Born in Tutwiler, Mississippi, a small town 100 miles from Memphis, Rev. Doug Kellum was the second son of Mr. & Mrs. J.W. Kellum.
Doug accepted Christ as his Savior when he was 7 years old and at 17 he committed his life for the ministry. He graduated from Mississippi College in 1968. During his time at college, he served as a youth minister for the Baptist Church in Lampert, Mississippi.
He was drafted to military service at the end of 1968. From 1970-1971 Lieutenant Kellum served in Vietnam as an advisor to the local forces for the District of Long Khanh.
He was discharged in 1971 and began his theological studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. But after only one year of seminary he returned to Vietnam as a missionary with the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board to serve the young people at Hope Baptist Church and teach English at local high schools.
In 1972 he returned to the U.S. and continued his theological training. However, the fall of Saigon in April of 1975, set off a massive wave of refugees, many of them coming to the U.S. One more time Doug postponed his study and left to serve the refugees at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Then he returned to the seminary to finish his seminary training.
The wave of boat people also crashed on the shores of Thailand. So from 1976-1981 Doug served among the Vietnamese refugees in Thailand’s Laem Sing and Phatnat Nikhom refugee camps.
From there he moved to the Philippines to serve in the Bataan refugee camp for 14 years and then the Palawan refugee camp until the refugee camps were closed.
In 1996 Doug began his ministry as the pastor for the Vietnamese Baptist Church in Memphis, TN. He retired in 2013 from the pastorate after serving 17 years and became an itinerant evangelist, preaching at mostly Vietnamese churches around North America.
Rev. Doug Kellum devoted his entire ministry to the Vietnamese, particularly Vietnamese refugees and Vietnamese diaspora. His journey of faith and ministry started by asking God not to send him to Vietnam. But the U.S. military ended up sending him to Vietnam, and Doug later returned as a missionary and eventually embraced the Vietnamese people and Vietnam which he considers his second country. He lives what he preaches. His maxim on evangelism is “people will see how we live before listening to what we say.” Speaking fluent Vietnamese he lived humbly among the refugees sharing the Gospel by his works. He served 18 years in refugee camps in Southeast Asia and 17 years as a pastor for the Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. He introduced thousands of Vietnamese to Christ and influenced many thousands with the Good News of the Gospel. The fruits of his ministry are still seen at many Vietnamese churches in the U.S. as well as in other countries where refugees passed through or where refugee camps were set up.
Sources: http://est.uui.us/news/rev-douglas-kellum
