Why would a man return to a country where he was kidnapped by an armed band of drunken marauders and dragged into the jungle for what he thought would be his execution?
In April, 15 years after his retirement, Mahaffey was reunited with old friends at churches he helped establish as a missionary.For retired missionary Jack Mahaffey, the answer is simple: “When I gotta go, I gotta go.”
The journey that would send him back to southern Thailand, where he and his wife Oneida served as Southern Baptist missionaries for nearly 30 years, began more than 50 years ago when Mahaffey thumbed a ride from college to his home in Liberty. He had no idea his hitchhiking would eventually take him halfway around the world.
On that ordinary afternoon, a businessman stopped his car, asked Mahaffey for directions to Charlotte, and offered him a ride. Mahaffey gratefully accepted, and took a seat in the front. In the backseat were two Japanese business associates.
“What are you studying?” the driver asked. Mahaffey, who had enrolled at Clemson University after serving in the Army for two years, told him he was working on an education degree, but that he planned to go to seminary after graduation and then come back home to preach in Pickens County.
The driver, a Gideon, smiled and translated Mahaffey’s answer for his Japanese associates. “They rejoiced,” Mahaffey said.
When they dropped him off in Pickens, Mahaffey thanked them and turned to walk away. “Boy!” the driver called out. Mahaffey froze at his stern tone. “Boy, why don’t you go overseas and preach where no one has heard the gospel? They’ve heard it in America till they’re hardened.”
Jack Mahaffey and his wife Oneida spent 30 years sharing the gospel with the people of Thailand.The stranger’s words were seared in Mahaffey’s mind. Later, after he graduated from Clemson and was starting his ministerial training at Southwestern Seminary, one of the first events he stumbled into was a missions emphasis day. “The Lord used that to convict me that I needed to do ministry overseas,” he said.
He and his wife applied for missionary status with the Foreign (now International) Mission Board, and, after serving two years of required field work at Mt. Tabor Baptist Church near Pendleton, left for Thailand in 1965. With three young sons in tow, the Mahaffeys set about learning the Thai language and putting down roots in a place far removed from Pickens County – in many ways.
Mahaffey worked in a church near Bangkok, teaching English as a second language. He helped start a church and enlisted a young Thai man to preach. He convinced the Foreign Mission Board to send him to Pattalung, a town in southern Thailand that had never seen a Southern Baptist missionary. “It was a good decision,” Mahaffey said. He started a new church, and he and his family spent the next eight years working there and in the nearby villages.
Mahaffey then requested a transfer to Hat Yai, a town 60 kilometers to the south, near the border with Malaysia. He and his wife would spend the next 20 years of their life there, helping grow one church and starting another.
It was in southern Thailand that Mahaffey first encountered resistance to his preaching. He regularly held a worship meeting with eight believers under a shade tree in a village. One day he and a deacon drove to the village, which was about 45 kilometers from his house, and were met by 10 men armed with knives and a gun. The gang gave chase, but Mahaffey and his deacon managed to barely escape by driving his van over a rickety plank bridge.
About a month later, Mahaffey and a home missionary decided to try to return to the village, but were ambushed on the road and robbed. Their assailants took them into the thick jungle, where Mahaffey was convinced they would be murdered. After some deliberation, however, the kidnappers decided to release the pair with instructions that Mahaffey return with cash in order to retrieve his van. Once they were out of danger, Mahaffey reported the incident to officials. Eventually the van was recovered, although no ransom was paid. Mahaffey said the group of robbers was eventually killed by communists who controlled part of the area.
Most people in the area did not resist the missionaries’ presence, however. In fact, both churches the Mahaffeys worked with in Hat Yai are still thriving today. One celebrated its 50th anniversary in April, an event that prompted an invitation for Mahaffey to return to Hat Yai after not having seen the city since he left in 1995.
“I almost didn’t go back,” said Mahaffey, now 80 and serving as pastor at Mt. Tabor Baptist Church in Easley. In addition to a nagging physical ailment, he was worried he wouldn’t be able to remember the language. Finally, he simply decided to go. “In my mind I still couldn’t speak the language, but I said, Lord, I’m going. It was just simple faith.”
He would end up preaching in the native tongue 10 times while on his reunion trip. “I didn’t have any problem,” he said. “I used the language just as I did when I was there the first time. I think the Lord enabled me to do it.”
Renewing old relationships in Thailand was “one of the greatest experiences I ever had,” he said. “I saw the love of the Thai people like I’d never seen it before. They opened their hearts and paid my way there and back. The wouldn’t take my money.”
Mahaffey said he also witnessed a heightened level of “enthusiasm for worship” among the Thai Christians and “a desire to be in the will of the Lord,” a commitment he generally finds lacking among Christians in America. “What I saw there was enthusiasm – they want to do the Lord’s business,” he said.
Which might explain why a man would want to return to a place where kidnappers threatened his life. It’s still a place where people’s hearts aren’t hardened to the gospel – as a businessman seeking directions to Charlotte might put it.
Believers in Thailand have “an enthusiasm for worship” and “a desire to be in the will of the Lord,” Mahaffey said.