Chiang Mai Orality Network

While on home assignment in the states in 2020, I and millions of other believers experienced unprecedented disruptions to our usual Sunday worship.

Thailand had been much more effective in Covid repression, and so upon my arrival in November of 2020, I thought that I could resume attending a more normal Sunday service. However, I found that my Thai church had to close for a couple of months and was still meeting with social distancing, masks and even handing out communion with plastic gloves and individually wrapped wafers.

Hebrews 10:25 states, “not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some …”.  What I observed was that many Thai had gotten used to “virtual church” and the flexibility and low keyness of being able to sit in your PJs and passively listen to a worship service. The author of Hebrews affirms how vital it is to physically gather for worship, sing together and absorb God’s Word. Personally, I don’t see how you can truly celebrate Communion online and we for sure can’t baptize over the internet. Also, no one has figured out a way to duplicate digitally the fellowship and wonderful Thai lunches we eat together each week after church. As helpful as technology has been during this pandemic, it has many inherent limitations. We see it clearly in our Sunday worship, but also academically. The faculty at the seminary I’m involved with feel that certain classes are just not suited for online learning (the results in public schools are confirming this).

Of course, one must be careful to protect the health of your parishioners, yet at the same time, God expects his people to gather regularly to praise God, edify one another and be equipped so that we can be sent out into the community to spread His good news.

My prayer is that as Covid lessens God’s people will see afresh the vital importance of physical/corporate worship.

In May of 2002 my wife Paula was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma cancer and our family of six had to vacate our large house in Chiang Mai Thailand within only three days and get on a plane for the states. A number of OMF missionaries helped close our house and distribute all the earthly goods we had accumulated.

Yesterday a missionary who coordinated stashing my stuff many years ago sent me a note, “I’ve been getting rid of accumulated stuff and I found your juicer … I’ve never used it so I’m returning it to you.”

I read an article in The Los Angeles Times entitled, For Many People, Gathering Possessions is Just the Stuff of Life. The article states, “The average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards. U.S. children make up 3.7% of the children on the planet but have 47% of all the toys and children’s books.”

I’ve noticed on furlough that many of the homes I’ve visited with two-car garages park their cars outside! I have a PowerPoint presentation where I show all 30+ homes that our family has lived in over my 41 years of service with OMF. Yes, moving so often was a pain, but it did force us to downsize regularly (yet I do remember counting 18 bags on the carousel during one trip back to the states).

Today I’m staying in one room in a student dormitory at my seminary and have transferred most of the books I’ve hoarded over the years to the library or onto my kindle. Many times when I’ve needed something quickly, I’ve wished I could be back at my parent’s house which was like a combined hardware/commodity store with access to most any item on my list. There are obvious drawbacks to the minimalist lifestyle I’ve chosen, yet it has hopefully freed me up to concentrate and focus on the many opportunities for ministry here in this needy country of Thailand.

There are two hymns that are invariably sung at official OMF functions including our Thailand field conference: Jehovah Jireh is His Name and How good is the God We Adore.

The latter was written by an English preacher named Joseph Hart (1712-1768):

How good is the God we adore!
Our faithful, unchangeable friend:
his love is as great as his pow’r
and knows neither knows measure nor end.

For Christ is the first and the last;
his Spirit will guide us safe home;
we’ll praise him for all that is past
and trust him for all that’s to come.

Unlike most hymns which have four stanzas or more with a chorus in between, Hart employs just two stanzas but packs no less than six attributes of God into the first stanza.  In the second stanza, he centers in on Christ and His eternal nature, the guiding presence of the Spirit and ends with praise for God’s past benevolence and affirmation of trust for the future. The reference to the past reminds CIM/OMF of its reliance on Ebenezer (Memorial Stone of Help in 1 Kings 4) and trust for the future (Jehovah Jireh in Genesis 22).

As a younger man, Joseph was an unlikely candidate to write such a hymn due to his stance as a professed libertine who wrote, The Unreasonableness of Religion, in an effort to convince John Wesley to simply believe in God and not worry about doing good works. Wesley may not have impressed the young Hart, but an older Hart sat under the powerful preaching of George Whitefield and was soundly converted. Hart went on to write over thirty hymns, including the well known “Come, Holy Spirit, Come” and “Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy” but his most famous hymn remains the one that OMF adopted, a hymn that was even sung at Westminster Chapel at the funeral service of Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones. Joseph Hart died at only 56 years old and at his funeral, tens of thousands of admirers gathered and could read on his tombstone what he had instructed to be engraved: “Joseph Hart was by the free and sovereign grace and Spirit of God raised up from the depths of sin, and delivered from the bonds of mere profession and self-righteousness, and led to rest entirely for salvation in the finished atonement and perfect obedience of Christ.”