April 2000

Dear Friends,

Today is Palm Sunday, 2000. How does the church sing "Hosanna, hosanna" on the slopes of the Mount of Olives after two millennia? In Thailand it is still a New Testament era. The cadences of the Christian song of ascents to the Holy Temple of the New Jerusalem are a first century rhythm set to a oriental pentatonic scale.

Where the road ended at the sea there was a cluster of tables under the palm trees, with old men and women selling fish dragged out of the gulf before dawn. Behind the tables on the tidal flats naked boys dodged among the beached fishing boats throwing mud at one another and squealing. The bright painted patterns on the prows of the boats declared that the owners were "Chao Lay," Sea Gypsies.

We threaded our way between dwellings of discarded sheet metal and bamboo. The houses were built so close to one another that we could brush the houses on both sides of the path with our fingertips. It was a rabbit warren of lanes and passages, sometimes broadening into a narrow plaza under a tamarind tree where someone squatted selling fried bananas from a woven tray.

Our little delegation included a Korean missionary, two Thai pastors, a Thai evangelist, and me. We were visiting the first Chao Lay Christians in Thailand to ask for their help. Toward the center of the village was a cluster of stout wooden houses, each with an open-sided porch and a room behind. A woman in a southern Thai sarong bounded toward us and urged us to follow her up onto one of these. Above the door was a bleached picture of Jesus. The house was otherwise indistinguishable from the rest. She was the first Christian Chao Lay on Phuket Island.

Acharn Theerayut had been visiting the Chao Lay people two hours south of Phuket, on Lanta Island, for the past year. Amazing things had happened. A year ago I had first conducted a prayer retreat for pastors on Koh Lanta, and last Easter I wrote:

We had a pastors' retreat on an island so isolated from the waves of civilization that when our pastors went out two-by-two "to do something to demonstrate God's love," they did not find a single person who had ever heard of Jesus Christ. Some of the Sea Gypsies, an underdeveloped ethnic minority of wanderers who live all their lives afloat in boat communities, had never even heard of God. Meanwhile, most of the island is inhabited by Moslems of the most conservative kind found in Thailand. But the whole group of pastors coalesced in the conviction that they must establish an outpost for Christ right there.

The beginning had been inauspicious. Two of the first Chao Lay to show any interest in Christianity had fallen ill. Everyone in the village concluded that the ghosts and demons were unhappy at being increasingly ignored. Furthermore, the condition of one of the new believers in Christ steadily worsened until she was paralyzed and almost comatose. But a miraculous recovery took place after the Thai missionary prayed for healing. It signaled a turn in attitudes toward the God of the Christians. By now the healing is complete. The two have been baptized, and five others are ready to take the step (or the plunge, as is the case).

There are only a few Chao Lay Christians in Thailand, so we need the help of the little community in Phuket to visit the new converts on Lanta. The woman whom we were visiting surprised us with a Bible newly printed in Lay language using Thai script. They also have a hymnbook. These are basic tools for Christian work.

Before we left Phuket there was one more act of ministry. The head of the tiny Chao Lay church was building a house, and today they were going to set the center post. They had to use every available hour before the rains came again because they had torn the former house down to make room for the new one. Under an awning of plastic sheeting and gunny sacks, we blessed a sandy hole and pair of blue strings intersecting above it. Years ago they would have buried a chicken to consecrate the hole, or, if it was the hole for the center post of a holy site, the quivering body of a freshly decapitated slave. The Sea Gypsies themselves have been the preferred sacrifices of the natives of Borneo and Malaya. Today the invocation of God's grace is more than enough. There was no need for sacred strings around the top of the post or offerings at its base to see it firmly planted. Christ is the release from servitude to that.

On the last day of our second pastors retreat on Lanta Island we each carried a brick to the front of a plot of land owned by a Christian from the city of Trang. He was giving the land to the Lord for a chapel to become the first Christian edifice on Lanta Island. They say that the vision for this came from us a year ago. Before that, they hadn't given a thought to evangelizing the Chao Lay. The vision may have came through us but I take no credit for its origin. Nor for the vision we had on Monday morning in which we laid hands on a young man to be the first full-time Thai missionary to live and work among the Chao Lay in the Indian Ocean villages of southern Thailand.

We are living in New Testament times in the church in Thailand.

Grace and Peace at Easter, 2000

Rev. Ken and Michal Dobson

The 2000 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 158