As a missions agency, MTW focuses on planting churches. We believe the Church is God’s instrument for advancing His kingdom across the world (our vision) and making disciples of all nations (our mission). Therefore, all that we do flows into, rests within, or flows out of the local church.

Yet as God’s primary kingdom agent, the Church is responsible for demonstrating God’s kingdom ethics through acts of mercy and the pursuit of justice. Caring for the poor and vulnerable is not only a command from God (found in both the Old and New Testaments)—it is a natural expression of our love and worship of Him.

We believe planting churches and establishing ministries of mercy and justice go hand-in-hand and around the world MTW teams are building churches and mercy ministries that support one another. One such field is Cambodia.

Over the course of 18 years, MTW’s team in Phnom Penh has planted multiple village and city churches, established a presbytery, opened a medical clinic, and created a dorm ministry for girls who have been victims of sex trafficking. As a result, the gospel goes forth, the Church continues to grow, and people believe in Jesus.

Local Churches that Have a Passion for Mercy Ministry

Paul Lee, MTW’s regional director for Southeast Asia, joined the Cambodia team in 2010 during the early years of their church planting efforts. MTW missionaries had partnered with a local church in Phnom Penh that shared their vision of multiplying churches across the city and the country. For the next few years, MTW and their church partner focused on leadership development, accountability, and support for local church planters. Their work with national pastors eventually led to 13 church plants and a new presbytery committed to showing Christ’s compassion to their villages. According to Paul, each pastor planted a church understanding that neither Scripture nor Jesus divorces the Church’s job to preach the gospel from its responsibility to take care of people’s needs.

“They go out into the community, and they get to know the people there … They get a feel for the felt needs and one way that they want to do ministry is to really address those felt needs … That’s something that was very important to the Cambodian pastors and I learned a lot from them. But I really appreciated that as they thought about church, they really thought about loving their neighbor,” says Paul.

Whether it was providing food during the COVID-19 pandemic, education for children living in poverty, lodging for college students, medical care for the sick, relationships for the lonely, or help for people’s day to day concerns, the pastors established mercy as the heartbeat of the churches from the beginning.

Creating Mercy Ministries in an International Church Planting Context

This focus on caring for the local community opened the door for MTW missionaries Mark and Laura Ambrose to launch mercy ministries that provided resources the church couldn’t while strengthening local congregations. Their first initiative—and the reason they went to Cambodia—was to open a permanent medical clinic.

Mark is a doctor with a background in urban family medicine. After spending two decades providing medical care in the inner city of Chicago, he and Laura decided to use their gifts and expertise overseas.

They had one condition—they wanted to build up the local church.

“We just want to propagate the church and that’s when MTW came in. We knew about MTW and then we sat down with them and were like, ‘This is exactly what we want to do.’ We want the church to go forth and everything needs to either stem from or revert back to the local church.”

According to Mark, the first principle in developing any mercy ministry on the mission field is to find a good national partner.

“You have to. That’s crucial,” says Mark. “You have to have somebody to know what they’re doing, who knows the culture, who can navigate all the stuff that we as foreigners just don’t know. Even you’ve been here for 20 years, it doesn’t matter. You need to have a solid national partner … whose vision is similar so you guys can get along. … So if it takes you five years to find a national partner, that’s much better than trying to do this on your own.”

Fortunately, Mark was able to connect quickly with a local pediatrician named Kheng Sisanara, known as Dr. Nara, who specialized in pediatric sexual trauma and ran a small clinic that worked with girls who had been trafficked. She also desired to connect the medical clinic to the local church and the two began working together.

Since Mark and Nara were developing the medical clinic in a church planting context, they sought buy-in from the local pastors. Mark explained the vision and asked if they would be willing to partner with the clinic. The church’s main role was to serve as a referral network where each congregation would have a designated point of contact who Mark could connect the patients with and who would invite them into the church community. In return, the clinic would provide medical services to the congregation.

Mark’s second principle when building a mercy ministry, and particularly a medical clinic, is to have a niche. He encourages missions teams and local churches to look around and figure out a major need, medical or otherwise, in their context that needs to be addressed.

“Maybe you’re in a part of the world that has leprosy and nobody wants to minister to lepers … or what about AIDS? People still have a big stigma about AIDS in Africa and in other parts of the world. You can say, ‘Hey! These people are marginalized. How can we help these people come into the church and be part of the body of Christ? They belong.’”

Mark, Nara, and the local pastors all had a heart for girls who had been sexually exploited. They partnered with NGOs that specialized in sex trafficking rescue and rehabilitation.

Finally, Mark’s last principle for establishing a mercy ministry on the mission field is to involve other people—both staff and donors. Starting a medical clinic is expensive on the front end and the Ambroses started a capital campaign to raise funds for a building and equipment. Fortunately, Mark had a wide network of doctors and supporters in the U.S. and they were able to raise money quickly. He purchased the big equipment—beds, an X-ray machine, an ultrasound, etc.—so that his monthly overhead would be limited to rent, utilities, and staff salaries.

