Introduction of a new partner in ministry:

As some of you may know, 4 years ago when we first got to Khon Kaen, we were led to pray very hard for a Christian family service centre to help kids at risk. Many of the kids from the slums are distracted from their studies at school, because of the complexity of life in a slum environment. Many of the girls enter prostitution as young as 13 years old, and many boys get involved in gangs, fights, petty crime and homosexuality. Many suffer sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. God put in my heart a particularly deep burden for those who needed a shelter to run to, but had nowhere to turn because of shame, or a lack of resources to help themselves out of destructive patterns of behaviour. God answered our prayer.

This year God led us to meet a woman named Dorothy, who has set up a family centre in Khon Kaen. Not only has Dorothy’s foundation helped to establish a very good chapel program for the kids at school, now the kids have another place to call home too, where they can pick up Christian values. Dorothy and her faith was God’s answer to our prayer. We now work in partnership with Dorothy and her foundation to serve the youth of Khon Kaen city, especially our kids from the slum districts.

God’s miracle of provision

Dorothy was led to set up a hands-on missions training school, so that there were more people equipped to help bring the good news to the Thai people in ways that had longer lasting impact. As part of their tentmaking, they also have rented a little place and set up an English language school. Proceeds from this school will go to finance the family centre. In future, we hope to set up vocational training facilities so that the thai kids from the slums who aren’t accepted into polytechnics (our equivalent of ITEs) still have some means of acquiring market-necessary skills to break out of the poverty cycle. These are all our big, human dreams. As Dorothy committed it to God, God told her to trust Him for an overabundance of resources. Dorothy proceeded to have faith in Him.

Just the night before we left Thailand, Dorothy met our team and shared with us what had just happened. A man approached her, and told her that God had specifically directed him to find her, and give her “a lot of money”.

“Tell me any project you wish to do, write me a proposal, and I will give you the money”, he said.

Upon hearing it, Dorothy was both rather surprised and puzzled. She asked “What do you mean, ‘a lot of money’?”

“A lot of money, we can start small first, you want 1 million US? Or maybe 5 million? As one project takes off, we can finance another”

Dorothy was totally bowled over and stunned. And so were we. In all our hearts, we were thinking “no, that’s WAY too much money, we can’t accept that!”. While an abundance of finances were good news to us (we could finally finish the leaking roof of the Khon Kaen Christian School building, buy over the family centre instead of paying rent for it, buy over the building where we had our language school, and buy a plot of land to build the missions training centre), our reaction showed us the extent of our disbelief. We were still reeling in incredulity at the news, not daring to take ownership of His providence. We were led to repent that while we had the faith to ask God’s provision, when it came down to the crunch, we didn’t have the faith to receive it.

We spent the evening on our knees praying and repenting. Tears flowed, because in that moment, God showed us further still the impurity of our hearts and the weakness of our faith. We thanked Him that His faithfulness isn’t nullified by our own lack of faith. We came out of it all with changed hearts—hearts that now truly knew, experientially knew, how deeply we could just trust Him for every need we had. We now wanted to be careful we didn’t run ahead of Him, or start strategizing on His behalf. We want to make every step we take aligned right in the centre of His will.

Turns out this man has links to the likes of George Soros, and is a backslided Christian newly returned to Christ. Upon coming back to God, he wanted to do something for God. He came shortly after to be the trustee of a large amount of money after his friend passed away. That friend had willed that money to charity, and so his job was to find a suitable charity to give the money to. This man wanted to make a difference with that money, so he prayed and God specifically told him to give it to Dorothy Jason. There are many other groups out there trying to grab him and get him to look at their projects, but he was so convicted that it was to go only to Dorothy Jason, that he didn’t stop looking for her till he found her.

