Thank you for praying for our D4D Trip to Santa Cruz and Cochabamba, Bolivia from November 13 – 24, 2025! It was a great trip, and I want to share one Saturday morning with you.

 Would you like to meet a “ripe,” ready, eager-to-learn whole life discipleship team? Just as a mango matures to the place it is “ripe” and ready to pick and eat, so a team can be “ripe” and eager to learn. I’m going to share from our three-hour visit to the Cochabamba team.

 What makes this team ripe?

• They are organized and used our time together well.
• They know their lessons, and instead of only studying the first required eight-lessons have gone much further than we expected. We love their initiative!
• They shared how their current lesson of Resource Mapping had taught them about their local community including which languages their neighbors speak.
• They are using the lessons, like “Seven minutes with God” on how to organize a quick daily devotional study with their families. One man lives in a home with 12 people, and his grandkids ask him, “When are we doing our Seven Minutes with God today?”
• They are an eight-person team and have five small groups in their homes where they are facilitating the lessons with their families and some neighbors. We haven’t yet asked them to do this! They are taking the initiative!
• We came ready for a devotional study, but they had one already prepared!
• We tested their level of teaching in an adult learning style where facilitators ask questions to guide the group, instead of the prevalent rote-memory education system including preaching and most teaching they are used to. They have room to grow in this area, and now that they know what we are looking for I’m expecting to see some growth. We will also do a full workshop in Adult Learning and Bible Telling next year.
• We got in one lesson on making Personal Development Plans so they can better apply lessons they are learning to their lives. Their level of participation in this lesson shows that Antonio has been using adult learning methods and they are eager to participate.

I have coached some good teams, and Gary Hipp has coached even more. We both felt that this is the ripest team we have ever encountered this early in the process. This was Rodiz Chambi’s first coaching trip, and he said, “Now I know what a ‘ripe’ team looks and feels like!” I am excited to coach this team along with Rodiz and Pablo, giving them an excellent example as they help us coach other teams in the Santa Cruz area. By God’s grace, their eagerness to learn, along with the transformation we will be seeing in their lives, families, church and community will be a valuable foundation to grow a whole-life, disciple-making movement on!

Back Row left to right: Marcario Salva, Rodiz Chambi (coaching with Gary Hipp and David Thomas) Pablo, Rolando Vasquez. Front left to right Veronica, Isidora Chipana (Marcario’s wife), Pascuala Aruquipa, Bernardo Mendoza, and kneeling on the floor Pastor Antonio Mamani (D4D Team leader). They belong to the “Iglesia Vida Para Todos,” a Friends church in Cochabamba.

I included this picture here with their names because some of you like to pray for these people by name. Your prayers make a difference! Thank you in advance for investing prayer in their lives. It is my privilege to coach this group, and to focus your intercession in the place where it is going to have a great impact. Thank you for joining us in prayer!

The Lord bless you!
David Thomas

Planting whole-life, disciple-making movements

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. Psalm 67:1-2

The post David Thomas | December Update first appeared on FRIENDSMISSION.COM.

Chiang Rai, Thailand | Jan 24 – Feb 8, 2024

 Trip Calendar

For this prayer update, I’m going to include Scott’s prayer guide for this trip. It gives an excellent short history of our work with The Way Foundation in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Enjoy!

Thailand Trip – Purser Prayer Guide

Dear Friends,

Twenty years ago, David Kibbe, an American math teacher in Bangkok, saw the need in northern Thailand to begin a pastor and evangelist training program with a vision for training indigenous leaders in Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos (the Golden Triangle region). As he met with Lahu leaders, he learned that often church leaders were unable to articulate the gospel and had few resources and methods to study the Bible. Furthermore, he saw a clear need for discipleship and a vision for reproducing disciples (2 Timothy 2:2).

