My family and I are missionaries and have been working in Mailaa in South Thailand for 3 years and not a single person has come to faith. We have shared the Gospel faithfully with many, had outreach events, handed out tracts, prayer walked the area regularly, listened to people’s stories of pain and struggles, cried and prayed with them, journeyed with them in their time of need and shown them God’s love.
When we are called by God to be a missionary there is an expectation and a desire to see 100’s of people coming to Christ, both by the missionary and those supporting the missionary. Yet, not a single person in the past 3 years has come to know Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour. Jesus said: “Go and make disciples.” Yet it seems that we are not doing this very effectively.
Does this mean that we have not been obedient to God’s call? Does this mean we are failing at being missionaries? If we see making disciples as someone who comes to faith and in turn leading others to faith, then yes, we are failing. At this present time, we could say that we have been effective teachers, but not disciple makers.
However, just because no one has come to faith does not meant that we are not fulfilling the call God has placed on our lives. Within the Buddhist context that we work we had not expected to have a conversion yet, we know the time frame. But we can find the work slow and tedious as we see little fruit in our labour. In order to harvest you must sow seeds, care for the plants, etc. The harvest is not instant, neither is the harvest of soul’s instant. Scripture however does not call us to make disciples as our first priority. I believe our first and main priority is to be faithful to God in obeying Him and allow His plan to unfold in His time. This includes trusting God to transform people’s hearts in His time.
God is the one who transforms hearts. 1 Corinthians 3:6-23. Verse 7 reads: “So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. “ We are called to be faithful and wait patiently for God to orchestrate his plan while we fulfil our role as his faithful servants. In some ways I do not understand God’s delay in bringing change in people’s hearts, but we also do understand that without the delay many Thai would not have a solid foundation and understanding of God’s word and plan for salvation, thus making it harder for them to evangelise their neighbours. We do not understand the way God brings transformation, but we know he is faithful and does transforms lives and communities. We do understand that God’s ways are higher than my ways, God’s love is greater than our love for these people and because of this we need to follow patiently and obediently.
In obediently serving God and patiently waiting we see God’s plan revealed. Possibly one of the reasons that we have not seen converts in our area is that there is a small church situated about 3 kilometers from our house. The church is hidden both physically as a building and as a people worshipping God. This church is in an area that was formerly part of a leper colony. In a Buddhist worldview there is a great stigma associated with all disease and a belief you did something bad in this or a previous life to be cursed with bad karma. If you are believed to be cursed how can you share the good news of the gospel effectively?
Trish and I believe we are called to train, empower and equip this small church which is called “Santitham church”. The church consists of around 15 regular attendees each week who are mainly elderly. They have a pastor lead their service once every 2 – 3 months and for the rest of the Sundays they lead worship, preach and pray together at Sunday service with about 6-7 of them sharing the different roles.
A strategy we are praying about at present is for any new converts we have in the future to be encouraged to attend this church as it is local and easy to get to. We are hoping to be able to go visiting and sharing the gospel with the Christians from this church, which heightens the chance of conversion. Research shows that if a Thai hears the gospel from a foreigner it takes on average 6 years for a conversion, but if they hear it from a Thai it generally takes 6 months. We are greatly encouraged by the thought of this new partnership and it could be seen as a God-sized answer to our prayer for a Thai worker. Instead of one Thai worker He has blessed us with a church full.
At this stage our strategy will be focused on establishing a Christian community of believers that would be actively reaching out to the friends and families with the gospel and then helping these new converts grow and through discipleship training. In the future we would then be aiming to work alongside these new and mature believers to plant a new church in Ron Phibun, which is the next big town in our area, situated about 10kms away.