Starting a School in Thailand – Val Yoder – Anabaptist Perspectives Ep. 103

Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I’m here with Val Yoder. You’re down visiting in my area actually because your daughter married my brother which is a neat family connection. Really glad to do this. Something about your life story that I actually don’t know that much about is you helped start the Institute for Global Opportunities over in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It’s a school for Anabaptist young people. Can you just tell us a little of how that process happened? How did you start a school in Thailand? Okay we had back in the late 90s been involved with the Personal Workers Training Camp in Ontario, and they were training their young people to go out into the different reserves, and to spend the summer up there in ministry, and that kind of sparked the idea of having a training place for young people, and so I had talked with brother Amos and brother Claire about it. Amos was excited about it. Claire come along, and nah, it’s not going to work.

01:15 - Was it just a little too far out there? I think he felt like the other missions wouldn’t feel real comfortable sending all their personnel up to N.Y.P. and so he made a very dynamic statement. He said you need a neutral place in order to have this kind of thing. So that kind of got the balls rolling, the gears rolling, and we decided we’d do something at SMBI, and have the WATER program, so what started the WATER program. We kind of took PWTC’s ideas, and then put it into a whole bunch of different missions. So I was excited about that. Then in about the fall or the summer of 1998 or ‘99 - someplace in there - we had a Family Focus Week in Minnesota, and brother Ernest Witmer challenged us to make a mission statement as a family.

What do we want to do as a mission movement in our families? One 02:18 - of the things we wrote down was we’d like to visit a third world country mission that has just begun, and have our children exposed to that. So in the year 2000, we went over to Chiang Mai, and visited Luke Kuepfer, and the ministry there of Global Tribes Outreach, and really enjoyed our time. Now at that point Global Tribes Outreach would have been pretty new. Very young. Yes. We had five weeks over there traveling with the Kuepfers, and our children really enjoyed it. As we were leaving, we had a number of the staff people there say, would you be willing to come back? and no, we’re busy at SMBI, and we’re not planning to make any changes.

Got back to the States, and then about 03:09 - two board members, and one parent of some of the young people over there asked the same question. Well, that really kind of hit hard because we were just planning to go on with SMBI for as long as we could, and so during the nighttime seasons when I couldn’t sleep, things start rolling in my mind. Could we have something like the WATER program over there so that young people could learn what’s involved in being in missions in a cross-cultural setting - in an unfamiliar setting - rather than here in the States. As I started talking with a few people, they were excited about it, and gave encouragement to it, and the Lord put together a very affirming board. A man that got excited about the idea, and so that’s kind of how it started. That happened in 2003.

We didn’t get over there til 2006, and of course after our family had come to 04:12 - a peace about going, God took Crystal out of the picture by her death in the early part of 2006. So I got the family together, and said, should we still consider going over? That’s kind of another story, but it took Crystal a while to get excited about the mission over there, and yet that process really affirmed to my children that God was calling us to go, so when she died, and we got together to talk about that, the children basically said, you know God wants us to go. Mom wanted us to go. Satan doesn’t want us to go, so let’s go. Wow. So you packed your bags, and moved? Yeah, along with Rick Rhode’s family. I think we had something like 28 pieces of luggage that were 70 pounds each. You could have 70 pounds in those days. There was a mountain of luggage. Okay, so we talked about how. Can you walk me through the why? What’s the vision behind - I mean this is radical stuff.

You’re packing up your family, and moving to 05:19 - literally the other side of the planet. What’s the vision? Why did you do that? Well, the 10-40 window (which I’m sure you’re familiar with that) is the least evangelized in the world, and so getting into Thailand which has less than one percent of believers. They’re mainly Buddhist, and then some animistic additions to that. The need was so tremendous, and that has really been confirmed over the years as the young people have gone out. The testimony that the Asian people give to us. The pastors come back to us, and they are just so appreciative of the young people coming over.

They say we didn’t know 06:03 - there were those kind of young people in America. In fact one pastor was standing in the airport watching the people de-plane, and then he saw these five or six young people coming off the plane. He said, are those the ones that are coming here? And he says, they didn’t come with all spiked hair and all kinds of weird clothing. He said, I was just shocked, and so he welcomed them, and they worked in his ministry for about 10 days, and he said, they were just like angels. They helped. They were so submissive. They were excited. They did what they needed to do, and he was so impressed with them that a couple weeks later, he got his own airplane ticket to fly to Chiang Mai because he just wanted to see if this was real, and the workers - our young ladies have been working with some of the street ladies.

Again, we’ve had the leaders of those 07:00 - missions say - at first, they were a little bit hesitant. You’re so different than what they are, but their response was after they had been there for anywhere from 10 days to in some cases three months. They come back saying, your girls are more effective in reaching these people because they represent something that every one of these girls wishes they would have, and there’s a connection with these ladies from the street that we don’t see in so many other groups that come over. So I just feel like there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in those countries to represent Christ in a very significant way, and with a lifestyle of Christianity rather than just something that happens in the record books of Heaven. You’re taking these young people. You’re taking them to this Institute. Train them, but at the same time they’re getting that hands-on experience basically. Right.

