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Dear Concerned Christian,
One way to understand the growth of the Thai church is to find where the church is growing rapidly and where it is not growing. To do this we compared the number of Christians in 2011 with the number counted in 2007. What we found was a net gain of 68,573 Christians since 2007. This averages to 17,143 new Christians per year or 47 new Christians per day. Praise the Lord for this growth!
When looking at the data one fact that becomes apparent is just how much faster the church is growing in the provinces of Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, & Mae Hong Son compared to the remaining 74 provinces combined. In these northern provinces there are three million people (5% of the country’s population) and 190,081 Thai Christians. One out of every 16 people calls themselves a Christian (6.17% of the population). (1) Every year 9,397 people come to faith in Jesus in these 3 provinces, 26 people every day.
Compare this with the remaining 74 provinces where 95% of the population lives (over sixty million people). In all 74 provinces combined there are 182,170 Christians. This is less than the total number of Christians in the three northern most provinces. 7,746 people come to faith each year or 21 per day. The whole area is only 0.3 percent Christian, one out of every 330 citizens is a Christian. In some provinces there are more than 1,000 citizens per Christian.
As you can see there is still much work to do in Thailand. Praise the Lord that the Gospel is expanding rapidly in the far north.
- Pray that the Christians in the north would get a burden for their fellow citizens.
- Pray that many of these Christians would become missionaries to other parts of their country.
- Pray that God would encourage and bless the Christian leaders in these 74 provinces.
- Pray that they would be faithful to the work that God has called them to.
For God’s Glory,
Dwight Martin
Research Coordinator
Thailand Evangelism & Church Growth Committee
(1) If you exclude the Tribal Christians and consider only the ethnic Thai, the percent Christian in the far north is about 2.5%
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