April 2024

April is hot, hot, hot season here in Thailand.  Temperatures this year reach record or near record levels of 45 degrees Celsius (about 113 degrees Fahrenheit). It is also summer break for schools…too hot to study I guess.

Campers enjoying lunch, visiting with each other.

It is also the traditional month for youth church camps.  This year the leadership of the Lua churches decided it was time to restart the youth programs.  Things were shut down during the pandemic, and have been slow to start back up, so it has been almost 5  years since our last youth camp.

One of our main evangelist organized the event. He went to churches of other language groups (Hmong, Mien, Thai) to get all to work together.  But the leadership of those churches turned him down saying they didn’t have any youth that would be interested. So we decided to just have the Lua youth. We anticipated about 50,60 young people and budgeted accordingly.

Main Session

Our leaders, however, refused to give up. They posted on a  community Facebook page about the camp and invited all to come.  The youth in the other churches saw the post and complained to their parents “Why didn’t you tell us there is a youth camp?” and the parents went to their church leaders and asked “Why didn’t you tell us there is a youth camp being planned?”

In the end we had 139 youth from 4 different language groups attend with another 40 adult sponsors.  Needless to say this was going to break our budget. You might remember I made a special appeal and we were able to raise the extra funds.

One of the impressive aspects of this camp is that our Lua leaders spent time before the camp training the older high school students to lead worship, help lead teams, and mentor the younger kids (we had all ages attend).  We did not ask for outside help.  It was very encouraging to me to see the leaders I trained and mentored during my time at Lanna Theological Center turn around and start discipling their youth.  The teenagers did a great job!!

Hot, and the start of Thai Songkran Holiday, the world’s largest water fight. The municipality provided a wet, and cool ending to the camp.

We have decided that we will  put our energy and resources into restarting our youth outreach program in the Lua c

hurches and other churches in Nan Province.  We have a branch foundation office (Youth Development Foundation of Chiang Mai) located in the Pua area, but it is unstaffed as this time.  I am working with the church leadership to recruit someone who would come on as a foundation staff to plan and coordinate youth activities with the different churches.

Prayer Need:

1. We find the right person for this position
2. We do not have the funding for this position.

Thank you for your support of the ministry among the Lua churches and other churches in Nan, and Chiang Mai.