Within his first two years in Cambodia, Mark and Nara found a building, hired a team of physicians with different specialties, and began advertising through Facebook and by word of mouth. Before anyone knew it, Family Clinic was up and running.

The clinic’s work in the anti-trafficking sphere gave rise to the team’s second main mercy ministry—Freedom Ministries. As the clinic treated girls in rehabilitation programs, the MTW team realized many of them had nowhere to go once they were ready to reintegrate into Cambodian society. They would likely be trafficked again if they returned to their villages and because they were now viewed as nothing in society’s eyes, finding a place to live, getting a job, and forming friends was going to be difficult.

God laid it on the Ambroses heart to start a dorm ministry with their church which owned a college dorm facility. In 2019, they welcomed their first freedom scholars. They were college-aged girls who graduated out of a rehab program and received scholarships and free housing from the MTW team and presbytery. When MTW’s NGO partners began asking the team to take in younger girls, the Ambroses began praying and raising money to purchase and renovate a building that could house elementary and adolescent girls. By 2023, the team had opened Dahlia Dorm—a place where 12 to 18-year-old girls who had been rescued from the sex industry can live safely, go to school, receive food and medical care, and get connected to the local church. Today 28 girls live in Dahlia Dorm and the freedom ministry church dorm, all of whom are members of an MTW church plant. The team also recently purchased property to open a second Dahlia Dorm to rescue and house another 14 girls under the age of 18.

How the Mercy Ministries and Church Support One Another

One of the main pitfalls of any parachurch ministry, mercy or otherwise, is that they can undermine the role of the local church. As Family Clinic and Freedom Ministries have become more established, the MTW team and presbytery have maintained a healthy relationship. How?

First, everyone is on the same page—united in their passion to spread the gospel throughout Cambodia. Paul said they keep their vision and mission before them at their monthly team meetings to make sure the preaching of the gospel through the ministry of the local church stays at the center.

“I think what really helps is our Cambodian pastors, the presbytery, and our other national partners, they believe that [the mercy ministries] are vital as well. So it’s not something that we’re trying to drag people into, but something that we are drawn together toward,” said Paul.

And this shared passion has led to a symbiotic relationship between the presbytery, the medical clinic, and Freedom Ministries. For example, the clinic is what Mark calls a “wedge” ministry—an outreach into the broader community that wedges the door open for people to enter the local church. Mark has learned that no matter their religious background, people will always seek good and affordable medical care. In this way, the clinic is able to draw lots of people to the front steps of the church quickly. With the referral network with the local churches, the clinic staff is able to put their patients’ hands into the hands of a church leader who will invite them into a local church community.

The clinic also serves the churches by essentially providing free medical care to the congregations. Yet Mark set it up so that the payment for the services goes through the churches. The clinic essentially donates money to the church designated to cover the cost of the medical services for those in the congregation who cannot afford them.

“If we’re going to cover all the medical expense, we do it through the church. I tell the pastors, ‘I’m going to give you $50 and then you’ll give me $50 to pay for the bill’ … so the diaconal needs and mercy ministry comes through the church … so that the church gets credit for that, which they should,” says Mark.

The clinic also allows churches to use their building when needed for small groups and worship services, trains their staff to be an active resource in the life of their own church family, and equips the staff for the work of evangelism.

“We don’t have to think that the basics of the gospel have to be relegated to a professional pastor. They are busy. I teach the basics of the gospel every Tuesday and Friday. … We want to show people what sin is and how Christ has made the way for us to be reconciled to God and get that into their heart and into their brain,” says Mark.

Freedom Ministries provides the church the opportunity to embrace the most marginalized, ousted people of Cambodian society. It is a picture of the ethics of God’s kingdom as these girls find protection, care, and dignity in Christ’s family. As they are welcomed into the local church, they are taught what it means to be a disciple of Christ and to follow in His footsteps in extending the mercy they have been shown by Him and His people. This turns them into effective kingdom agents.

“That ministry has literally exploded over the years. Now to have girls who’ve been marginalized and abused and had their lives taken away from them are now becoming Bible translators, social workers, and doctors who want to go into ministry and want to go to Bible school,” says Mark.

Deploying More Disciples for Gospel and Mercy Ministry

MTW Cambodia is an example of how church planting and mercy ministry go hand-in-hand. As the mercy ministries take care of people’s needs, it attracts people to the church community where they hear about Jesus. The church then disciples and deploys these people into the world with a visceral understanding of God’s compassion for the broken and vulnerable. They go out into their own spheres showing God’s care, sharing the gospel, and promoting the church—which then attracts more people to God’s community and the cycle builds on itself. As a result, the gospel goes forth, people come to faith, the Church is strengthened, and God’s kingdom advances. Praise God for the ways He is using His people in Cambodia and around the world to push back the effects of the fall and make disciples. Praise God for the ways He is doing similar things through His people around the world.

Learn more about opportunities to serve that combine mercy with church planting at mtw.org/serve.