For more than six years, Wilke and Marlies den Hertog lived and worked with their children in the small village of Khon Sawan. Now they are making a big jump to northern Thailand, to live and work in Chiang Mai. Not to escape the 'countryside', but to possibly reach out even better to the people of Thailand through others.
The move from Khon Sawan to Chaing Mai was necessary for a number of reasons. The age of the children makes moving to a place, where a good international secondary school is present, necessary. There are several such schools in Chiang Mai. OMF's policy is also that you don't work and stay in a place like Khon Sawan for more than six years.
Contact with churches
In their latest newsletter, Wilke and Marlies talk about what life in Chaing Mai will be like once they move in on 5 January:
'The work we will do there is multifaceted. Wilke hopes to be involved in a theological school, on the one hand to visit and coach their former students, and on the other to help in teaching. At the same time, we hope to get contacts with lots of churches in the north. Indeed, the three northern provinces of Thailand are the most (with the gospel) reached areas of Thailand, forty per cent of all Christians in Thailand live in the three provinces around Chiangmai!
Challenging domestic shipment
So why exactly are we going there? Not to go there to help with church planting, as there are plenty of Thai Christians who can do that themselves. Why then? There still seems to be little vision among churches in the north for their role in reaching Thailand.
For a long time they were just the 'receiving end', missionaries coming to plant churches and those churches trying to grow by preaching the gospel in their own neighbourhood. But what the churches in the north still seem oblivious to is the fact that by now they are ripe to become sending churches themselves. Wilke hopes to establish contacts with many churches in the north and challenge them to start thinking together about what role lies ahead for churches to reach their own countries. Hopefully this will then soon become concrete and we can start coaching and guiding people to start working elsewhere in Thailand in spreading the gospel and planting churches.
We hope and pray that this will give a group of Thai leaders in the north a concrete vision for Thailand. There are at least thousands of Christians there who know the language, know the culture and can thus get to work. We are very eager to see if we may mean something in moving the churches of the north.
Supervision of children
Marlies hopes to help coach the alumni in their work in the churches. At the same time, Marlies has also been tasked with becoming a Child Safety Officer. This means she will be the point of contact when unsafe or undesirable situations arise for children at one of OMF's families in Thailand. In addition, Marlies is part of the TCK team. TCK stands for Third Culture Kids, or children who do not grow up in their own culture, but are also not part of the culture they live in and have thus developed their own 'third' culture. This team aims to support parents with common problems in this group of children.'
