By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent
HANOI, VIETNAM (Worthy News)-- Vietnamese officials in Dien Bien Province recently destroyed two new church buildings belonging to minority Hmong Christians.
Having congregations of about 500, the Ho He Church of the unregistered Vietnam Good News Mission and the Phan Ho Church of the registered Evangelical Church of Vietnam were both destroyed in June. Beginning as modest house churches, they had outgrown even the largest Hmong homes, so their congregations built wooden structures that were soon reduced to rubble as local police and paramilitary easilly destroyed them.
The Hmong Christian movement in Vietnam's mountainous Northwest has grown to more than 400,000 believers in just 20 years; as a result, the Hmong are routinely subjected to harassment and persecution by government officials.
Open Doors placed Vietnam on their 2012 World Watch List as the 19th of 50 countries where Christian persecution was the worst.