Alan and Averil Bennett

Alan and Averil Bennett have spent the last 40 years in Thailand as OMF Missionaries. They are members of Tawa Baptist Church. Recently, the Auckland Baptist Tabernacle held a service to celebrate their ministry.

Those first twenty years in Thailand…what one or two words sum them up?

Alan: Word one: adventure. Word two: pioneer. We lived in Central Thailand between Bangkok and Chiengmai. The name of Jesus wasn’t known. There was a scattering of tiny church groups, meeting in leprosy treatment lean-tos or under a farmer’s stilt house, or at Manorom Christian Hospital, opened ten years before we arrived. Our three daughters were born there and our Singapore-born son was treated for malaria – and it was a spiritual nursery for new believers. When we returned from home assignment we started gathering the believers together again. Like starting your ABC all over!

Averil: Basic. Everything was basic: status, spirits, subsistence; slow slog – can’t you see me pushing Alan on his Honda on forest tracks and one plank bridges? The bunch of terrorists we met got such a fright at the foreign woman heave-ho-ing through the mud they fled. Fellow missionaries looked askance when I drove the Superintendent’s vehicle – the first woman driver! My Christmas cake took four hours in a kerosene tin oven alternating above two charcoal pots. After our first flood we hosted a refugee snake under the fridge for 6 weeks. Every one of our four children escaped death in a crisis situation. Kristina - under a ute, and AnnaMarie - pinned by a sinking water taxi to the bottom of a river. I’d like to thank them both for their enthusiastic interaction in our family team. Kristina helped me mind the children of a fellow worker who was shot while Alan went to retrieve the body. Two Bible verses: Matt 18:10 and Is 54:13, were ‘ours’.

You experienced tough times. What stands out in your memory?

Alan: Being thrown into leadership of 120 missionaries after only four years in Thailand. That started thirty years of administration in both OMF and FEBC, the latter due to my telecommunications training.

Averil: The death of those precious to me – my sister and children, then three closest friends. We cared for the children they left behind – but new believers were going through the same intense spiritual battle. Murder, prison, demon possession, shame…the prince of this part of the world had never been challenged in 2000 years. Yet we felt secure in the victory we had in Christ.

What characterised your second twenty years?

Averil: For us as a family it was catching the divine opportunities presented by constant change. We moved house five times in five years. One house was the residential section of a night club. Our girls were enthusiastic. “At school we prayed for a brothel to burn down. How much more sense to live in one!” and, “We never were respectable were we?” The first week a young man negotiated the grills from the hostel above… (he was) a student the girls had given a tract to in a Nakhon Sawan temple. He is now an elder in a church. Reluctantly, we came to NZ to take up the National Director role for five years. God used the time to start the teen GO Teams and the Samphan Crafts cooperative. Both have a major impact.

Alan: The maturing of the church. What seemed impossible, and then oh, so hard...is done. The church is established. We never saw a breakthrough as such but, gradually, individual believers switched from the anonymity of correspondence courses to preferring being linked with a local church. Local churches are in one association which integrates the old leprosy, ethnic and geographic divisions. Initial goals set to see a church in every province have been achieved with new goals for a church in every district town for 2010. The LIFE Centre we set up is the model for another major lay training centre. Currently, I help local churches take advantage of the opening for FM community radio stations. Six are operating effectively. Now the Thai church is a missionary sending church with more than ten in OMF and other missions.

Thanks to OMF for permission to reprint this article.