12 minute read
NOTES FROM THE DAIRY OF A CHURCH PLANTER
by Rev Henry Yeo MMS Country Director for Thailand. His favourite pastime is gardening; he has many trees he grew from seeds.
Editor’s Note: Ps Henry was one of the speakers for the “Church Multiplication Connection” seminar organised by Singapore Centre for Global Missions in January 2024. He shared the case study of planting Sanphranet Methodist Church and Shineforth Methodist Church in Thailand. The first part of the article was first published in the March 2024 issue of Methodist Message (MM). We thank the MM editorial team for editing the article.
Rev Henry Yeo and his wife, Sungwan Yeo, were sent out by the Methodist Missions Society, Singapore (MMS) to help establish the Methodist Mission in Thailand (MMT) in 1998. Rev Henry has served as the Country Coordinator and then later as Country Director. Sungwan is a native Thai from the province of Nakhon Rachasima, Thailand.
In 2004, MMT was renamed the Mettakij Church Association (MCA). The main objective of MCA is to plant churches supported and enhanced by community services and social welfare.
This is Rev Henry’s account of their time spent church planting in Thailand.
It is a cool, dry February day in 1998 when we arrive and set up our base in Sanphranet. Sanphranet is a relatively well-populated community in the Sansai district in the northern province of Chiang Mai. Most inhabitants are the native Lan Na Thai people (also known as Khon Mueng or “City People”), while the rest are from hill tribes such as the Lahu, Karen, Akha, and Hmong who come to Sanphranet to seek economic opportunities in the capital city (which, like the province, is also called Chiang Mai).
The church we are attached to here is the first church in Thailand adopted by MMT. This church was planted by a pastor from the Lahu tribe. Before our arrival, he had made a request to come under the umbrella of MMT, for financial support as well as “legal cover”. It is a very common practice in Thailand for pastors who plant independent churches to do this in order to attain a form of legitimacy.
On our first Sunday, we can see it is a vibrant church, but all its 80-odd members are from the minority Lahu tribe and all activities are conducted exclusively in their own dialect. This dialect, foreign to the Lan Na Thai and people from other hill tribes, is clearly a barrier to outreach. Neither does the church offer any activities to attract the community at large. Having identified what is lacking, we must now find solutions.
Most Sanphranet inhabitants are in the lower-middle income group, but there are some very poor families trying to make ends meet because jobs are scarce. We find out later that several of our first converts are employed in a big pig farm not too far away.
After discussing with me, my wife Sungwan, a trained teacher, sets off to visit an elementary school operated by a local Buddhist temple. It is highly common in Thailand for schools to be founded and supported by a temple or be located on temple grounds.
She comes back to report that many of the students need help after school with their homework assignments. But quite a few of them are being raised by single mothers or come from families which are broken. In many cases, both parents will be at work for long hours daily, six days a week, leaving their children home alone after school to fend for themselves. And even when parents are at home, many are not educated enough, or are too tired, to help their children.
Sungwan wants to minister to the children by starting an After-School Programme for them. Much to her delight (and mine), it attracts almost all the children at the small school, particularly the older ones studying in Grades 4-6 who have considerably more homework assignments. After spending some time observing the students, Sungwan categorises them according to their abilities and begins to tutor the weaker ones.
When she has time, she goes out to visit the parents of the children. During these informal “parent-teacher meetings”, besides discussing the children’s progress, she looks for an opportunity to talk about God and to pray with the parents. As time passes, it’s obvious that many of them are grateful for the After-School Programme and trust her. However, while they appreciate what she is doing for their children, they are not yet open to receiving Christ as their Saviour.
We remind each other that God is the Lord of the harvest, and we are here simply to sow the seed. Three weeks into the After-School Programme, Sungwan announces to the children that if they come to the church on Saturday mornings, she will teach them songs and stories from the Bible. It is gratifying to see the response to her invitation. More than 80 children are turning up every Saturday!
Remarkably, even though most of the parents are not willing to accept Christ or to attend church themselves, they readily allow and even encourage their children to attend our Saturday morning activities. This situation really boosts our boldness and vision.
In August 1999, Sungwan takes the lead in organising a one-day evangelistic outreach to the children. We are greatly helped by a missionary couple from the United States who are here to aid us for two weeks. We had first met them in Bangkok in 1994, when I was pastoring a church there, and where they were instrumental in Sungwan’s conversion to Christianity. About 80 children attend and at the end of the day, at least 40 of them pray to receive Christ. A few months later, most of the converts are joyfully baptised at a nearby swimming pool by Bishop Wong Kiam Thau of The Methodist Church in Singapore.
Sungwan neither has a degree in theology nor has she received any training to be a missionary. I’m grateful she has accompanied me into this mission field which, as God ordained, happens to be her home country. She says she’s simply doing what she feels is needed for the community, especially in the areas of the children’s education and welfare. In October 2000, she starts a child-care centre as many parents need a place for their children to be looked after while they’re at work.
