Our partner church had their annual General Assembly (GA) in april as well. April is always a busy month, even though it is the summer vacation month in Thailand.

This year GA started monday with a full day for only the youth. Young people from many of the different churches around Thailand came to Bangkok to join the youth day and the GA. A few of them were even representatives for their churches with voting rights and all. Lovely to see the church embracing more and more youth work and focusing on its younger members a bit more than before.

The youth day was a lovely event, I was really excited to be invited to talk about discipleship with the youth, and I used the oportunity to talk about mission and sharing your faith, time, things, and talents with others. I used to talk about discipleship a lot when I worked in NMSU (NMS’s youth organisation), so it was great to be able to do some camp style teaching again. The youth was also very actively part of the program by doing a lot of the music, prayers and other parts of the services and also keeping a cafe open the whole week. The money from the cafe went to the youth work.

The rest of the GA worked like many GA’s and had a lot of discussion on different topics the church is focusing on. And then also they had an election. I will not go too far into detail here, as some of these church politics could be a bit sensitive and also kind of boring to some people. But it was a very important year. The voting was also a fun process as they are doing it very manually still and it reminded me of electing class presidents etc. with written notes and so on. Not boring like the modern digital solutions. Although maybe a bit slower and less efficient.

We also had a big celebration dinner on the thursday with speeches, and great food. And also a songkran theme. In which all of us missionaries got “water blessings” songkran style. Friday was the partner meeting and so we all presented our work and our focus for the future etc. I was also invited to do a short sermon on youth work in the church during the partner meeting.