Meanwhile, back in the US of A

A shout out to my small group at Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in Liberty, Missouri. PV is all decked out for the Christmas Season and its annual production of the Singing Christmas Tree, which attracts thousands of unchurched folks each year.

Pastor Vernon addressing the congregation at PV.

The biggest news at PV these days is the opening of our first regional campus in the old Farmland Building near KCI. Our research has shown that there is a huge number of unchurched people in the Zona Rosa/KCI region and we want to join in the efforts to reach out to this area. The church will be housed in the first floor of this building. They'll kick off services there on January 4th!

Stephen Boster will be the regional campus pastor.

A link to the regional campus blog is on the main page of this blog if you want to check it out!

I believe with all of my heart that the local church is God's chosen instrument for reaching the world with the message of hope and reconciliation through Christ. I am so excited to see my home church in the US looking to impact a wider area of Kansas City. I am praying for y'all!

Prepping for the big day!

Sunday is the first slum Christmas party. We'll be going to Ja Rurat, where we expect two hundred kids and a lot of adults. Wednesday, a group of us gathered to fill gift bags with presents for the kids. Sunday evening's entry should be fun to read with lots of great pictures.

Father - bless every bag and use it to demonstrate your wonderful, radical love for these kids!

December 7th in the slums

We didn't go to Ja Rurat today, but next week is the big Christmas party there, and we are planning gifts for two hundred kids. Yikes! Thankfully, Wednesday is a holiday here, and I can help stuff Christmas boxes that day.

We did go to Soi 107, and the numbers were down quite a bit today, and I have no idea why. Still, the kids had a good time and made their own Christmas cards. The party at 107 will be the 21st, and I think we are expecting about a hundred fifty at that one. The next two slums posts should be good.

Mhuwey teaching the kids a new song.

Catching on fast.

While the kids worked on their cards, a small team of us walked through the community to invite kids to the party two weeks from today. I am told that some folks think the area we are in with Soi 107 doesn't look much like their idea of a slum. These homes are a block or two away from where we meet. There are a number of houses packed in this area, and the only way back to them is through the opening you see. This is a marsh and the houses are on short stilts with raw sewage beneath.

The thing that is so hard to grasp is that these kids LIVE here and it is all they know. Of one thing I am certain. God loves them with a radical love.

The guys

Meet the next generation of leaders in Immanuel Baptist Church and maybe in the church in Bangkok in general. These guys are so faithful and so committed to Christ. They help lead the kids in songs each week and make sure the rest of the team gets transported safely about town.

I remember my second or third Sunday in the slums. We had sung some songs and the program had changed over to English instruction for the children. These guys don't have the English skills yet to help much in that area, so they were killing time til the end of the teaching time. I watched as they went off to a spot by themselves with a guitar and sat and worshipped together quietly for the better part of an hour. Oh, if I had been like them at their age!

Left to right: Son (pronounced like song without the 'g'), Eddie, and Ting (believe it or not, short for Meeting).

Son. The most experienced believer of the group. This week at the retreat, Thanee was speaking from the book of Philemon. I happened to glance over and noticed that Son's Bible was filled with notes. The margins were filled top bottom and side, and every white space between verses. In PHILEMON, for goodness sake! Here's a man who studies the Word.

Eddie, a newer believer, and gifted musician. Well, they are ALL gifted musicians, come to think of it.

Bee and Ting. Bee is a new believer. He became a Christian last summer and Thanee has been discipling him. He is at the church every time the doors are open, I think. And Ting is just one cool guy. Very quiet personality, but so faithful, and you just know something is going on deep inside with him.

Thanee

I decided it would be a good thing to introduce a few of the people from the slums ministry that I work closely with. You hear about the team each weekend, but never the people who make up that team.

One of the people I most admire it Thanee (usually referred to as Tony.) Thanee has worked with Vee for many years and helped Vee establish the whole slum ministry. He is an incredible person. A layman, he works through the week as a maintenance man at an international school in Bangkok. He is Immanuel Church's Mr. Fix It. If a drain clogs, call Tony. If the van breaks down, call Tony.

But he is much more, too. Tony has a heart of pure gold and is as full of energy as the Energizer Bunny. He is always on the go, always full of joy and always encouraging. The children just adore him, and he is a master at organizing and running children's games.

Tony came to know Christ after years with a severe alcohol problem. Today, you could never guess that he had that past. Today, he mentors several young men and encourages them to serve and give of themselves to the church.

This weekend, he shared the speaking duties with Vee during the retreat. Tony spoke about being a servant, which was the focus of the weekend. I had tears in my eyes as I heard him close his message Friday with these lines. "I am not on the board of the church, so I am usually not involved in making the big decisions for the church. But I can have a big influence on the lives of the next generation of leaders." I wanted to stand and applaud and say, "This man GETS IT!"

Monkey Mountain

After the retreat, the team stopped on the way home for a few hours of rest and fun on the
beach, followed by a trip to nearby, "Monkey Mountain." Wild monkeys are all over this mountain, and vendors are also all over, selling bananas and other fruit to feed them. Not as fun as the monkeys at the temple ruins in Lop Buri, but still fun.


The view from atop Monkey Mountain.

Sriracha

Thursday night, the slum ministry team headed to Sriracha in Chonburi province, just southeast of Bangkok for a two day retreat to strengthen relationships within the team, to begin plans for 2009, and to renew our own individual focus on serving.



When Vee told us we'd be staying on the water, he was not lying. We stayed in these two guest houses operated in conjunction with a hospital on shore. We have connections through the church, somehow.
It's a tough gig, but someone has to do it!

Ah Jan Vee doing his Ah Jan thing... teaching us lessons about being an effective servant from the story of the birth of Jesus. He was excellent and challenging.

