Asia

Update on Sri Lanka from Mohan Jayasekera

There is another exciting development with the Sinhala translation of the Discipleship 101 course in Sri Lanka. My cousin, Rev. Lokendra Abhayaratne, helped us coordinate the translating and printing. The book was published with the help of the Colombo Theological Seminary. The Principal, Ivor Poobalan, a long-time friend of mine, was very supportive and helpful in the project. The book is now a required text for students in the Christian doctrines class at CTS. They have sold over 500 copies through the Seminary bookshop.

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We are currently engaged in translating the material and publishing it in the other local language in Sri Lanka – Tamil. It should be done by November.Last year, CTS asked me to do a two-day workshop on Trinitarian Theology for their students and invited pastors. It was a sobering and humbling experience to be invited for something like this. It was well received. We are building a wonderful working relationship with them that we had never dreamed of. This is much like our experience in Nepal and Pakistan as well. Often Rod Matthews and I shake our heads and wonder what is going on. We are thankful and excited that we have the privilege to participate in what Jesus is doing in ways we would have never dreamed of by ourselves.

 The bishop of the Anglican church in Sri Lanka has requested permission to print our Trinitarian booklet for all his pastors. We have developed a good working relationship with him through my cousin. We helped them in many Tsunami relief and rebuilding projects.

 On another note, SriLankan Airlines has just signed another contract with our church owned and operated school in Sri Lanka, Worldwide Educational Institute, to teach English to 60 of their new recruits in the next several months. This is the fourth time that they have asked for the services of our school in this regard.

 Working as a Christian church in the third world has many challenges and obstacles. But often we are shown that Jesus invites us to participate in what he is doing for humanity in opportunities such as these. It is a blessing and privilege.

 Thailand

From Rod Matthews:

After visiting Myanmar [see last week’s Update], Malaysian pastor Wong Mein Kong and I flew to Thailand to visit our pastor and congregation of Karen people in a refugee camp near the Myanmar border. This camp is one of seven along the border holding approximately 140,000 refugees. Many are political refugees, fleeing the conflict between the Burmese army and the Karen across the border in Myanmar.

In recent years, the United Nations has worked at resettling many refugee families in new homes overseas, but those leaving the camps have been replaced by others arriving, many of whom are economic refugees. You can’t blame people for wishing for a better life for their families and children, but it does complicate the process for the UN in determining priorities.

Pastor Lah Shi met us and we drove for 40 minutes along the border road to the camp (if you can call a settlement of about 40,000 people a camp). Although it was a weekday, we were able to meet with many members of our congregation and have a worship service. Mein Kong and I gave shorter messages, this time translated into the Karen language by Lah Shi. There were a large number of children present who sang for us, accompanied by a young man on the guitar who helps out with our children’s program. I discovered that a number of the children attending are not those of member families but come from the homes packed in around our church building, and who want to be involved in the children’s program especially for the music.

Several Karen member families have been resettled in Australia and the United States, and several others who were refused visas for Australia are re-applying to other countries. The children know of no other world than that of the camp, so education is important to prepare them for a world beyond the camp whenever they might be permitted to access it.

The Australian members provide monthly financial support to the Karen congregation to enable the camp-bound members to have access to supplemental food supplies, cover urgent house repairs after storms, meet medical expenses for conditions beyond what can be handled by the camp’s first-aid station, pay for higher education for the children, and provide pastoral support, including maintaining the church building (right).

When visiting the camp with Wong Mein Kong, I can think of no other more vivid reminder that Christ came to “set the prisoners free.” I can leave the camp any time, but they can’t. I can choose where to live, where and when to travel, and have access to all types of social benefits. They are essentially stateless, the victims of a war decided on by men in distant cities, who are themselves protected by armies and largely isolated from the poverty, disruption and squalor of the innocent people caught in the middle. We leave these brothers and sisters and children in Christ with such encouragement as we can, pointing them to their only Savior, Jesus Christ, and his words of acceptance, comfort and love in the full knowledge that he knows what they are enduring, and will rescue them.

Myanmar

Rod Matthews sent this update of his April visit to Myanmar:

Malaysian pastor Wong Mein Kong and I made a trip to visit members and strengthen our connections with some other ministry groups in Myanmar (Burma). On arrival in Yangon (Rangoon), we met up with the leader of our congregation in the southern Irrawaddy delta area, who had travelled to Yangon so as to accompany us back to his village, where the church meets in his home. Also travelling with us was Tluang Kung, a young man that one of the Australian congregations sponsored through a Master of Theology course in a seminary in India several years ago to equip him for pastoral ministry and theological teaching. He is currently teaching at a seminary in Yangon; and since he is fluent in Burmese and English as well as other local languages, he accompanied us as a translator.

The trip from Yangon to the regional town of Myaungmya was arduous – six hours by an old 20-seater minibus with no air-conditioning. The distance was probably over 200 km, but the state of the road made it seem so much longer. At first the tarmac road had large potholes that needed dodging. As the journey progressed, the potholes grew wider to become large unsealed patches of stones and holes, and before long the tarmac had shrunk to a few resilient little patches on a rocky, potholed, unsealed, narrow “highway.”

On one occasion we all had to get off the bus so it (we!) could safely cross an old battered wooden bridge over a small river. Because it was the hot and dry season, the whole road was layered in a fine powdery dust that crept through every crack and hole in the floor of the bus – and in waves through the open windows when a vehicle passed the other way. I guessed that the temperature was around 36°C. (97ºF).

