Central Thai Missions

Due to unforeseen circumstances in the life of another missionary, I was recently asked to guest teach at Mae Ra Moe Karen Baptist Bible School. A co-laborer here in Thailand had been slated to teach at the Bible school at a Karen refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border for most of the month of June. Since he couldn’t make it, I spent most of June in northwest Thailand near the Myanmar border.

Mae Rah Moe Bible College is situated on a hill above the main sections of the Karen refugee camp inside Thailand. When I arrived in the camp, I was given the option to either stay at the home of a local pastor in the camp, or scale the hill daily to teach at the school. At first I thought that I might benefit a little from the daily hike, but after a couple trips up and down the mountain, I knew I had to stay up above at the school.

This turned out to be the right choice. I was scheduled to teach the Pentateuch, a spiritual growth class, and on average three English classes per day. On top of five hours of class time each day, the students would come to talk Bible and to practice their English after class, often until the candles had burned down low at 10 p.m. or so (I think I was letting them break their school curfew by staying out that late…), and until I was ready to dive under the mosquito net for the night.

The students day starts with dawn prayer at 5 a.m. in the chapel. From there they have daily work around the school grounds from 6-7, then morning chapel service at 8:20, followed by their first classroom hour at 9 a.m. Their school day ends after classes with another chapel service from 3:15-4:00.

All of the Bible teaching I did was in English. The courses I taught were at their Bachelor of Theology level, which is taught in the English language, regardless of whether the instructor is Karen or a foreigner. This proved to be a bit of a challenge for the students, which is why three hours of my class time per day was devoted to teaching English.

What was a challenge for me was being away from my family for two whole weeks. Praise God that my wife was able to come into the camp for the last two days of my stay there. I was so glad to see her arrive in the middle of my second week there. She and our friend Vem Vem were also a great help in the English teaching.

The school and local church leadership in Mae Rah Moe were pretty insistent that I come back and teach again in two weeks time. I told them that was just too soon, but I hope to guest teach again next semester. My main impression was really that their biggest need at present is a full-time English teacher, and they are desperately in need of English bibles and study aids. If you would like to donate any Bibles (NIV) or study aids to the Mae Rah Moe Karen Baptist Bible School, contact me at: for more information.

Excellent message by David Platt.

David Platt: SBC Pastors Conference 2009 from Todd Thomas on Vimeo.

Great clip I borrowed from Provocations and Pantings.

We got our first hundred tracts printed today.  A small start, but we are glad to finally have the “Good Person” tract completed and ready to pass out.

We first contacted Living Waters about translating their “Are You a Good Person” comic back in May.  They gave permission, provided we used the utmost care in maintaining the integrity of the message, and that we do not sell the material.  Both of which we had the same heart to do.

If you are curious to see the entire tract, you can see the Thai version here, and the English version here.

We have access to lots of gospel tracts here, but often they seem to rely a bit too much on “Christianese” for our tastes.  We were looking for something that could be put into common, every-day language, as well as something that people would actually read (not a wall of text), that clearly presented the gospel message.  All of the team here in Sukhothai feel pretty strongly that we found all of that in Ray Comfort’s “Good Person” tract.  Now we get to go give them out!

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As we near the close of this month, I would have to summarize it as more of the same, only better.  We are still volunteering at some local schools, and still shepherding two local churches, but this month stands out as one of renewed vision.

Recently, the Japanese missionaries that put yellow signs all over the country and pass out tracts made their way through our area.  This has opened doors to share the Lord with folks several times already.  One example that stands out in my mind is a recent class Vem taught.  The kids were full of questions about one of the signs that had been put  up in their neighborhood – so she spent a good deal of time fielding questions about what Jesus was all about – and then posing a few questions of her own.  “So what about you?  Where will you go when you die?”  etc. 

In pastoring the churches here, I still have a tough time at times expressing myself when preaching and teaching in Thai.  I am beginning to think that often the toughest  things to say are things that I might as well not even try to say – but rather to stick with “safe” stuff.  Like rather than use an illustration or analogy that I’m familiar with to explain a truth from scripture, just find an example in the gospels or the old testament that illustrates it, and read that.  Win win – I am understood, and the teaching is that much more biblically sound.  Why didn’t that occur to me sooner?  Paul seemed to have come to a similar conclusion in his own teaching, when after a tough time in Athens, he went to Corinth and says

“I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2:2 ESV).

The month of July has been anything but ordinary for us here in Sukhothai, Thailand. We were blessed by a brief but encouraging visit from some of the saints from Calvary Chapel Dumaguete, Philippines. The team of four arrived to experience was pretty close to an ordinary weekend in the life of the Johansens. All four of them led the Saturday kids ministry in a sort of one-day vacation Bible school. They had some fun new games to teach the kids, and most importantly some teachings from scripture for them. For the Sunday services, we had the two churches join together for one service at Sawankhalok. Our original reason was to reduce running around and transporting the team back and forth, but it turned out to be a great time of hearing the word of God together from Pastor Jo, and lunch and fellowship together after service. That afternoon, Ate Asha had several hours to encourage the ladies in their walks with Jesus, while the men fellowshipped.

Left: JB Lim of the Philippine team sharing a skit for the Saturday kids at Sinakhon while Mira interprets.

