Staff Training Week

This week was the training week for all of the staff with the Central Thailand Student Ministry. There are 3 Youth Houses in Central Thailand (Phitsanulok, Nakhon Sawan, Lopburi). Noon (Thailand), Julia (England), Jesse and Kristen (Florida) will work at the Phitsanulok Youth House. Caroline (England) and Zo (Thailand) will work at the Nakhon Sawan Youth House. We will work with Off and Pheung (Thailand) and Dtam (Thailand) at the Lopburi Youth House. Johnny and Ann McClean will look after all of the staff. 10 of the staff all came to Nakhon Sawan for an intense week of training, planning, and fellowship.
Each morning we started with a time of worship and then a Bible study about God’s Glory. We studied about God’s Glory because the mission of the team is to bring God glory by living our lives for Him, teaching students about Him, and teaching them how to live lives that bring Him glory.
In the afternoon we took time to talk about how God has been working through the ministry and to plan and discuss our vision, mission, and goals for the upcoming year. We had several long meetings sharing ideas and prioritizing our ideas. So, here it is (keep in mind that the statements are translated from Thai):

Vision
By God’s grace to see students of CT receiving salvation, growing as disciples, being faithful witnesses and living holy lives according to the Word of God.

Mission
To glorify God by Living, Proclaiming and Teaching the Word of God so that Thai students follow Christ in every area of life.

Goals
1. Students and outsiders acknowledge the Youth House is a place of good and appropriate activities (fun and trustworthy)
2. Students are passionately committed to regular, creative, widespread Biblical evangelism as God calls them (Acts 1:8)
3. Students passionate about studying and applying Scripture so that their lives glorify God in every area
4. Students commit themselves to regular prayer
5. Students take every opportunity to use their gifts to humbly serve others both in their church and their YH.
6. To have ‘small groups’ on each campus able to witness and encourage one another to grow spiritually
7. More Thai team members who are able to use their skills for God’s glory in CTSM
8. Thai churches and Christian organizations know and support CTSM/T2S

From these goals, we started making a schedule of activities and specific goals for what we will do at the Lopburi Youth House. Next week we will have more time to plan for specific events and activities at the Lopburi Youth House.

This week we also started our Train To Serve (T2S) program. The Train to Serve program is 2 years long and is for Thai students also (Noon, Zo, and Dtam will also be studying T2S). Unfortunately we won’t be able to complete the whole program. Johnny and Ann McClean will be our mentors for the program. We each chose 10 “modules” from the following list that we have to study and complete over the next 4 months.

• Evangelism
• Discipleship
• Training Others
• Inductive Bible Study
• Theology
• Biblical Leadership
• Practical Service
• Biblical Overview
• Personal Spiritual Life
• World Mission
• Thai Language

Each module has a list of assignments to complete and discuss with our mentor. The assignments often include working with students, so that the training is “on the job” training. For example, for discipleship we must prepare bible studies and meet weekly with 1 specific student that we will disciple. For Inductive Bible Study, we will study the Inductive Bible Study method and then prepare 6 Bible studies that we will then use. It looks like it will be challenging to complete all of the tasks but we are excited about the spiritual growth and skills that it will develop.