Cameroon a call to faithfulness

“Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.”

— Proverbs 24:11

The Christian has a duty to speak out (at the very least) in defense of the weak and needy, who are being oppressed, ruined and destroyed by evil men.

For the record, no, it doesn’t count that you pay a clergyman to do this for you. As individuals we must speak, just as we will stand before God someday.

Hoping to discharge some of that noble duty, I would like to introduce you to my friend and brother in Christ, Victor Chung.

Chung is from Southern Cameroon. He is a missionary to his own people, along with his wife and five children.

This region has not been in the “big” media, but I beg you to do a search online for “Cameroon Genocide” and begin to learn what your brethren there are going through.

To make a complex story short, modern Cameroon is the result of a recent political union of a French-speaking region, and the Southern, English-speaking one.

This union has not gone well. The French-speaking side has been in control of the government and the army is from that portion as well.

For many months, the French side has engaged in an extended, military aggression against the mostly unarmed and undefended English-speakers. This action has left literal rivers of blood and mounds of corpses in Southern Cameroon, as the killing has been indiscriminate and unrestrained.

Whole villages have been burned; entire families destroyed; and atrocities committed that are too horrific for me to talk about here.

Church leaders seem to have also been special targets of the military murder squads.

Victor Chung and his family have survived, and the stories of how God has preserved them rival anything you have read from Corrie Ten Boom or missionaries in hostile lands around the world.

I have been working with Chung for months, along with a host of others, but none of us have any big voice or real power. We have a plan to get them out of Cameroon, to a country where they can live without fear of government-sanctioned killers.

Now, according to reports on their regional television last week, news has leaked of a plan by the government of Cameroon to make a final, giant sweep through the South, with the intention of eliminating all young males among the English-speakers. I realize how outrageous this sounds, but it was less than two generations ago that the world saw the hellish Night of Long Knives and similar things in Nazi Germany.

Stuff like this happens.

It may only be slightly less tragic to realize that barely a peep about any of this has been heard from major news agencies around the world, much less from the international community.

The Southern Cameroonians are asking; Victor Chung is asking; and, I am asking you to speak up on behalf of those who are being led away to slaughter. In the social media age, contacting your Congressional representatives is not difficult. Just ask them to shine a light on Cameroon. Even that much would help tremendously.

For more information, including how you might be able to help Chung and his family directly, please contact me, or join the “Friends of Victor Chung” Facebook page.

Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at:

[email protected]