Birthday Girl

Our little girl turned 2 today. Happy birthday!

Does my motorbike have "bad luck"?

Last month I lent a fellow missionary my motorbike to use while we were going to be away. Unfortunately, she was just learning and lost control and accelerated into a busy street and was hit by a car. Praise God that she wasn't injured seriously.

When I returned from holidays a Thai friend told me that I should sell my motorbike because it was “bad luck”. 5 people have already had a crash on this motorbike since I bought it less than 3 years ago. I should really sell it and buy a new bike to escape this motorbike with bad luck.

Another missionary was able to buy a virtually brand new car very cheaply as the owner had hit a Chinese person on a bicycle (which was bad luck).

From a western perspective, we would argue that there have been so many accidents because all the people who had crashes were new or relatively inexperienced riders. So that is why people had accidents. But for many Thais, in their worldview, you cannot ignore the “bad luck” of the bike.

Rare honesty from a church planter

I’ve been reading the book “Church planting is for wimps” by Mike McKinley and in one chapter he bemoans the fact that most church planters are not honest about how things are REALLY going in their church plant. Most church planters overemphasize whatever good is happening and hardly mention the difficulties. Mike’s book was a refreshing change as he honestly recounts the damaging effects that church planting had on his marriage (and thus warns others not to make the same mistake.)

The following is an extract from a prayer letter from one of my missionary colleagues and I’m grateful for his honesty as I can truly relate to his sentiments.

“Dear Friends & Family,

“How is church planting going?” I donʼt particularly enjoy answering this question but I wish I did. With only about 3 months to go until our home assignment in the U.S., it is time to look back at our first full missionary term in Thailand and ask, “What has been accomplished? What do we have to show for ourselves as we head back home and meet with supporters?”


I wish I could tell you that new churches (or at least one new church) has been planted. Or maybe that a small group Bible study of some sort has started that we hope will grow into a church. Or at the very least, weʼd like to report about some promising new believers who have come to faith while weʼve been here. We know that in Thailand people are coming to faith, new small groups are starting, and churches are being planted. The statistics that came out for 2009 said that the number of Christians in Thailand is growing seven times faster than the biological growth rate of the country. That is great news. I just wish that we were seeing some of it in our neck of the woods.


Weʼve tried a lot of different things but nothing seems to have taken off.... [he goes on to list all the things he has tried]


With all the failures, one might be tempted to throw in the towel and go home. But the funny thing is, leaving the mission field has never crossed our mind. “And why not?” you may ask. Because the ultimate success of church planting in Thailand does not depend upon our efforts but the promise of God. Christ said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Mt 16:18). If Christ has said it will succeed, who are we to say it wonʼt?”

Fishing in Thailand

I'm currently on holidays in South Thailand at a guesthouse owned by our mission.  It is right by the beach and kid friendly with all meals and laundry included in the service, so it is much more convenient and relaxing than staying in a hotel.  On Sundays they have a church service at the guesthouse as all the guests are either missionaries for Christian workers.  The highlight so far as been hiring a local fishing boat and going fishing with one of my collegues and his father in law.  Caught a nice bream and lost another one big one.  Definately will be doing this again sometime.

Deep Church

There are so many books on church planting and church how do you decide what you should read and what you shouldn't?  On the front cover of the book "Deep Church" by Jim Belcher, it had Tim Keller's endorsement "This is an important book", and that was enough for me.

And being 3 quarters of the way through it, I agree that it is an important book.  It suggests a "third way", that doesn't have to be "traditional church" or "emerging church" but a "third way" with a mixture of both.  In my opinion though, Belcher in his "third way" leans much more towards a traditional model in the end and I wonder in reality what he offers is that much more different than a traditional church.

What I like about this look is that Belcher is very balanced in his assessment of traditional church and the emerging church.  Something which generally I find is handled very poorly.  Most of the time, writers say they are trying to write a balanced view and in love but in the end they fail on both counts.  They end up just taking snip shots at the other camp to justify their own positions.

Evidence of this balanced view is that on the back cover you have endorsements from people like Mark Driscoll (Traditional camp) and Rob Bell (Emergent camp).

Belcher's background is interesting.  He knows and dialogued with the some of the main emergent figures as they were just "emerging" but ended but being a Presbyterian minister and started his own church in this "third way" model.  But he was once part of ministry team of 17 at a 5,000 member congregation, then he became disgruntled and started a small organic church in his home.  He's really read up on all the traditional and emergent conversation, actually visited some the churches of the emergent leaders and talked to them.  Then he went out and tried to start a new church with the ideals of his "third way".  Once his church grew he faced the problem of some of his key original church planters being unhappy about the structure and vision of the church as it grew and the Presbyterian denomination had to step in to help resolve the conflict.  This is real experience and not just someone writing from theory.

So this is an important book to read especially in the traditional vs emerging church debate and one I'll need to go over again.

