Day 6: Local Churches

Day 6 Support a Local Church

At the last retreat for the program that I’m in (Christian Volunteers in Thailand:  CVT), we were talking about intentional Christian community. We were asked to each commit to one area in our lives as volunteers to try to intentionally be Christian. Over the year and a half I’ve been here I’ve been involved in many things, devotions before school each day, Karen bible studies on Saturday nights, church on Sunday mornings, and bible study with the foreigners living here each Sunday evening.

As they went around and shared what each of the other volunteers was going to do in their communities, I kept thinking yup, already doing that… To the point that I had to start thinking outside of the box to find something to commit to doing before the next retreat. I also knew my schedule, and didn’t want to commit to something too big that I wouldn’t be able to do. So, as I sat there and thought about it, I remembered the teacher who had just retired. His house is in an outskirt village, and there is a small outreach church nearby that he has been asking me to attend since I got here. So, I made my commitment to visit that church at least once before our next retreat. I have since then visited it once and have been to another one that is a Burmese church. There are several churches like this, usually made of bamboo, sometimes with a cement floor and partial cement wall. Very small, with less than twenty people in attendance at any given time. I have been to four of them now, and there are several others I haven’t been to yet. These churches are on my heart because they are local people trying to reach out to their unbelieving neighbors. Some of them have just a few who are actually Christians attending.

My idea for helping out these small churches would be in small donations/grants. I’m not sure what individual projects they may have at this time, but a donation of $500 or $1,000 would be a huge blessing to them. They could fix something in the church, add a proper roof, get a sound system, etc… Once I know there is a donation available and the amount, I will look into asking the local pastors that look after the churches and go through the process of finding something that is an urgent need in one of these other churches.

If you’re wondering why I mentioned a sound system, here’s why. I once attended one of these churches that had a tin roof, a cement floor, three cement block high walls, and the rest was chicken wire. Partway through it started pouring, nothing could be heard at all, so they had the person who was supposed to pray pray as I guess they decided it didn’t matter as much if the rest of us heard the prayer or not because God would. So, imagine what a speaker and a microphone would do for these small churches in the middle of the rainy season… I’m looking for donations to purchase what we would consider small things, but what to them are huge. Some of them I’m sure have an offering of less than $10 per week. So, some of these things would seem impossible for them to buy on their own.