I'm leading a Short Term Mission team from church to Thailand.
Why are we going?
15 people are going (not all present in the picture). three kinds of people are going - people who are already thinking about os mission and want more experience, people who should be thinking about overseas mission themselves, and people who may not go themselves but will be all the more enthusiastic about os missions and mission support for the experience.
My experience of short term tours and missions run by mission agencies is that they tend to only expose you to what they are doing, you spend a lot of time getting to know the "strangers" on your team, you aren't neccesarily looked after well while OS or when you come back. We thought we could do a lot better taking a group from church. While we will need to mindful of our limited usefulness (language and cultural barriers, etc.), we want to be as useful as we can, and be an encouragement to the missionaries and churches we visit, and an encouragement to each other.
Where are going?
We will spend half our time at Chang Mai and half at Khorat (on your Thailand map it’s a city to the NE of Bangkok called Nakhon Ratchasima). A big contrast Chang Mail is relatively well off and used to westerners, Khorat is poor and Westerners less common. Chang Mai we work with Aussie Presbyterian Missos, Khorat we work directly with two local evangelical churches.
Click on the "Thailand" label on the top left side of my blog to see all my blogs from the Thailand trip...