Our prayer needs:

In spite of all this exciting, exhilarating turn of events, we are not going to say yes immediately to the money. We want to seek God very carefully of the next step we should take. As mentioned earlier, there’s infrastructure that we’d like to purchase as immediately as possible—we could finish construction at Khon Kaen Christian School. We could buy the land the school stood on if possible, to save the school from paying rent it can barely afford. We could buy the family centre and the land it stood on, we’d want to buy the language school, so the family centre could be self-sustaining, and we could buy land to build a missions training centre, to train more people to gather in this harvest field—someone even joked with the money, we could buy over Khon Kaen.

Deep in our hearts we know that having money to build infrastructure is only a small part of the real work that needs to be done. It is a significant first step, but it is still nevertheless a small one. Each centre that comes up must be staffed with personnel that are able to maintain its ministry, function and service properly. It is easy to build a school, but another thing altogether to run it. (e.g. teachers need to be taught how to control their class, how to plan lessons and achieve lesson objectives, how to work with each other in teams, etc.) We are extremely short on people who have the soft skills to model for the locals how operating an effective centre/school is done. Over the long term, it is the transmission of these soft-skills that will have deep and far-reaching impact as we pass these physical infrastructures and concepts/ soft-skills over to the Thais, so that the Thai ministry may be a self-sustaining, self-renewing and growing one.

You are most warmly invited to join us, as we continue to serve in Thailand. We are calling for long-term volunteers for a period of 2-3 years. This goes out to anyone with a passion to answer His call for the lost. It doesn’t matter whether or not you feel you have the skills. All that matters is seeking Him and obeying Him if He calls. We must admit that even in setting up a family centre, we’ve done so purely out of obedience to His prompting. There are currently no staff with the paper qualifications for counselling/ social work, and we simply set up one, because God says so. We will trust Him to bring people with the skills, and most importantly, the right heart along, as we follow Him by faith. We simply do the best we can, and give all we can. Just as with Khon Kaen Christian School, if we could speak English, we taught it, best as we knew how, until a trained teacher came along with us and taught us how to do it better. If we can sew, we teach the kids to sew. If we can cook, we teach the kids to cook. There will never be a shortage of things one can do. The important thing is to be there first. God leads more specifically from that step. Usually because of language barriers, the first year is spent knowing the people personally, getting to know the spiritual and cultural ground, and picking up the language, before any subsequent breakthrus in ministry can be made.

Please pray for:

1. Wisdom, as we decide how best to steward our resources, especially over the million-US dollar issue.
2. Sensitivity to God’s heartbeat, so we don’t run ahead of Him or turn to human strategy
3. Labourers to answer the call to the harvest field
4. Khon Kaen Christian School—we thank God that now the kids have a good follow-up program once they receive Christ. Discipleship for school staff however remains worrying. Many of the teachers need to learn to draw refreshment from God, and are frequently tired and discouraged. Pray for staff relational-dynamics, and for God to send encouragement frequently and often. Pray especially for the school principal/manager Aacaan Songsri, for a close relationship with God, so that her administration will become a tool for further ministry in school.
5. The Gerald Khoo Foundation—Dorothy’s foundation, under which the family centre is set up. For God’s continued grace, rest and joy in their faithful labour.

Other Thanksgivings:

1. The new converts who have accept Christ at the Christmas concert.
2. Som, one of the thai girls I’ve ministered to and kept in contact with over the last 2 years, has told me she wants to give her life to serving Christ. She has been through an extremely difficult time growing up as she has burn scars all over her body, and struggled with self-image. I have spent the last two years praying with and for her, especially for her to experience God’s unfailing love and complete acceptance of her. In spite of her emails telling me she was much better now, I could not imagine the change in her, till I saw her this December. At our Christmas evangelistic rally, entirely of her own accord, she went about explaining the gospel message to her peers who had not yet received Christ. Never in my life, have I seen a 16 year old so unashamed of the gospel. =)
3. One of our BB officers has dedicated his life to full-time ministry as a pastor in the course of this trip. He is currently in university, and has been praying over this for some time. Making this trip up has changed his life and sealed his convictions. Do keep him in prayer, that he shall especially always remain God’s tender-hearted warrior. =)