Soon the dust permeated every pore – and you could even taste it. I felt like a scrambled egg when we finally bounced our way into in the regional town of Myaungmya. Now I knew personally what the local members have to experience to travel to Yangon to meet Wong Mein Kong on his annual visits.

The following day we arose early to travel to the rural area where our congregation meets. We rented a river taxi and after 45 minutes of pleasantly puttering up a branch of the busy Irrawaddy River (the main “highway” for commercial traffic and trade), we pulled into a small jetty at a village. At last we had arrived, I thought. But no, we now had to walk about three kilometers across harvested and parched rice fields, keeping to the banks that divide the square paddies, to a house standing in a patch of trees in the middle of the fields.

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This was where the church meets every weekend in the home of our congregational leader and companion since arriving in Yangon. About 30 excited people were waiting for us. They have had very few international visitors over the decades of the existence of this congregation because this part of Myanmar (in fact, much of the country) has been out-of-bounds for foreign visitors for much of that time. Of course, a lovely meal was waiting for us – surely a banquet compared with their normal morning meal.

After eating, we conducted a Bible study. Wong Mein Kong and I both gave a message, translated into Burmese very competently by Tluang Kung. It concluded with a time for questions and answers – theology, biblical practice and its applications, and inquiries about people in our fellowship they had heard about.

Naturally, this was followed by another meal. It was very hot – and outside a little petrol generator ran, off and on, powering a single oscillating fan, which waved a little air at us in each sweep. There is no community electricity supply here. It was a house of two floors. The lower, unwalled section was for animals and for storage of equipment and grain. The family lived on the upper floor, which had walls of woven thatch and curtains on wires dividing the open plan floor into sleeping sections at night. They had a DVD and CD player and a few electric lights when the generator was running.

I marveled at how far this was from the hustle and bustle of life in the big cities where the “important things” happen. How remote! How undeveloped! How beautifully connected with our Creator and the world that sustains us with food regardless of where we live! I’m sure the stars at night were simply stunning – no ambient lighting to smother their glory. God’s presence seemed more obvious and natural here.

Of course he’s always been there. He was there before we ever got there. This little congregation has existed for more than 40 years. They are people whose hearts God had touched and who follow and worship him. People who live in the middle of a largely Buddhist country, and who endure an intrusive and suspicious government who follows their every move. Our visit was tracked by local security authorities requiring hotels and transport providers to record our arrival, departures and movements. We even had a lady from the regional security authorities come all the way to the village, perhaps to ensure we weren’t in any danger. She sat in on the Bible study, which I hope she found interesting. She joined us for that lovely lunch too. So we offered her a lift back in our waiting river taxi.

About 2 p.m., it was time to leave – back across the rice fields (it was now much hotter than when we had come) to the landing jetty, into the river taxi and back along the river to Myaungmya. None of us were willing to face the bus trip again, so we opted for the night ferry back to Yangon. Foreigners are required to take one of the 10 or so cabins on the upper deck. Local people jostle for positions on the lower deck. No seats – just deck space. So they spread a mat and defend their claim. But more and more people pour onto the boat, and ultimately there is no space to walk between families sitting and lying on the deck with their food containers, rugs, cushions and bags.

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In one section, it seems you could rent a deck chair, but almost all the deck chairs I saw were just frames with broken canvas. It took 14 hours with a 9 p.m. and a 4 a.m. stop at regional centers en route. Hundreds getting off, cargo being unloaded by teams of sweating porters, hundreds getting on, more cargo being loaded, hawkers on the wharf desperately yelling for business, holding trays of flat bread and dried fish and other unidentifiable edibles (at least to me). This is life in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta. And God has given us a congregation there.

Back in Yangon, we met with our pastor from the north of the country, Naing Key Har, who had spent several days traveling down to meet with us. He pastors our second congregation in Myanmar, which has grown with his leadership and dedication. It will be another year before he sees someone from outside Myanmar again, so we leave him with packages of used clothing, some books and funds to support his pastoral work and help with his family’s medical expenses.

The weekend started when Mein Kong, Naing Key Har and I were guests in the small house church pastored by Tluang Kung’s father, who had moved to Yangon from the north of the country. It’s a little group of about 30, squashed into the lower floor of their very basic two-room home (one room downstairs, one upstairs) on the outskirts of Yangon.

Downstairs has a dirt floor with woven mats for the children to sit on. In fact, a majority are children. They worshipped God with beautiful songs, Tluang Kung accompanying them on the guitar. We both gave messages again with Tluang Kung translating. The children sang and Tluang Kung’s little sister performed some special music. It was simple. “Where two or three are gathered together…”

I should add here that Tluang Kung has completed translating our Discipleship course (Discipleship 101 on the HQ website) into Burmese, has had the translation checked, and with our funding is now negotiating for its printing. Within a few months we will have our first publication in the Burmese language.

The next day, we visited another young pastor who has a similar house church in his rented home. After learning of us through the internet, Daniel Ling and his wife Rebecca had contacted us by email many months ago desiring a connection so as to give them a stronger link with the broader Body of Christ. Unlike many small ministries that contact us by email, they were not asking for financial support (not that they didn’t need it), and we fellowshipped and worshipped together with a unity of mind and heart.

With Tluang Kung translating again, both Wong Mein Kong and I gave another short message bringing God’s word into the lives of these poor, salt-of-the-earth people as they struggle to survive in a land that makes life difficult in every way. I left Myanmar excited about the prospects of future contacts, developments and opportunities in one of the most challenging areas in Asia.