When I graduated from school, I ended up heading to Wisconsin for work. In Madison, I found a really good church and I got back into regular reading of Scripture. It was an incredible time of growth for me spiritually. I began pray about God’s plan for my life, and I eventually came to the point where I felt convinced that I was going to be a missionary. At the time, I had no idea how to become a missionary. I had never heard of Pioneers or any missions agency, but I knew that I needed to know the Bible better before I moved anywhere. So, I told my boss that I was going to seminary, and a few weeks later my business career was over.
Before starting DTS in the fall of ’05, I decided that it would be good for me to take a missions trip over the summer. I was really interested in working with Muslims and so I applied to an agency called Frontiers that specializes in Muslims. I told them that I was willing to go anywhere in the world and for the whole summer. Imagine my surprise when they called to tell me that I had been accepted on a trip to…Thailand. I didn’t even think there were Muslims in Thailand. As it happens, there is a Muslim people group there of about 4 million people.
Well, I can hardly do justice to the experience that I had on that trip. We worked with a long term missionary teaching English to Muslim and Buddhist students. While the focus of the work was on reaching Muslims, I felt myself drawn more to the Thai Buddhists. When we left, I never dreamed I would go back. I wanted to go to Central Asia or the Middle East and work in a more typically Muslim country.
While studying in seminary, I developed some very strong convictions about the approach I wanted to take with my ministry. I decided that working in a city and working among the poor were both very biblical and very strategic emphases to have. I wanted to plant churches among the urban poor and train them to go back to their home countries and villages and plant churches on their own.
After joining Pioneers, I took a survey trip to Turkey. I was interested in Turkey because of the desperate need for a Christian witness in that land. However, after much prayer, I decided that the type of ministry that God had put on my heart was not a match for Turkey. In order to work there today, one has to operate as a businessperson and evangelize very carefully.
As I stepped back from my narrow focus on Muslims to consider the bigger picture, I felt like God had been pointing me towards Thailand from the beginning. I had already been there twice without ever really choosing to go there. I had a wonderful experience with the people both times, and although Thailand has long been open to missionary activity, the church has not firmly taken root among the Thai as of yet. Also, I have come to believe that God has prepared Thailand as a strategic launching pad for ministry in Southeast Asia. Of all the bordering countries (Malaysia, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand is the only one that is wide open for missionaries. And people from all these countries can be found in the big cities of Thailand, especially Bangkok. Finally, Bangkok is full of slums. Some estimate that as many as 1 million people live in the city’s slums.
I had been praying about working in a large city with lots of poverty that could serve a strategic purpose regionally, and it took me all this time to figure out that it was a place I had already been when I was 13 years old.