Left to right: Jimbo, C, Thanee (Tony), Vee.

The team. This group does several things. Most serve in the slum ministry at Soi 107. A few are involved in the younger worship team that serves at the 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning service. For the most part, what you are looking at here is the next generation of leaders in Immanuel Church.

Weekly Slum Updates

A smaller group of kids at Ja Rurat, or so it seemed, but we gave away snacks to twenty eight, so I think not so small as it seemed.

I taught the last lesson on Joseph today. Nok is translating for me. My Thai is steadily improving, but I am still a LONG way from being able to talk in front of folks, even small folks, in Thai.

You are never sure if the kids are listening to you carefully, but afterward, I was so surprised when they were able to answer many questions from the story. I was so pleased when we asked what the main message of Joseph's story was and a girl raised her hand and said, "Even when life is not going good, we should remember that God loves us and that He will help us." Wow. Maybe she should have been teaching instead of me!

Afterward, I put together a game involving picture of animals. Here, Nok explains the game. The kids loved it far more than I could have expected.

Playing Simon Says, or in this case, "Vee Says."

At Soi 107 tonight, after the kids went home, we started planning for the Christmas Party there on December 21st. We are planning for one hundred fifty. All will get gifts and all will be fed. These guys are so great to work with!

(By the way, the Ja Rurat Christmas Party will be the week prior, on December 14th. We will likely have at least that many kids for this one, too. Please pray for the team, as this will be a HUGE undertaking.)

Closing the day, like every Sunday here, with my friends in a time of prayer and praise under the stars.

Final Kanchanaburi Images

The team at Three Pagodas Pass, a spot on the border with Myanmar. This is the border, itself, where we are standing.

Staning with a foot in Myanmar and the rest of me in Thailand. Although Myanmar is a cruelly repressive state, it is not actually that hard to cross the border, you just have to return the same day and not venture too far into the country. We didn't do that, but I still can at least say I was in Burma while I was here!

Monkin' around.

On the way back, the team stopped at Bpreu Nong Church, a church we support financially at Immanuel. Bpreu Nong has about thrity believers, several of whom were there to greet us when we arrived. They treatedus to a fun and unusual dinner. Groups of four or five were given two clay pots stacked on each other. The bottom one held glwoing coals and the top held broth. On the ground in front of us was a collection of meats (pork, beef liver, and chicken), noodles, and vegetables. You put whatever you want into the pot and let it boil until done. Similar to sukyaki and sort of like an Asian fondue.

This IS rhe church. Clear the food awy, put out some chairs and you have it. Clockwise from bottom left: Ah Jan Winit's brother, the pastor at Bpreu Non, Ah Jan Vee, Oat, me, Ah Jan Winit. Good eats!

Kanchaburi Part III

The third part of the ministry we visited Saturday is called Safe House. This is a house a couple hundred meters up the road from the orphanage, which houses very sick people. With a small staff, they work with twenty or more people that no one else wants, from people with HIV to malaria to mental issues. How this woman and her husband find the energy to deal with all the demands is beyond me.


The Safe House.

Those who stay at Safe House and are physically able, are given some form of vocational training. This occupies time, supplements the income of the facility, and gives the 'patients' a sense of accomplishments. Here, women are weaving beautiful wraps that are worn buy Burmese women.

Another type of work is brick making. The bricks produced here are expected to last four hundred years, although no one has checked that personally yet.

This is a house directly behind the Safe House, where a couple now live. When they arrived, the woman could not walk at all. She has somewhat recovered, but as a married couple, they are still afforded the luxury of their own house here.

This is the 'ward' for people too ill to care for themselves. Two of the men in this building are paralyzed, including a man from Bangladesh, who had fallen in a construction accident and was brought here. No one in the area speaks his language, and he clearly gets no visitors. A couple of people on the team stopped to just hold his hand and pray for him and he clutched their hands in his and kissed them and tried so hard to speak in a way we could understand. It was heart-breaking.

Kanchanaburi Part II

Chris works with a woman (standing to his right) who is just this side of Mother Teresa in my book. She totally loves the unlovable. Her own story is sad enough. She is a member of the Karen tribe, a largely Christian group, and was from a Small village in Myanmar (Burma). The Karen have long been the subject of intense persecution in Myanmar. Some twenty years ago, the military burned down the entire village and she and her husband fled to Thailand.

As she got her own life stabilized, she began to reach out to help others. Today, she operates a three-fold ministry. In buildings next to her home are an orphanage and a home for seniors with no one to care for them. The orphanage now houses about twenty eight kids. I have no idea how many seniors there are, but I met several of them


Ah Jan Winit plays his fiddle for the orphans.

This orphanage houses about twenty eight kids. All seemed very cheerful and were remarkably well-behaved. They obviously loved having visitors. David Johnson, a career missionary with IMB and an elder at Immanuel, is standing with them.

Two of the seniors.
Another senior. Notice the traditional Burmese clothing. The men and women both wear a wrap kind of like a skirt. He also has a bag tied around his waist you can barely see in back.

This is the back half of her house. It is mostly open to the elements.

Kanchanaburi - Part 1

We left Bangkok at 2:00 a.m. and drove through the early morning to pick up Chris Mills, an American missionary who is largely serving by himself in Kanchanaburi province. We went to go see Chris and encourage him, while getting a close up view of the work he is involved in.


The sun rises over the mountains near the Thai/Burma border.

Left to right - me, V, and Chris.

We visited a piece of land recently purchased by an organization called Vision Trust, based in the US. They feed about a hundred sixty kids in the area. They plan to build a community center, but right now they just have a big tent and, weather permitting, serve meals out in the open field.

The kids get a bowl of something like chicken noodle soup, but a bit thicker.

They then march over and get s big spoonful of crushed red peppers. Got to 'kick it up a notch!"