,” marking one of the few times in American history that the federal government officially endorsed a religious text. The action reflected the Christian character of the founding era and the practical needs of a nation seeking spiritual resources during wartime.
The Aitken Bible stands as a testament to the integral role of Christian faith in early American life. Today, original copies of this congressionally endorsed Bible are valuable collector’s items that remind Americans of their nation’s spiritual heritage.
In a separate event, the Catholic Church moved to condemn the “Provincial Letters” written by French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal. These influential letters, written in defense of Jansenism, critiqued certain Jesuit teachings on grace and moral theology.
Pascal’s sharp wit and compelling prose made the letters widely read across Europe. However, church authorities viewed them as theologically problematic, particularly regarding questions of divine grace, human will, and moral decision-making.
The condemnation highlighted ongoing tensions within Catholic theology during the 17th century. Despite official censure, Pascal’s writings continued to influence Christian thought and remain studied today for their literary merit and theological insight.
Additionally, this week marks the anniversary of missionary Samuel Marsden’s shipwreck. Marsden, known as the “Apostle of New Zealand,” survived the harrowing experience while traveling to bring the Gospel to indigenous peoples in the Pacific.
His perseverance through such trials exemplified the commitment of early missionaries who risked everything to spread Christian faith. Marsden would go on to establish significant ministry work that laid foundations for Christianity in New Zealand.
These historical moments remind contemporary believers of the sacrifices, controversies, and governmental recognition that have marked Christianity’s journey through the centuries. From congressional chambers to storm-tossed seas, the faith has endured through both official endorsement and official opposition.
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Faith Facts
- The European Parliament hosted a conference focused exclusively on the future of Christian communities in Syria
- Church leaders, EU policymakers, and Syrian representatives gathered to address the plight of persecuted believers in the war-torn nation
- The conference represents a rare institutional acknowledgment of the targeted persecution Christians face in the Middle East
In a significant move that recognizes the dire situation facing believers in the Middle East, the European Parliament convened a special conference dedicated to the future of Christians in Syria. The gathering brought together an important coalition of voices committed to protecting religious freedom in one of the world’s most dangerous regions for people of faith.
The conference united church leaders, European Union policymakers, and Syrian representatives under one roof. This collaboration signals a growing awareness among Western institutions that Christian communities in Syria face existential threats that demand immediate attention and coordinated response.
For years, Christians in Syria have endured unspeakable persecution, displacement, and violence as civil war and Islamic extremism have ravaged their ancient homeland. These communities, some of the oldest Christian populations in the world, have seen their numbers decimated through targeted attacks, forced conversions, and mass exodus.
The European Parliament’s decision to host this conference represents more than symbolic support. It demonstrates a concrete commitment to engaging with the crisis facing Syrian Christians and exploring pathways to ensure their survival and flourishing in the land where Christianity first took root and spread.
The participation of Syrian representatives adds crucial on-the-ground perspective to discussions that often occur far removed from the realities facing believers in conflict zones. Their voices provide testimony to both the suffering endured and the resilience of faith communities determined to maintain their witness despite extraordinary hardship.
This conference comes at a critical juncture when the international community must decide whether it will stand with persecuted Christians or allow these historic communities to vanish from the lands they have inhabited since the time of the apostles. The outcome of such discussions will shape not only the future of Syrian Christians but also send a message about Western commitment to religious freedom worldwide.
American Christians should pay close attention to these developments and support efforts to protect our brothers and sisters in Christ who face persecution simply for bearing the name of Jesus. Their struggle is our struggle, and their faithfulness under fire should inspire us to boldly stand for our own values here at home.
Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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