{"id":645,"date":"2017-09-08T15:27:05","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T08:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/?p=645"},"modified":"2018-12-04T08:19:44","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T01:19:44","slug":"history-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/history-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look at our History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From 1962 – 1969 in church in Guatemala was encountering a leadership problem.\u00a0 There were not enough leaders for new churches starting up throughout the country.\u00a0 Some orphans were chosen to study at the local Bible School with the hopes they would become leaders for these churches.\u00a0 However, when they completed their studies they found churches to serve in the city more interesting than returning to the country churches. In addition, the Bible schools were not producing enough ministers to meet the rate that the church was growing.<\/p>\n

In the 1970\u2019s, the church in Africa was facing a similar problem.\u00a0 The church was growing quickly and the Bible school was not able to prepare and train leaders in time.\u00a0 Many lay leaders were doing the duties and the responsibilities of pastors or leaders of churches though they had not received any training.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 During that time they tried to fix the problem by opening teaching via postal mail and mobile Bible schools in which the teacher travelled from one place to another in order to teach the Bible every 4-6 weeks.\u00a0 But these ways of training were inadequate for the needs.\u00a0 Leaders then came across information of how Latin American churches were teaching and training their people to serve in the church.\u00a0 Students would leave their homes and go to a fixed location to receive training every week.\u00a0 This way of studying and training was called \u201cTheological Education Reaching the Student at Home.\u201d\u00a0 In Africa, missionaries Rev. Ralph Winter and his colleague Rev. Fred Holland worked with this program and later organized it calling it\u00a0 \u201cTheological Education by Extension\u201d or in abbreviation, T.E.E.\u00a0 Presently there are many organizations using this program.<\/p>\n

The church in Thailand, today, has a similar problem as the church in Guatemala and Africa encountered.\u00a0 We have a shortage of leaders in our churches.\u00a0 Our bible Schools cannot keep up with the growth of the churches and the need for pastors.\u00a0 Many of the leaders in our churches have not received any training.\u00a0 Many leaders would like to go to Bible school but are not able to leave their work and families to go study for 4 years.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In 1989, there were 3 women in one of our churches who wanted to be discipled.\u00a0 At that point in their life, they had not thought about the possibility of discipling other new believers – they just wanted to study the Bible. Dr. Leok Har Chan, a missionary from Malaysia discipled these women.\u00a0 While she was studying at the Alliance Theological Seminary in America she discovered a discipleship curriculum called \u201cAbundant Life.\u201d\u00a0 After returning to Thailand she taught this curriculum to these 3 women in English.\u00a0Later she thought that it would be better to translate the material into Thai so that other Thai people could use it too and mainly people experienced in professional services like mythicalmaids.com<\/a>.\u00a0 After these 3 women finished the Abundant Life book, they began to study other topics from the Bible.<\/p>\n

Rev. Norman Ford, a missionary in Thailand suggested Dr. Chan use \u201cThe Life of Christ\u201d curriculum to continue teaching the 3 ladies.\u00a0 This curriculum was part of the S.E.A.N. program which is an abbreviation for Study by Extension for All Nations.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the 1990\u2019s Dr. Jerry Soung began using the Life of Christ material with the Hmong in Northern Thailand.\u00a0\u00a0 He used the Hmong translation of the materials that he had used while he was a pastor in America before coming to Thailand as a missionary.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the year 2000, the Siam mission received finances to translate all of the S.E.A.N. materials in the Thai language.\u00a0 Rev. Larry had returned from the states at that time and helped with the revisions and updating of the materials, putting them in book form<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In\u00a0 2002, Rev. Larry and his team finished the translation of books 1 to 3 and began to translate other materials from S.E.A.N.\u00a0 The first Center for Leadership Development was begun at the Mahapawn Sukkhumvit Church in Bangkok with Dr. Leok Har Chan and one of the pastors, Miss Pawinee Chetsuthayangkul, serving as the center leaders.\u00a0 They began training 4 lay leaders of the church.\u00a0 Since that time the number of centers and center leaders and students have gradually grown.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From 1962 – 1969 in church in Guatemala was encountering a leadership problem.\u00a0 There were not enough leaders for new churches starting up throughout the country.\u00a0 Some orphans were chosen to study at the local […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sspthai.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}