Man Thluai Zing said when her family moved to the Spruce Pine area three years ago, they didn’t come looking for other Burmese families. They came looking for a farm.
“We were farmers back in Burma,” Zing said of her home country, now called Myanmar. “We want to stay in a rural area and do farm work — that’s natural for us.”
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She said when she and her family first bought their chicken farm, there were two more Burmese families in the area. But within the past year, that number has grown tremendously.
And on Sunday, Aug. 10, a group of them met for the first time at Mount Hebron Baptist Church in Spruce Pine as North Alabama Chin Baptist Church. That group — made up of about 15 families — has been meeting monthly in homes up until now.
“We have been going farm to farm and meeting and fellowshipping together,” Zing said. “But that is not enough for us. We wanted to meet weekly and worship together.”
So they went to Franklin Baptist Association and asked director of missions Ted Vafeas if there might be a church in a central location that would allow them to meet in their building.
Vafeas then called Mike Norton, Mount Hebron’s pastor, who said it was an easy yes.
“We prayed about it and decided as a church that we would like to have them worship here,” he said. “God sent them, and they knocked on our door, so you open your doors and do what you’re supposed to do as a church. We’re excited about it.”
They met together for a joint service to kick off their partnership. A Chin choir sang, and several people spoke.
Oppression
Zing shared during that service that Myanmar is a “war-torn country” — that’s how she and the others ended up in the United States as refugees.
“We all have different stories,” she said.
She doesn’t clearly remember when hers started, but she said the Chin people began to be oppressed for their Christian faith because the government wanted the entire country to be Buddhist.
Presbyterian missionaries Arthur E. and Laura Carson had first come to her people group around 1896 and worked to reach them and translate the Gospel of Matthew into their language. The work was carried on later by Baptist missionary Robert G. Johnson and his family before missionaries began to be kicked out of the country, Zing said. That’s when the oppression began.
“What I admire my people for the most today, no matter how they treated us, it doesn’t matter — no one can change our faith in God,” she said.
Zing said when she was in the sixth grade, her father was forced by the government to begin collecting money from people in the community so the police could have “pocket money.”
“It was very, very hard for my father to do the work, but if he refused, he would go to jail,” she said. “He worked for four years for the government, and those four years were hell for us.”
Because of how unpopular it made him in the community, he was unable to get enough work as a carpenter to feed his family, Zing said. Then one night, the army busted into their family home, beat her father and demanded he join them going door to door to catch people who had begun assembling against the government.
“At one house, my father knocked on the door respectfully, and then the army person banged with the gun,” Zing said.
An older woman came out, saw the army and died from a heart attack, she said.
That was the turning point. Zing’s father fled to Malaysia as a refugee, planning to earn enough money to sneak each of his family members across the border one at a time. Zing was first, but when she got to Malaysia, she found he was suffering from a brain tumor.
She spent eight months with him in the hospital while working to get him to the United States as a refugee for treatment.
“After eight months, we passed all the tests and got the immunization shots to be able to enter America,” Zing said. “We got to Memphis, and he passed away the next day. I was 17.”
Needing prayer
Some people she knew from her village in Myanmar were already in the U.S., and they took Zing in with them in Texas. She stayed there for four years, got married and then they moved to Indianapolis to try to find better jobs.
“Then in 2022, we decided with God’s blessing we would come to Alabama to live in rural place and have a quiet life,” she said.
Zing and others are grateful to have found a good place to call home in the Spruce Pine area, but she said they need a lot of prayers — their family members still in Myanmar are in a “very dangerous” situation.
“They burned down the second largest Chin city, and our people are scattered. Our Chin land has become uninhabitable,” Zing said. “I’m hoping people will pray for us — we need a lot of prayers.”
She said they are grateful for a place to gather together at Mount Hebron.
“We have been looking for a church for three or four months, and now we have found one,” she said. “We are all very excited.”
Norton said he has a heart for overseas missions, and it’s been “humbling” for him to get to see the fruit of international missionaries who devoted their lives to introducing the Chin people to the hope offered in Christ.
“All of a sudden, you look up and in Spruce Pine, Alabama, you have the opportunity to partner with a church from Myanmar that was birthed there through missionaries who were sent,” he said. “To us, it’s unbelievable. It’s something God has put in our path to be able to do, and it’s an honor.”
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