...and what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8

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Team History

The original InnerCHANGE Cambodia team members received their first taste of Cambodian language and culture in the late 1980s while living in and ministering among an impoverished Cambodian émigré community on Minnie Street in Santa Ana, California. At that time, Minnie Street was a tough place, with multiple gangs, prostitution, drugs, and crippling poverty infesting the street. By the early 1990s many of the Cambodian neighbors began to experience an economic uplift as their children graduated from school and began to work. As more income flowed, they began to move away from the neighborhood in search of safer and larger places to live. The ministry field was moving away! The team was faced with a decision: continue its presence among the dwindling Cambodian population on Minnie Street or move to another site.

As these changes played out on Minnie Street, peace started to stabilize in Cambodia for the first time in a generation. Wracked by decades of civil war, culminating in the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the various combatants finally agreed to a peace process in 1989. The UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) took control of the country from 1991-93 and foreign access to Cambodia was allowed. Responding to this opportunity, many InnerCHANGE members, ministering among Cambodians in Santa Ana, felt called to relocate in Cambodia. Thus, by fall 1994 the InnerCHANGE Cambodia team was birthed in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia.

Since then, the team has faced its share of challenges and set-backs with much of their unrealistic idealism and naiveté being polished away. Sicknesses, military coup and unrest, wrestling with inadequate responses to the myriad needs, and the corruption endemic to Cambodia have all been struggles we all still learning to navigate. Being a team isn't always easy. We have bruised others and been bruised ourselves. However, we have also been tremendously blessed by individual spiritual growth and as an increasingly healthy community of InnerCHANGE missionaries. We've learned how to better love and encourage each other. We've learned how to laugh at ourselves and to cry with those we have the privilege of serving. We’ve learned to better recognize God’s fingerprints on our neighbors’ lives. And we persist in serving, learning, and growing in a context of poverty in its many forms.