Split Vietnam Church Hopes to Reunite Soon'

A Christian religious leader in Vietnam on Monday expressed hope for reunification of a million-strong church that remains divided between north and south four decades after the end of the Vietnam War.

The Evangelical Church of Vietnam (ECVN) operates as two separate entities, with a northern church and one in the south, a split that persists long after the 1975 communist victory reunited the two halves of the country.

"We wish in the near future the southern and the northern churches can become one," Thai Phuoc Truong, who leads the southern church, said at celebrations marking the northern church's 100th anniversary.

The church has been divided since 1954, Nguyen Huu Mac, the northern church leader, told celebrants at a Hanoi sports stadium.

Colonial France's 1954 defeat by communist forces led to Vietnam's division into the communist North and pro-U.S. South, setting the stage for two more decades of war until communist troops entered Saigon on April 30, 1975.

"In 1954 the country was divided into two parts and the Evangelical Church of Vietnam was separated," Mac said, adding that many members from the north fled south or abroad.

"God did not forget us, so we are here today," with the northern church's ranks boosted in recent years by an influx of ethnic minorities, particularly Hmong, he said.

Thomas Stebbins, who spent two decades until 1975 working as a missionary in central Vietnam, said both the northern and southern churches want to join, but with the condition that the unified church can be divided into districts, as it was before 1954.

Without individual districts it will be difficult to administer, said Stebbins, who is now based in the United States.

"They are awaiting the government to allow them... There's no progress," he told Agence France Presse. "They're praying that there will be progress."

Stebbins, whose parents were also missionaries in Vietnam, said most of the Evangelical Church's more than one million members are based in the south.

Vietnam is a majority Buddhist nation where Roman Catholics are the largest religious minority, with about six million followers.

Religious activity remains under state control in Vietnam.

Officials in Vietnam's religious affairs department could not immediately comment about the church's division.