English is the trade language of the world, yet not enough Thai people know it. In Bangkok, when our ministry teams are there, we see nice cars on the roads and thousands of people shopping in fancy malls. So, how can Wooddale and you help the Thai people where many of the signs are written in beautiful, undecipherable characters?
Wooddale volunteers go to Thailand to help the Thai people learn the sounds of English. That’s where “you” come in. You can help at the Santisuk English School by becoming a short term “teacher.” Thai students enroll because they have heard that Santisuk really helps in learning spoken English, because the teachers are native English speakers.
As teachers, Wooddalers, get to know Thai people in a way a tourist cannot. To touch them spiritually we study workbooks that have true stories about Jesus and his power. We connect outside the classroom as we get students to help us order good food or find a famous or obscure tourist attraction. As we become friends, we start to understand the frustrations our Thai students face. They are the same struggles that we Americans’ face. They look for purpose or feel unloved because they cannot reach the standards set by their family or others. We can share our purpose and acceptance in Jesus Christ. We
introduce them to Thai people who have found new life in Jesus.
We invite the students to come to church, lifegroup or even lunch with us and we seek out those in whom the Spirit is working. One student had a friend who had found God in Jesus. She enrolled at Santisuk. As she was wandering out she struck up a conversation with a teacher. During lunch, she suddenly mentioned that she wanted to know God. That opened the door for more lunches and sharing an illustration of Jesus being the bridge to God. This was just what the student was waiting to hear. She invited Jesus into her life. Now she will connect and grow in the Lord as she becomes part of a lifegroup at Santisuk!
Want to be a “teacher” or learn more about short term trips? Contact us at worldwide@wooddale.org
Learn More About the 2025 Santisuk Vision from our Global Partners there:
By 2025, enlarge our Thailand career missionary team by adding 15 new high-quality career missionaries who will focus on evangelism and church planting at 15 new locations in Bangkok using our school/cell church model.
There is a lot packed into that little statement. First of all, this is a 10-year goal.
But there is a lot more to this than just “we want more people”. We have a METHOD now…new missionaries don’t have to think up a method on their own. When we first came to Thailand the question we had was the question everyone else had – what is a method for planting churches, for winning people to Christ that WORKS in Thailand? And the answer everyone gave was – “we’re still working on that”. No one had an answer. Now we have an answer. Surely not every Thai person is interested in learning English. But it is at least a method that works for a very large portion of the population. So new missionaries don’t have to come to Thailand and try to figure out what to do. They’ll come knowing there is a method or pattern to follow – our school/cell church model.
We have a WAY for people to serve here long-term now. When we first came to Thailand we weren’t sure how we’d get visas to stay here. We’ve solved those issues now in a multitude of ways so people don’t have to face those issues.
We have a method that is WORKING now…churches are being planted, people are being won to Jesus Christ. A few months ago when I was talking to a new pastor at one of our supporting churches I said to him that we were doing church planting in Bangkok and seeing people come to Christ. He asked incredulously, “you mean you’re seeing something happen there?”. He’d been part of a different denomination that had had missionaries in Thailand but they weren’t seeing people coming to Christ. Because of that, many mission groups have been turning to other “good works” (orphanages, hospitals, schools, rescue ministries) but weren’t focused on church planting. God has given us a method that is working. We want to use it to the max.
We have a TARGET now – not just “go anywhere in Thailand and see what you can do” but a focus on Bangkok. As my father-in-law said many years ago, when you want to kill a snake, you hit it on the head. Bangkok is the “head” of Thailand. If we want to see Thailand won to Christ, we need to go where the greatest need is, the greatest opportunity is, and hit it hard.
This is the MOST ambitious increase for a single field in the BGC/Converge in over 30 years…by far.
Our church will provide the “training ground” for both the new missionaries and the Thai counterpart/partners. For the missionaries – to learn how to do an English school, to learn how to lead a cell church, and to be introduced to all kinds of ministry. For the Thai, to be won to Christ and trained “on-the-job” to then eventually go out as skilled leaders with new missionaries to start a new English center/church. Our Thai will neither be by-standers nor uninvolved.
The Wooddale teachers have both been part of the huge number of short-termers that have fueled this ministry and Wooddale has supported us for nearly 26 years now. We’ve had nearly 700 DIFFERENT teachers come for one month or longer, and those 700 different people have come nearly 1,000 total times (many come more than once). Because of the short-termers that have come, we’ve seen, over the 23 years of doing evangelistic English teaching, about 1.2% of our students make a definite decision for Christ, in a nation where .3% of the population know Christ as Savior. Remember this too: these students are not coming to learn with us because they want to become Christians, so that in some way we are rather inefficient in winning them to Christ….NO!….they come to study English with us generally OPPOSED to knowing Christ, and through the classes and time spent with us, their lives and world-views have been turned UPSIDE down! Wooddale has sent at least 20 different short-term teachers over the many years. Thanks for your part in making this happen.