Thai Church

Last Sunday I attended a Thai church whose pastor is one of our neighbors. This church will be helping the Shaws and I get work visas when our 3 month visas expire. It is important to me to connect with the Thai believers in Chiang Mai, to see their heart for the city. Many of the missions organizations based in Chiang Mai just see the city as a location, not as an opportunity to minister. Because of this many of the native Christians have negative feelings towards the foreign Christians. Instead we should be supporting and learning from one another.

The church felt like any small church in the United States. We sang worship songs before the message, with the words projected on a screen up front. Thai script is completely unreadable to me so far, but the first few songs also had the lyrics written out in the western alphabet. It was fun to sing along to the songs, having no idea what I was singing but knowing it was worship. I was surprised when two of the songs actually were translated into English! So at that point I could sing along to the music in my own language while the rest sang in Thai. I loved the idea of believers worshiping side by side in their own language but with the same words.

Our interpreter was a woman named Julie. She was a Filipino-American woman who had been living in Chiang Mai for six years. It felt awkward to have her sitting behind us explaining the sermon as the pastor spoke. I felt like it must be distracting for the rest of the congregation and tiring for Julie. I also found it hard to focus on the message when it was coming to me second hand. There were even a couple antidotes that Julie was unable to translate.

After the sermon and a couple more songs, we were dismissed and there was a potluck lunch! The church has a lunch every other Sunday where people bring some of their favorite dishes. The food was as tasty as it was unrecognizable. It’s always fun to sample the food that the native people eat and enjoy, as opposed to restaurant food where you never know if they are catering to your western taste buds.

As with most things I’m finding here in Thailand, I was surprised at how similar everything was to what I am used to. Besides the language, this church felt like any small church in the United States. The format of the service and the content felt very familiar. It’s hard to say if this is evidence of churches taking on the culture of the foreign missionaries who help them start or if it shows that we are all not as different as we think.