We were also blessed this month to get a visit from another group of foreigners – my mother and aunt came to see their grandkids/grand-nieces, and to spend a bit of their summer in Thailand. I got to play tour guide for some of their time in country, showing off some of the local historical sites, and even taking some time off to visit Chiang Mai. One of the highlights for me was bringing my aunt to school with me. I was a little nervous that my fifth graders would get crazy and embarrass me, but they were on their best behavior. Must have been the candy she brought.

Discipleship classes continue with Chuadchai. So far we have finished studying an inductive Bible study workshop, taught another workshop together, studied through the book of Genesis, and are mid-way through the book of Romans. Probably the most exciting part of the discipleship class has been putting things into practice. We have taken to door to door sharing with people in the outlying areas. So far no bites, but we are encouraged by John 6:37, “All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me.” Our hope is too that the more we are active in sharing our faith, the more the saints at Samruan and Sawankhalok churches will be encouraged to do so as well. Chuadchai is anxious to get out and serve the Lord – either through evangelizing in the mountains of his home province of Chiang Rai, in a small church in Phuket that he has been asked to serve at.

Praise Reports:

• Praise God for the seeds of His gospel being planted in the hearts of many people in the area.

• We thank the Lord for all of the Filipino goodies donated by the saints in Dumaguete. Lami kaayo!

• The great visit we had from dear mom and aunt Gayle. It was great having you two out.

Prayer Requests:

• For more sinners in Sukhothai to come to repentance and faith in Jesus.

• For spiritual growth and revived hearts among the saints in Sawankhalok and Samruan churches.

• For spiritual strength for us; that we could love, serve, and proclaim Jesus as we are called to.

One of the most useful tools I gained as a student in Bible college was how to study the Bible inductively.  It has long been our desire to teach Thai Christians some of what my wife and I learned from those years of study. 

Recently one of our former instructors from our alma matter (not only was he an instructor, he was the director) wrote a short, simplified book on the inductive Bible study method.  I liked it so much I decided to have it translated into Thai to aid us in making disciples here in central Thailand.

Finding a translator proved very difficult, and I found I was a bit naive on how much that kind of service costs.  But we were blessed to be put in contact with a Christian couple from north-eastern Thailand that does translation work.  Asger and Nittaya Poulsen did an excellent, and very quick (considering the length of the manuscript) job, and we recently received the final copy of the Living Word Study, by Pastor Trip Kimball, in Thai.  Earlier this week we had it printed as a parallel bi-lingual volume, to help foreigners like myself reference things on the page more easily.

We intend to have (Lord willing) our first IBS training in June.

For those of you in need of Thai translation services, I can highly recommend the Poulsens:

It was such a joy to get together with the saints this Easter.  For first service in Samruan, we met at 7a.m. for worship, communion, a Bible study, and a baby dedication.  Whew!  It was awesome – so many people showed up for church.  And not Easter/Christmas types, but many who had moved away happened to be in town, or recently returned to live in the village again.  After service we had breakfast and broke rice together.

Second service met at the usual time in Sawankhalok.  Again we had more present that usual.  This weekend happens to be a five day weekend, thanks to the Buddhist new year that runs from April 13th-15th.  It was a blessing to see folks linger over snacks after the service and fellowship.  So often everyone seems to be in a hurry to get home.  The kids had a fun Sunday school craft: Making Easter eggs.  Most of the eggs here are brown, so don’t take very well to being painted.  My innovative wife solved the problem by using the nice white salted duck eggs.  Easy to paint, and delicious to eat!

Above: The dedication of one-week-old baby Ton-naam.

Left: Matthew and his salted Easter duck eggs.

During our recent trip home to the United States, I was able to purchase some seeds of the bhut jolokia chili pepper.  This Indian pepper has many names, but is also known as the worlds hottest pepper.  I had cooked up an idea to grow it here in Thailand and concoct some super spicy Thai food.  Unfortunately, the local insects have thwarted all my attempts at growing them so far. 

Other people have had better results than I have though.  After a  friend of ours picked my family and I up at the airport in Sukhothai, he went back to his labors along the Thai-Burma border with a packet of my jolokia seeds.  He then passed them on to a contact in the Karen state who evidently is having much better results.  The contact sees a real value in the peppers, since he and others are often on long backpack trips in the jungle, where every gram you can shave off of your pack weight is a blessing.  These little peppers definitely wont require much pack space to pack some punch into their meals on the trail.   Enjoy guys!

We seem to see these signs everywhere.  Not so much on the main roads, but as soon as you get off the beaten path a bit, you start to see them everywhere.  I was told some Japanese missionaries are responsible for them.  Nice work guys!  MJ and I got to count quite a few of them over the last few days.  The kids we normally teach English to have finals this week, so we took advantage of the time off to bring a load of supplies and donations to some good friends working with the Karen people near the Burmese border.  We had a literal truckload of stuff donated by the saints here in central Thailand, as well as by generous neighbors of the church who wanted to help.  Over the seven hour drive to the location  the supplies were to be brought, one of our family’s many diversions was look out for and try to read the many different gospel message signs posted along the way.  The one pictured above says “Jesus’ blood washes away sin.”