Year 2000 brings a big change! Some people have expressed their wish for an adult worship service on Sunday for non-Lahu speakers. Sungwan and I can speak the so-called “Central Thai” but we’re not proficient in the Lan Na Thai dialect which is slightly different. We have invited a pastor who is a Lan Na Thai and able to speak both languages to help shepherd this newly-formed congregation. Eventually this congregation will become the Sanphranet Methodist Church, while the Lahu congregation re-locates to another city in Chiang Mai.
It’s 2002 and a new four-lane highway is being built. While this brings about many advantages, it will unfortunately separate Sanphranet from another community nearby, where some of those who attend our church come from. The highway will not only inconvenience them, but it will also be an unsafe crossing for the children. This is why we set up our second church, Shineforth Methodist Church.
In 2005, we are able to tap on the Student Sponsorship Scheme (SSS) which will help some of the poorer families supplement the cost of their children’s schooling. Although tuition is heavily subsidised by the Thai government from Grades 1 to 12, there are other expenses like school uniforms, books and stationery which can be a heavy burden.
Meanwhile, we are constantly looking for ways to meet the needs of the adults in Sanphranet Methodist Church. Making disciples is difficult, to say the least. For example, a pre-believing elderly woman went to an evangelistic healing crusade and accepted Christ after she was healed of pain in her arm. A cell group was formed which met at her home, as her children forbade her to attend church with us. However, one day she requested the cell group to stop meeting at her home as her children opposed it. While Sungwan and I continue to visit her, she won’t allow us to even pray for her. She feels obliged to obey her children as she’s dependent on them financially. Sadly, such overpowering resistance of family members is not uncommon in Thailand.
The similarity in the church planting model for Sanphranet Methodist Church and Shineforth Methodist Church is that they both started off with ministries for children. Eventually the parents and other adults are drawn in. It’s our experience that fewer Lan Na Thai people (richer, as they generally own the houses they live in), will accept Christ, as compared to people from the hill tribes who mostly stay in rented housing.
I’m reading up on the history of Chiang Mai to better understand our mission field. Chiang Mai is the birthplace and a stronghold of Theravada Buddhism, a branch of Buddhism with the most adherents in Thailand. Some tribal communities won’t allow churches to be built and in rare instances, churches have been burned down. Although this sort of physical opposition is rare, Christians encounter very subtle and verbal opposition of various forms. The city itself has so many temples; no wonder it is referred to as the Northern Buddhism capital.
In a short time, I’ve learnt that societal pressure is a very strong deterrent for Thai people to become Christians. In their culture, individualism is seen as selfishness and arrogance, and in a country where the popular saying goes, “To be a Thai is to be a Buddhist”, converting is as serious as renouncing your national identity. Is there any way our mission can move this mountain?
It’s been found that it’s easier to evangelise to Thai people who have relocated from their places of origin. They are more willing to convert. Quite likely it’s because they are freed from the societal pressure within the community they came from.
The university campus is one such place, where there is peer-to-peer evangelism takes place among the students. Students are normally seekers and more open to new perspectives; there, they also face less pressure from family or the community they came from.
If the key people in a community are converted, that may more easily lead to the conversion of a majority, if not the entire, community. This was what happened in Phetchabun province, where evangelism by the Free In Jesus Christ Church Association, Thailand resulted in about 1,760 people being baptised in May 2023.
It seems Christianity spreads more quickly with the tribal people as missionaries evangelise to a whole village (mass evangelism), rather than to individuals in an urban or city setting.
Undoubtedly, the more conversions there are in a community, the less pressure the converts will face from family and community to recant.
Children-related ministry is one of the best ways to open doors and bring the gospel to a community.
Children related ministry is one of the best ways to open doors and bring the gospel to a community.
Sanphranet Methodist Church and Shineforth Methodist Church grew out of our ministries to the children in Sanphranet and its neighbouring communities. My wife, Sungwan, did very well in meeting the children’s needs: providing after-school care, help with home assignments and extra tuition, and activities on weekends.
Some of the children who accepted Christ have continued in the faith into adulthood. Some who walked away for a while have returned. I believe the exposure they received when they were young was crucial. As Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Sadly, some have not returned.
One of the things I would have liked to do better was to spend more time on intentional discipleship. Many of the children may not have left the faith if we had devoted more time to build them up into faithful and strong disciples; while the ones still faithful would be able to make disciples themselves if we had equipped them better.
Most leaders would agree that churches will not grow if there is no effective and continual disciple-making, but disciple-making requires churches to develop the children actively and intentionally, not only by teaching them Bible lessons in the traditional Sunday school setting, but also by establishing ministries to provide an avenue for the children to invite their non-believing friends to church, teach them how to evangelise and equip them to be effective disciples who can disciple others.
When it comes to bringing the adults to Christ in this very closely-knit community, the task is even more challenging. Many, if not all, have heard the gospel and experienced the love we expressed, mainly through our ministry to their children, but the cost of conversion can be too great for them.
While both our churches, Sanphranet Methodist Church and Shineforth Methodist Church, still face difficulty in persuading the mainly Khon Mueng (City People) to accept Christ, they do attract many of the hill tribe people who have migrated here. All glory to God who is still at work through us.
