SC
01 · Teacher
Sophea Chan
Lead Teacher, Old Testament Studies
Qualifications
M.Div, Phnom Penh Bible School
Experience
12 years teaching and pastoral ministry
Languages
Khmer, English
Our story
1992 – 1993 · Takeo Province
This story starts long before we did.
The Gabriel Bible Center is new. But it did not come from a plan or a building — it came from something we lived through in our own province, in the generation of churches before this one, and could not forget.
1992–93
The gospel comes to Takeo
The good news reaches Takeo province, and the church begins to grow almost at once. People come, and they keep coming. Something real is happening, and it is happening among ordinary villagers.
The years that followed
The church grows, and spreads
Leaders rise from the congregation. Interest is strong enough that church buildings go up across the villages — deliberately many small churches near the people, rather than one large church far from them. Some of those believers go on to become pastors in their own areas.
The 2000s
The doors close
Two things gave way at once. Care went outward — into new villages, new believers, more students sent away to the Bible schools of the day, all of them far from Takeo — until the mother church holding everything up was left untended, and it could not carry the weight. And the students who were sent did not come back to it: some returned without serving, others gave their years to churches elsewhere. The training meant to replenish the church never flowed back to it. One by one, the doors across the province closed.
Today
Regathered — and a center of our own
What was broken has been brought back together. But we did not want to restart the old pattern and watch it empty a second time — so this time we built the teaching ourselves, here, close to home. The Gabriel Bible Center is that answer, and it is why we are only beginning now.