Yeah, what the program involves is they come, and they spend three weeks in class 08:04 - taking courses like they would take at other Bible Schools because we believe that the issues that missionaries face when it comes to theology or family or whatever are the same as what we face back here at home. They take those same courses. Every term has missional courses, but there are also family courses, and book studies, and so forth. Then at the end of those three weeks, they will have about a two day period of time when they have some solitude, and then they spend some time with their mentor, and a mentoring group - usually four or five people in each group - just in personal spiritual development talking to each other about what they’re facing as young Christians. Then after those two days on Tuesday evening they fly out to anywhere from Egypt all the way to Japan and down into Indonesia and up into China, so any of those areas is where they will be sent to. They’re there for 10 days. They come back, have a debriefing, and then they take another three weeks of classes, and keep that routine for four months. So it’s been exciting. We’ve had some of the best students around. We really enjoy them. That’s amazing.

So you’ve described how the school runs, why it’s there. Can you explain why is cross-cultural experience important? I’m sure some people are going to wonder is it really worth the cost to get on a plane, and go to the other side of the world? Isn’t this something we can learn a little closer to home? What is it about that cross-cultural element that’s so important? I think probably the primary thing would be that when we’re here in the States, you know where Walmart is. You know how to walk through that. You know where the gas stations are. You know how to talk to anybody. There’s really no overt pressure to learn how to communicate with somebody from a different culture. They have already learned to communicate with you to some degree by being here. Over there you’re the stranger, and so you’re looking at signs. You’re trying to hear voices.

You’re trying to figure out what they’re saying, 10:13 - and you use a lot of signs and wonders to begin with, but it really puts you on the learner’s edge of a missional setting, so I think that’s really been so important for our young people too when they go out, and are playing basketball with the university students at Chiang Mai. They’re interacting, and they’re talking. Both of them are struggling to communicate, and yet they can sit down afterwards with coffee or something, and build relationships with people that are there at home, and we’re the foreigner. So I feel like that’s one of the biggest things. Does that validate the cost? You know that question’s been thrown at us a number of times, and to me young people in America are spending a lot of money for a lot of other things that aren’t that important, but it’s been a life-changing experience for so many of them that have gone over there. You know if you really factor in all the costs for a full four months of the study time, the travel that would be involved in our program that we used to have - the WATER program - where you’d travel over there and back again, and spend what ends up being nine weeks of classroom time along with traveling to three different countries. The cost isn’t much different if you really work it down to how much it costs to fly from here to go over into a WATER program, so we try to diffuse that argument as much as we can.

11:47 - And really at the end of the day, if you’re seeing real life change in your students, it’s really hard to put a price tag on something like that. Right. The whole thing of them being able to represent Jesus Christ through the Anabaptist perspective, and bring the native people into a place where they can see that in young people. That’s really been powerful. You know that can happen in America too. I’m not negating that, but that’s a part of the world that doesn’t have it nearly as accessible. And that really goes into the next question I have which is how is this a service to the church? Both the home churches where these people are coming from, but then also the broader, the global church? It gives the returning student opportunity to represent a part of the world to their church that the church probably hasn’t had a lot of exposure to, and so there’s a sensitivity that happens with these young people coming back, and sharing that vision, and that excitement they’ve had. That wouldn’t happen if they hadn’t been there.

How does it help the global church? Again, 12:56 - I kind of go back to the whole thing of the way that these leaders in the various different nations that we’re going to are so appreciative, and just underscoring the fact that they want the kind of message, and lifestyle that’s coming through these young people to be a part of, or to be exposed to their own congregations. Probably the most asked for seminars that we have in Asia are requests for teaching on the family, teaching on marriage because many of the pastors - I remember one pastor - brother Isaac from Myanmar had said that most of the children of the pastors of the churches that he’s working with are street children. They’re on drugs. They’re into immorality, and so forth, and they’re really struggling to build Christian families. These young people that are coming over. Most of them have pretty solid families comparatively, and so they are just hungry for that kind of input, so that’s kind of a different element of IGO. The Macedonian Teaching Ministry is led by Raymond Burkholder, and he’s going all over Asia the same areas that we go to with our young people.

He goes there, and has 14:28 - anywhere from three day to three week conferences, and many of these are on the home, and on some of the teachings of scripture that are not as common with most evangelicals. Okay. So to close it out, what do you feel is the most significant lesson you’ve learned through starting this school in Thailand? Probably the most significant lesson is that God can use average people who don’t have very much to offer, and make some beauty out of it. Our family was very much an ordinary family, and yet just it’s been such an encouragement, such a joyous walk with the Lord, and I just say that to say that anyone that steps into what God has called them to do will find blessing and joy in the journey. I just want to encourage those who are listening to truly follow what God is - the visions, the things that are out of this world, or at least out of this nation that seem so great, and so unattainable. If God is in it, He will do great things, and you’ll never regret it. Thanks so much for your time, Val. This has been great. I’ve really enjoyed this. .