Hard Decisions

Our househelp, Samon is a pastor’s wife. Her husband is working at a new church plant in a nearby town. He receives some financial support from Korean missionaries but not enough by any means to live on. So her husband is going to ask the Korean missionaries if they could raise their financial support. If they are not able to get an increase, they will seriously consider an offer to be the pastor of a more established church in another province. They don’t want to move but they are really struggling to live on their current income, even with what we pay Samon (which is at the high end for househelp wages).

Unfortunately, this is a common problem within the Thai church. Rural churches cannot afford to pay their pastors enough for them to live on. Compounding the problem is that pastors think it is demeaning for them as a pastor to get a another job to supplement their income. So either pastors move to a bigger church in the major cities or quit being a pastor and find secular work.

I’m not sure of what Samon’s husband was doing before he started this new church plant. But I wonder if he would have gone through with it, if there as no financial backing from these Korean missionaries? I would say not. OMF in the past have provided funding for pastors of churches OMF has setup, but are in the process of a gradual withdrawal of all such funding and has a policy of not providing such funding in the future. It has created an unhelpful dependence on missionary funding and rarely are churches successfully weaned from such funding.

I don’t know if we contributed partly to their current financial situation too. Last year, Samon was mentioning how her husband was thinking of borrowing some money to by a motorbike as Samon was using theirs to come to our house to work. They would have to pay quite a bit of interest on the loan so wanting to help them out, I offered to provide them with a loan at no interest. Samon would pay back the loan over a number of years from her wages. Samon’s husband up buying a cheap car instead of a motorbike. It has been useful for their ministry in picking up members of their church and taking people to camps and things. But I’m sure that the running costs of the car and the increased cost of petrol has added to their financial burden, canceling any benefit of the interest costs they saved from borrowing from me. I guess could argue that if I hadn’t given them the loan they would have borrowed the money from the car dealer with the additional interest expense and be in a worse situation. It is hard to know what they would have done.

It would be a great loss for us if Samon had to leave. We are praying that she won’t have to. We try to help out when they additional medical costs or when she gets a fine for not having a driver’s license. I’m not sure that there is much more that we can do. It would be hard to find someone who would be as trustworthy and hard working as her.