David and his wife Marilyn moved to Chiang Rai and began a small pastor and evangelist program among the Lahu. By 2012, the Kibbe’s son, Ben, also became a missionary to Thailand through Evangelical Friends in Ohio. Ben was instrumental in working with key Lahu Christian leaders to establish an official Thai ministry called The Way Foundation. The three-pronged purpose of The Way Foundation included the pastor and evangelist training program and also added a focus on planting new churches and focusing on holistic discipleship within Lahu villages. In 2016, Ben’s wife, Charity, a nurse, visited Colorado Springs (along with several of her prayer team members) and attended Discipling for Development’s initial ministry course called, “Foundations for holistic ministry,” a focus on using empowerment methods, whole-life discipleship and available resources to advance the Kingdom of God.

In 2017, The Way Foundation invited Discipling for Development to begin training their team in Chiang Rai, northern Thailand. They invited David Thomas, a missionary from the Evangelical Friends Mission, to be the liaison between Discipling for Development and The Way Foundation. David had effectively used the Discipling for Development method of ministry during his years in Rwanda. In 2018, David invited me (Scott) to form a small team of two to help coach the Lahu team through the five phases of Discipling for Development (preparation, exploration, mobilization, empowerment, and reproduction). Each year we make two or three visits to Thailand to coach, mentor, and train the team as they seek to disciple their communities in the hills of northern Thailand. About once or twice a month we also Zoom with two key leaders (Yosapa and Mana) to maintain relationships, talk about their work in communities, brainstorm together, and consider how to stir up the team towards love and good works (Hebrews 10: 24).

On this trip, David Thomas and I will team up to coach the team as they continue through what we call the mobilization phase. The mobilization phase is working with a community to help them identify and discover their strengths and obstacles and ultimately decide for themselves what areas they would like to receive training in to help their communities thrive. In the past few months, Yosapa and Mana have been traveling every other Sunday to two different Lahu villages and have been helping two small churches through this process. Recently, it has involved taking topics that the communities have selected such as a lack of Bible training or struggles with planning or problems between husbands and wives, and going through a “root cause analysis” process. What are the core roots of these types of struggles? As they continue to do this, they ultimately will develop a curriculum of topics they want to receive training in to help their community. As we meet, we will go through their conclusions based on their research.

Right: Yosapa and team members discussing barriers to their development in JaSoPa village’s ‘candy-wrapper vote’ in September 2023.

The last time we were with this team was in September 2023. On this trip, in addition to helping the team through the mobilization phase, we will follow up with a training we did on coaching methods. We will also get updates on how the Discipling for Development team (YoSaPa and Mana) is doing and work together with them in thinking through the next steps and training for the coming three months. Here are some specific prayer requests:

• In the words of 2 Timothy 2: 1, “be strengthened by the grace [power] that is in Christ Jesus.” We hope that insights in coaching this team will come from God, and not from our own human wisdom and strength. We don’t just want good ideas, but to know that God is the one who is empowering us all through the Holy Spirit.
• For health, energy, and strength throughout the two weeks. On short trips like these, it feels like you are only just recovering from jetlag by the time you come back home again. On our last few trips, we have experienced some levels of sickness. It is also very common for translators and other Lahu team members to experience various kinds of sickness.
• To be the aroma of Christ. The apostle Paul writes, “Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2: 16). But we want to spread “the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere” (vs. 14). Please pray that Christ would be central in all that we do.
• To abound in every good work. “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:8). Often, we don’t know the full situation of things until we meet and begin sharing with each other. As mentioned above, we want to hold on to God who gives this grace for all times and all situations.

Thank you for praying through these areas as you think of our team in Thailand.

Warmly in Christ,

Scott

From David:

Scott and I will also participate with EFM’s field director Dan Cammack and former EFM missionary to Thailand, Ben Kibbe, along with The Way Foundation leaders as they seek to strengthen their relationship. They will be looking at how TWF and EFM can work well together in promoting the growth of God’s kingdom throughout the Lahu peoples with Bible training, leadership development, church planting and whole-life discipleship. They will be looking at the unique challenges of church planting in their context. We will be looking at how EFM can best partner with them to encourage them to be and achieve all that God has called them to.

Thank you-all for praying with us on this trip!

Bless you!

David Thomas

The post David Thomas Prayer Update: January 2024 Trip to Thailand first appeared on FRIENDSMISSION.COM.