I rarely get excited when I hear about large scale evangelistic events in Thailand (or anywhere else, for that matter).

I don’t fault the motivation of anyone involved but for all the time and money put into these colossal under-takings, especially at a national level in a big arena, the results seem meager.  What results am I talking about?  The goal, directly or indirectly, of these events is to get a lot of people to become Christians through praying a prayer or going forward in response to an altar call.  Even when events have impressive results, such as the 2009 “My Hope Thailand” campaign which produced 12,000 decisions, most of these decisions rarely translate into committed Christian disciples.   

But regardless of what I or others say, it is unlikely that altar call evangelism will be given up anytime soon.  It just looks too good on the surface to abandon entirely. Even if most new converts fall away, many advocates for such events are fully persuaded by the justification that “even if one person comes to Christ, it was all worth it.”  Is it? For the time and money expended, maybe different activities would be even more worth it?  Just a thought. 

With that preamble out of the way, I want to get to the main point of this post. Even if large scale evangelistic events have dubious value in terms of directly producing new Christian disciples, they do have two other distinct benefits that I believe gives them real value and justifies their continuation. 

In the early days of Protestant mission work in Thailand, it was common for missionaries to meet Thai royalty, who often kept themselves apprised of the missionaries’ work.  As the country changed and grew, and the 20th century progressed, such relations became less common. 

In the early 1960s, however, a visiting Southern Baptist choir had a unique audience with His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, illustrating the goodness of God’s provision as well as the kind generosity His Majesty and his love of music. Ron Hill, a longtime missionary to Thailand who was involved in early Southern Baptist work in that country relates the story as follows.

Spending the summer in a tropical country, you'd think that we'd do lots of warm weather activities, but our kids spotted a skating rink at a local mall and desperately wanted to go.  Their only other experience of ice skating was a couple years ago in Bangkok and they were far from sure on their feet.  This time could have gone similarly but Joshua made amazing progress in only 90 minutes of ice time and even Caitlin started to learn a bit.  John wasn't quite there yet and he rode the seal most of the time.  But we all had a great time and Sun was able to resurrect her skating (mostly roller) from long ago.  Now they want to go again :-)  Enjoy the video and photos below.

If you cannot see the video above, click here to watch it on YouTube