Benjamin's Story

A Taste of Nepal in the Streets of KL - July 2010

The following is an excerpt from a paper I'll be sharing at the International Association for Mission Studies gathering in Toronto from Aug 15-20, 2012. The theme of the event is "Migration, Human Dislocation, and the Good News: Margins as the Center in Christian Mission."

I was walking with 'Benjamin' through the streets of central Kuala Lumpur. A young man from Nepal, Benjamin was in Malaysia as a short-term migrant worker at a restaurant and bar in the neighboring suburb of Petaling Jaya. As we paused at a corner, he put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Brother . . . ” he said, “Brother, before I was a Christian I had only one family in one valley in Nepal. Now, however, I have family everywhere. I have more brothers in Nepal, brothers and sisters in Malaysia, and now – in you – in America and all around the world.” As we stood on that street corner, his words hung poignantly in the air, mixing with the scent of joss sticks and incense rising from shrines outside of Chinese shop lots and the Hindu temple around the corner. 

Before coming to Malaysia, Benjamin has said that he did not know anything about Christianity or the church. After six months in Malaysia, another Nepali worker, a Christian named Raj, came to visit Benjamin in the cramped living conditions of the worker hostel in which he was staying. Raj’s witness upset Benjamin. “I was so angry and I scolded him,” Benjamin recalls,

I told him that the Christian religion is not for me and I don't want to sell my life to his religion. I requested that he share about Hinduism because we are Hindus and our religion is better than Christianity. I told him so many things but he just simply listened to me without getting angry. I always used to scold him but he didn't stop coming to our room.

The persistence and presence of this friend had their desired effect. Over time, Benjamin agreed to follow Raj to a Nepalese program at a local church. He went to sing songs because he liked music, but what he found was “great love from the brothers and sisters of the church.” Every Sunday he began to go back for English and computer classes, refreshments, and fellowship with other migrant workers. “For the next few weeks,” he writes, “I kept thinking about the love which I experienced. Oh what kind of love is this? Even my own relatives never showed such love to me. I was wondering why they loved me like my mother.” In time, Benjamin “found that they loved us (workers) so much because they had the love of Jesus in their life so I decided later to follow Jesus Christ.”

On November 19, 2006 Benjamin – a migrant worker from the foothills of the Himalayas– was baptized and became a member of the worldwide Christian family in a predominantly Chinese congregation on the urban fringe of this Malay mega-city. In that conversion process, Benjamin underwent a transformation that was simultaneously global and local, expansively communal and yet intensely personal. In that conversion experience, he is not alone. Through the concerted efforts of congregations and organizations on the Malay peninsula, migrant workers from across Asia are being introduced, perhaps unexpectedly, to the Christian faith in the context of a mostly Muslim country.

This paper offers a cursory look at the experience of migrant workers like Benjamin. Living, working, and moving between countries and cultures, this study reveals short-term migrant workers to be not just receptacles but carriers of the gospel and agents of change in a transnational web of relationships and identities that connects disparate parts of the globe. For practitioners of mission, it is hoped that this paper will underscore the significance of migrant ministries undertaken in settings with a significant concentration of migrant laborers, such as Malaysia. For scholars it is hoped that it will begin to illumine further areas for research, namely the experience of short-term migrants such as those in the Nepali Diaspora and the linkages that they are forming across Asia. The paper begins by examining Kuala Lumpur as a center for both human migration and Christian mission, continues by discussing the ways in which a ‘glocalized’ transnational identity rooted in the Imago Dei is understood and articulated by migrant workers, and concludes by following migrant workers turned missionaries back to Nepal and on to other destinations in the region.

Want to read more? The complete text of the paper can be found here.