Home Schooling

One of the difficulties missionaries face is the education of their children so that when they eventually return to their home countries, their children can fit back into their home country’s schooling system. In Thailand missionaries have many different options depending on their location. In Bangkok or Chiang Mai there are excellent (but expensive) International School with either a British or American curriculum. Little supplementing would be needed for Australians such as ourselves.  There is a small international school in Lampang with a British program but after starting with this option for our boys we decided that it wasn’t the best for them as they were not learning enough time. After much soul searching and research (mostly by my diligent wife) we decided on our children going to Thai school supplemented by home schooling. 

So my wife goes into our oldest son’s school 3 afternoons a week for an hour to supplement my son’s education following the Sonlight curriculum (American). We hope it will be adequate but we won’t really know until we go back to Australia in 3 years time. One of the great things about OMF is that twice a year they organise Home Schooling Week where homeschooling families get together and have a week of homeschooling with the help of teachers from overseas. So we are off tomorrow to Bangkok for our first home schooling week.

Home Schooling Fun - Volcano Experiment

Lighthouse Shirts

It was months in the making as the team discussed the finer details of the shirt design, but our Lighthouse shirts have been printed and they look great. We are already planning a second printing only 2 weeks after the first one. There will be some minor modifications on the second printing. We’re going have a small Lighthouse logo on the front of the polo shirt (but not the T-shirt). In Australia I’ve been involved in making a shirt, logos, signs but here the team has had to do it all. Great experience. Our students have asked for the shirts too.

In Thailand you have special colours for each day of the week. Last Saturday I happened to wear by purple Lighthouse Shirt (I have a navy blue one as well). And the colour for Saturday - purple! I matched. Now I intend to buy a yellow (Monday), pink (Tuesday), green (green) ,orange (Thursday) shirts and red (Sunday) for the second printing to add to my blue (Friday) and Purple (Saturday) ones. Unfortunately, the rest of my team mates don’t share my enthusiasm to fit in culturally with Thais in wearing the right coloured shirts on the appropriate days.

On the back is the Bible verse from John chapter 8 verse 12.

Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Our Girl with Curls

We don’t know where our daughter got her curls from as both Lisa and I have straight hair (though it must be from Lisa’s side of the family as Asians don’t have curly hair right? I think Lisa’s brother had curly hair as a child). But it is definitely a point of interest and conversation with Thai people we meet. Is it natural they ask? (Yes, it is. I don’t think she’d be patient enough anyway to sit while having curls put in).

Having children can definitely make things harder living cross culturally. You take longer to learn the language as you have less time. They get sick. They can be very tiring.

However, (apart from being a great blessing) people usually are more open to talking to you if you have a child with you. Thai people generally love children. We had a young workman at our house when it was being fixed up and he loved just playing with our daughter. I can’t imagine that she’d have the same reaction back in Australia.

Also, our children have opened up new relationships with parents at school and at Taekwondo. They are great at breaking down barriers.

So there’s some of the bad and good of having children on the field.

Water Tank & Pump installed

For the last two years we’ve endured varying levels of low water pressure in our house, especially upstairs where during the evening when we want to bath the kids, the water pressure is too low for the water heater to work. So this has meant using the downstairs bathroom (which is smaller) and going upstairs to get the kids clothes. Somedays, the water only trickles during the day throughout the house (during the dry season).

Now that we’ve decided not to move house, it was time to get a water tank and pump installed.
On Monday the installers came in the early afternoon and at 5pm they said that they’ll be back tomorrow to finish the job. They hadn’t finishing installing the pipes or connecting the pump with electricity. I told them to come at the same time as I was busy in the afternoon. So the next day I’m waiting at home for them to come but they still haven’t come at 3:20pm so I give the store a call. “Sorry, the installers are busy with another job. They can’t come today”. I thought “you could have at least called me” though I didn’t say it.

The next afternoon they came (late) and when they had finished the job, the pump kept turning on every 10 seconds even though none of the taps were on. “There’s a leak in the pipes under the ground somewhere”, the installer said. So they would need to come back tomorrow to install new pipes.
Anyway, by the end of the week, everything was done and now we don’t have to wake up and go downstairs to have a shower which is nice. The water pressure is greeaaaat!

As a point of interest, the installers had this bag full of joints for the pipes. They dumped them on the ground and whenever they needed a particular joint they would search for it. I didn’t think it was a very efficient way of doing it really. What if they use up a couple of the joints and then forget to replace that particular size. They would need to go back all the way to the store to get another one.

Son's Birthday Party

Just before our son’s 4th birthday party was due to begin it started to rain which is not good news. Thais don’t like to go out in the rain for the fear that they will get sick. At 4:15pm (the party was schedule to start at 4:00pm) there was only our team mates there and I was starting to get worried as we’d bought quite a bit of food already. Soon after that people started to trickle in. By the end we had a decent turnout, with about 4 of our son’s friends from school, our neighbours and English students.

The dinosaur cake was a hit, so much so it was hard to get the kids away to take a picture.

We had fun games such as pin the horn on the dinosaur and carry the the dinosaur egg on a spoon. Thai children have never played such games so they had great fun.
Birthday parties take up a lot time and effort so we’re relived the next one in our family isn’t until November. They are a great way though to meet the parents of your children’s classmates.