guest post by Larry Dinkins 

In 2018 the world was captivated by the young Thai soccer team and their coach who were lost in a flooded cave in northern Thailand and then found and rescued. I wrote three blogs concerning those harrowing 18 days: Thai Soccer Team Lost, Found! ... and Rescued?“, “Lessons from the Rescue of the Thai Soccer Team”  and here: “Cave Rescue: Adun Samon.” In those three blogs I tried to draw out spiritual lessons from that rescue and eventually those articles received the most hits of any blogs I’ve ever written.  I find myself writing again about a similar incident in Laos where a group of seven men entered a cave to search for gold.  The men understood the danger and yet pressed ahead in their quest for gold, yet were met with torential rains that flooded the cave and stranded the men. Once again, a rescue team was formed, including divers from the 2018 rescue and they were able to navigate over 900 feet of narrow, muddy tunnels as well as strong currents to locate the five survivors (two more are still missing). The next step was the dangerous task of extracting the five over the same hazzardous route. In comparing the two rescues I was struck by the contrast of a young soccer team simply wanting to celebrate a winning season with a cave adventure and seven grown men risking life and limb to find elusive treasure. In both cases the bravery and courage of the rescuers is most impressive as they risked their lives to not only find the lost spelunkers but to strategize on how to safely extract them from the jaws of a watery death.  Both of these incidents reminds us of the courage and strategies that are needed for the spiritual rescue mission of saving lost souls caught in the dark cave of sin and extracting them through the power of the gospel as expressed in Luke 19:10, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” 

Language learning is an essential part of minstry for many missionaries, but it is also a task that is fraught with challenges, anxiety, ups and downs, and not a few humbling moments along the way.

My missionary colleague Larry Dinkins and I sat down recently to record a couple of videos about langauge learning, especially Thai learning.  The first video is a hour long conversation, relaxed but serious.  The second video is a collection of Thai language bloopers, presented as a light-hearted parody of a new missionary taking his first year Thai language test.

At a recent meeting of the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand (EFT), a presenter shared a slide with data showing a stark imbalance in the number of missionaries located in major city centers versus other regions of Thailand.  Of those missionaries holding a visa through the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand, the data showed that 72% of them were clustered in only two provinces, namely Bangkok and Chiang Mai. The remaining 28% were spread out through another 40 provinces, and another 35 provinces had no missionaries at all.

At first glance, these statistics are rather shocking. Thailand is a country that is over 94% Buddhist and about 4% Muslim. Protestants make up only about 0.7% of the whole population. If you include Roman Catholics, the number of all Christian traditions is still only a little over 1%.  There are many towns and villages throughout Thailand with absolutely no churches whatsoever. There are many places that need to hear the gospel for the first time. If that’s the case, why don’t the missionaries spread out a bit? Why are they all hanging out in Bangkok in Chiang Mai?

With the revolution of AI tools, people have started to ask me about the potential for using AI to translate Christian books. For a number of years I have been involved with writing, translating, and publishing Christian resources in Thai.  I currently teach church history and mission studies at Chiang Mai Theological Seminary, and previously I taught at Bangkok Bible Seminary while also working part time at Kanok Bannasan (OMF Publishers) Thailand.  I have a desire to see good resources get into the hands of Thai Christians to help them spread the Gospel and to grow in their walk with the Lord.  Compared to languages like English, Chinese, Spanish, or Korean, there are relatively few Thai-language Christian resources.  With the advent of widely accessible AI tools, especially Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT or Grok, the potential for fast tracking translation is really exciting. More books faster sounds really good.

That said, my experience of using AI translation for Christian content has been mixed. I have primarily used ChatGPT for translating back and forth between Thai and English. If you use a different AI model and different input languages, I imagine the results might be different, especially for translation into more widely used language like Chinese or Spanish, for which AI has more data to draw from. That said, here are the advantages and limitations of AI translation as I find them at the beginning of 2026.

One of the greatest needs of Thai churches today is the desire and ability to rightly divide the Word of God. 

If you were to visit Thai churches across the Protestant and Pentecostal spectrum, you would often hear sermons that are only loosely connected to the Bible. There are many self-help sermons, allegorical sermons, and rousing exhortations to serve God and receive his blessings. Many sermons are topical, meaning that the preacher has chosen a topic that he wants to preach on and then has sought out a Bible passage (or passages) that support what he wants to say. In church small groups, it is common for Christians to read the Bible together and then immediately ask, “What does this mean for me?” instead of first asking, “What does this passage mean?”