1,435 people baptized in Thailand in one service

1,435 people being baptized in Thailand on Sept. 6, 2020. Credit: Reach a Village

An extraordinary thing happened in Thailand recently. The country located on the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia has a population of 66 million with 95% of them Buddhist and only 1% are Christians.

But according to a report in Christianity Today, the Free in Jesus Christ Church Association (FJCCA) held what it claims to be the largest baptism in Thailand’s history, when 20 church pastors baptized 1,435 people on Sept 6, 2020.

FJCCA, working with a missionary organization called Reach a Village, focuses its ministry on taking the gospel to the tens of thousands of villages scattered throughout Thailand. It is estimated that 75,000 Thai villages do not have a Christian witness.

The people being baptized came from nearly 200 village churches in five provinces and many of the new converts had not heard of Christ until the gospel was shared with them this year.

When it first started in 2016, FJCCA had just 20 village churches, but that number has grown to over 700 house churches today.

Of course, in many of these villages there is no technology or internet and the churches are springing up the old-fashioned way with people sharing their faith person to person.

We can so easily be caught up in the doom and gloom all around us, but without a doubt God is moving, and we are seeing hints of it popping up everywhere.

I recently reported on how nearly 1,000 people were baptized in the Pacific Ocean in mid-September by Calvary Chapel Church in Chino, CA. Like in Thailand, this was a record number of baptisms.

A recent poll conducted by a secular organization based in Holland, Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, concluded that there were 1.2 million believers in Iran.

This is an astounding number. Christian organizations were estimating at the high end that there were only 400,000 believers in that Muslim country. The actual number is three times higher!

In other words, we have no idea what God is doing behind the scenes in people’s lives and in entire countries.

When we only focus on what’s happening in the physical realm, it is easy to lose hope. However, we are not seeing what God is doing behind the scenes in the spiritual realm.

God is moving.