One afternoon, while I was walking down the street, I and my friend stopped to rest. A man walked over to talk with us. He knew very little English, so I tried out my conversational Thai. He asked why we came to Thailand. I said in Thai “to tell people about Jesus.” He gave me a blank stare, then said, in Thai, “khray na kap” which means “who?” I then said we were Christians, and he laughed. A few more friendly questions, and we each went our way.

I have more questions than answers about the conversation. It bothered me that I could not speak his language, or he mine, to communicate anything about Jesus Christ who is so dear to me. I couldn’t ask him why he laughed after I said the Thai word for Christianity. Was it just because he was happy he finally understood me? Did he think Christianity was untrue or didn’t work? Was it nervous laughter because he didn’t know anything about Christianity or Jesus?

I knew I had pronounced the Thai word for Jesus correctly, so it was quite shocking that he didn’t even recognize the name at all in his own language. And then all those statistics I had learned about Thailand’s population of “unreached” people sunk in: to not know Jesus’ name in one’s own language (let alone what He taught) is normal on this side of the world. It is also normal to not know enough English to understand most western materials about Jesus.

We want to help to fill that need. There are Thai Christians here preaching about Jesus already, and they long to share the hope that Jesus has brought to their lives. We aim to help them spread the good news about Jesus to their own people groups, by filming their sermons and producing DVD’s for distribution and eventual broadcast. We are the support people—the local people are the ones spreading the message.

Our ministry is volunteer, and our DVD’s are given out for free. If you ask “why not sell them”, please think about it. How would the unreached know it was good enough to pay for if they don’t yet know a thing about Jesus? We do have a goal of putting English subtitles on each presentation, so maybe they would want to watch our DVD’s to help them learn better English. In that way, we hope to serve the community.

Bear family- Thailand