December 2014 Prayer Letter

Written by Karl Dahlfred on 16 December 2014.

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Dear Friends & Family,

As we come to the end of 2014, is hard to believe that yet another year has gone by. Thank you for standing with us in prayer and finances as we minister in Thailand.

Grace City Bangkok Church

Our church plant has been holding weekly Sunday worship since September 2013 and we continue to get new visitors at worship on Sunday, though not all of our “regular” people are there regularly. There are four of us who function as elders for the church, Andrew, Tim, Natee and myself (Karl). All of us have young families and other responsibilities outside of the church plant. That makes for a lot of busyness, exhaustion, and sometimes sickness. It is exciting to meet non-believers asking questions, and see the church slowly grow, but it is a lot of work. Please pray for this small church plant as we seek to disciple believers and reach out to non-believers. Please remember in prayer a big Christmas event on December 20th, both for the planning and that the people who come to this event would ask questions and return for the worship service later.

Teaching is Always Getting Better

The fall term recently ended at Bangkok Bible Seminary, which marks 2.5 yrs since I began teaching here. I barely made it through my first year of teaching, and my second year was better. Now in my third year, I am able to continually improve my teaching in the classroom, preparing better lessons for my students and develop more resources to help them learn. I actually have pretty powerpoint presentations for church history now, whereas I didn’t have time to prep those in the past. I am also in the process of developing a Thai/English website called www.thaichurchhistory.com which provides timelines, book recommendations, photos, translations of historic documents in PDF, and other items. My goal is to have a ready online source where I can direct my students for further study. The site still needs a LOT of work (as does my teaching) but I hope to be teaching at Bangkok Bible Seminary for many years to come and (Lord willing) have more time to work on all that. Recently I was encouraged by the following note that a student in a church history class sent to me:

“Thank you so much for teaching this course. I remember that at first I had to adjust to listening to you because I wasn’t accustomed to your accent. But now that I’ve finished the course, I found that I really liked it. You teach very well, making good observations, giving interesting points and thoughts to reflect on, and always giving opportunities for questions.”

I am acutely aware of my deficiencies in areas such as Thai language, but all the same it is good to know students feel like they are benefitting from our time together.

BBS Student Presentation on the Crusades

Busy Home Life

Our kids are now 8, 5, and 1 and keep us on the run. John is fast, reaching more things more quickly… and sticking them in his mouth. Sun is trying to homeschool them & manage the household while I am at BBS and Kanok. And the both of us are trying to get to bed earlier and get more exercise, and we often succeed in neither. Please pray that we would have wisdom, diligence, and a close walk with the Lord in this coming year.

by Christ’s grace,
Karl & Sun Dahlfred

PRAYER POINTS