HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (ABP) — Baptists in Vietnam reached a milestone when they held their first legal national conference Jan. 10-12.
An estimated 400 people from 13 southern provinces and cities were expected for the meeting in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly the South Vietnamese capital known as Saigon.
Delegates of the Grace-Southern Baptist General Confederation were to elect an executive board, approve a charter, and formulate rules, according to the state-controlled Vietnam News Agency. All are legitimizing efforts, designed to help the group earn recognition as a bona fide religious organization from the nation's communist government.
The meeting comes only a year after the Vietnam Baptist Protestant Church first received an official operating license. But Baptist churches and groups have existed in the country for decades.
Much of the nation's Baptist community owes its roots to Southern Baptist Convention-supported missionaries who came over in the 1950s. The first Baptist church in Vietnam was organized in Saigon in 1962. By 1975, it had birthed 16 congregations encompassing more than 10,000 members, VNA reported.
In 2006, Agence France-Presse reported that Vietnamese government officials had issued “certificates of religious practice” to two Protestant churches: the Vietnam Seventh-Day Adventist Church and the Vietnam Grace Baptist Church. The churches had been operating normally for years but did not have legal status prior to their licensing, the report said.
Earlier that year, Vietnam was removed from the State Department's list of “Countries of Particular Concern” for the world's most egregious violators of religious freedom. Department officials had added it to that list in 2004.
But life for the country's fewer than 1 million Protestants remains difficult, according to communiqués from Baptist organizations there. Nearly 85 percent of the country's 85 million people identify as Buddhist, and in 2001 and 2004, huge demonstrations against religious persecution triggered violence and a mass exodus to surrounding countries.
Several representatives of the SBC attended the meeting, according to Baptist Press, including Frank Page, SBC president; Jerry Rankin, president of the SBC's International Mission Board; and Chinh Van Dao, a Georgia pastor and president of the National Fellowship of Vietnamese Baptist Churches in America.