Even after eight years of ministry with Beehive Global Collective, I still find that there are moments when I am overwhelmed. And for that, I am grateful.
I do not mean overwhelmed in the sense of feeling lost or without bearing. I mean overwhelmed by God’s grace. By His love and goodness. By His faithfulness, and by the promises He has kept — quietly, steadily, across many years of patient work that did not always feel productive. To have the ability to step back, even for a single moment, and see how He is moving — to feel the accumulated weight of what He has been doing in ways we could not yet perceive — that is its own kind of gift.
Today was such a day.
The Women’s Ministry Seminar opened this morning at Da Goc Nha — Rock Villa — here in Da Lat. But before we speak of what happened inside that room, we should speak of what it means for these women to be in it at all.
The women gathered here today do not occupy positions of social ease. Many come from ethnic minority communities — Hre, K’Ho, and others — communities that carry generations of marginalization not only from the broader Vietnamese society, but often from within their own cultural frameworks. A Vietnamese woman in the highlands does not often find herself in a space where her voice is invited, her story is taken seriously, and her standing before God is declared equal to any other bearer of His image. The cultural weight pressing against her showing up at all — the expectations of family, the obligations of household, the distance traveled, the cost of that travel — is not incidental. It is the context inside which her presence here becomes an act of faith.
Several of these women lead small churches in provinces where theological training is almost entirely unavailable. They carry their congregations on the strength of what they have received in Scripture, in prayer, and in the faithfulness that God has built into them through seasons they did not choose. They arrived here hungry — not for novelty, but for nourishment. And they came knowing that what they receive in these three days they will carry home and distribute.
To be in a room like that is not a small thing. We do not take it lightly.
There is something we must say about how we came to be here at all.
Iris and I felt the call to Vietnam nearly a decade ago. We came with conviction and with questions, and we began the slow, often invisible work of building relationships, learning language, discerning context, and searching for the partners through whom God was already moving. For five years — five years — we labored in what felt, at many points, like barren soil. No seminar. No network of women. No room full of voices lifted in worship. Just quiet fidelity to a sense of calling that we could not always explain and could not yet see bearing fruit.
In our work in Kenya, we have written about what we have come to call orchard evangelism — the long game of planting and tending and returning, trusting that neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:7, ESV). We have watched that truth unfold over seven years alongside Rev. David and Mako in Olderkesi. Vietnam has required the same posture. The same patience. The same willingness to believe that the seasons of attrition — the years without visible fruit — are not wasted seasons. They are orchard seasons.
This morning we opened the seminar with Sarah. We sat inside Genesis 18:14: “Is anything too hard for the LORD?” We traced the arc of a woman who waited twenty-five years for a promise she had been given before she could see how it would come. We asked what it looks like to stay near to God when the promise has not yet arrived. And the room received that question with a recognition that was palpable — because they know what that waiting costs.
So do we.
Today felt like the culmination of five years of patient work in seemingly barren soil. To stand in that room, to hear those voices — women from four provinces, from five different ethnic minority groups, in one place, together — lifting their voices in worship to the same Lord who had kept His word to Sarah, and who has been keeping His word to us in ways we are only beginning to see clearly — was beautiful. It was moving.
It was, in the best possible sense, overwhelming.
Nearly forty women. Four provinces: Da Lat, Dak Lak, Saigon, Quang Ngai. Five ethnic minority groups represented — women who do not share a first language, who come from communities that have not always been in fellowship with one another, gathered around the same Scripture, the same Jesus, the same hope.
There is a tendency, when we write about global ministry, to reach for abstraction — to speak in broad strokes about the body of Christ without letting the particularity land. So let this land: these are specific women, from specific places, who made specific sacrifices to be here. Some of them have never sat in a room like this one. Several of them lead churches. All of them came because they believe the Word of God is worth the cost of the journey.
They are right.
Perhaps the most moving moment of the day came in the afternoon.
The afternoon session centered on Hagar — the Egyptian servant used as a surrogate, dismissed, and twice sent into the wilderness with nothing. She is among the most overlooked women in the Bible, and among the most theologically significant. She is the first person in all of Scripture to give God a name. In the wilderness, after He found her and spoke to her and promised her a future, she called Him El Roi: the God who sees.
Iris led a small group through the session’s discussion questions. I watched her from across the room — a woman stepping genuinely out of her comfort zone, leaning into God’s grace as a cross-cultural missionary, doing the quiet and difficult work of helping other women give voice to when they have felt marginalized, unseen, dismissed. Helping them locate themselves not in their circumstances but in their identity in Christ — as seen, as known, as loved by Him.
At the end of the afternoon, the small groups shared what they had discussed. The final discussion question invited each woman to do what Hagar had done: to name God based on her own life experience. What has He been to you, in the wilderness moments you have actually lived?
In their own words:
God is Healer. Provider. Present. Peace. Faithful — God always keeps His promises.
Five names. Spoken by women who earned them. Not theological abstractions, but testimonies — the accumulated witness of women who have met El Roi in the places where no one else was watching and found Him already there.
This is what proximity discipleship produces, given enough time and enough faithfulness. It produces women who know God’s name from experience.
Two days remain. Four more sessions. The fruit of today carries forward only if the Spirit sustains what He has begun.
Pray for the women who will sleep in unfamiliar places tonight and return tomorrow. Pray for our Vietnamese partners — Ma Linh, Seth, and the others — who have carried the weight of this for months. Pray for Iris, Vera Ruth, and me — that we would remain close enough to Jesus that others would see Him through us.
And pray, if you are willing, for us — that we would receive this season with open hands. That we would not grasp at it or rush to explain it, but simply remain present to what God is doing, long enough to let it form us.
We are grateful you are with us.
In Christ,
Mathew, Iris & Vera Ruth
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27