As I write this, I am sitting in my office at 12:33 a.m. on Thursday, July 13, 2023. It’s a strange time to be typing an article for The Baptist Courier. Indeed, what a strange time to be awake.
Six of us from First Baptist, Newberry, plus a pastor friend from another South Carolina Baptist church, are going to meet in the church parking lot at 2 a.m. We will put our luggage in vehicles and head to Charlotte in time to meet the suggested three-hours-before-take-off check-in time for a 7 a.m. international departure.
We are headed to Northern Thailand in partnership with an International Mission Board team that serves there. The northernmost province of Thailand shares borders with Myanmar (Burma) and Laos. As the crow flies, China is only about 100 miles away. This is the Golden Triangle, famed for the past “glory” of the opium trade. And heat. And lostness.
Our mission? To serve in support of the IMB field team. We want to help them advance their strategy. We will devote most of our energies to the children of a cluster of several villages that are neighbors to each other. These children and villagers are largely disadvantaged from an economic and educational standpoint, and they are overwhelmingly lost from a spiritual standpoint.
About 150 students, ages 7 to 17, attend a special school in one of these villages. Because the missionaries want to reach the villagers with the gospel, we will invest our time in the school, building relationships with administration, faculty, and students, as we put on a mini-sports camp (football and baseball), a mini-holiday camp (Christmas and Easter will be explained), and a mini-western food camp (still working on that!).
We will share, through Christian Thai translators, and encourage the school community with the love of Jesus. We will be free to share our faith, sowing as much seed as we can. We will call people to saving faith and set the stage for longer-term follow-up by the field missionaries and their local partners.
The culmination of the mini camps at the school will be a large-scale community event to be held on a Saturday. Everyone will be invited to have fun, play games, and win prizes. We hope to see many of the school children with whom we will build relationships that week, as well as many of the school administrators and teachers. We also hope that the parents and other adults from the neighboring villages will attend the event, that we will be able to talk and share with them. We plan to share the gospel with the entire gathered crowd that day.
We plan to paint one of their school buildings that needs serious help. We also plan to prayer-walk through the area’s villages, made up of several ethnic minorities, and we hope to have many conversations with “persons of peace” (people who, for no apparent reason, show hospitality to the strangers in town). We plan to give direct, verbal witness using our personal testimonies as well as using other gospel-sharing approaches, and to call people to trust in Jesus.
While there, we will also do our best to bless the IMB family with whom our church is partnering — a husband and wife with five children. They live in a beautiful, but difficult, place of intense heat and spiritual darkness. They came out of a church much like some of ours in South Carolina — believing it to be worth moving across the world to share the hope of Jesus with those who, by and large, have never heard of Him.
It’s now 1:25 a.m. It’s almost time to leave. Why go? As Jesus said: “To open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith …” (Acts 26:18, NASB 1995).
“Let’s Go!”