Nattavee Anuchot is a worship leader at Sansawang Church in Thailand. In this conversation, she sits down with Theresa, Alpha Asia Pacific’s Regional Marketing & Resource Manager for a conversation on how her church culture was transformed from a mainly passive congregation to a congregation that was involved and proactive in building the life of the church.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
Below is the transcript of the video.
Theresa
Now we would like to invite Miss Nattavee right here. She is from Sansawang (Sacred Light Baptist) Church to hear how Alpha has impacted her life and her church. And here, she has a lot of amazing experience on her guests coming to faith through Alpha and lot of testimonies.
So we’re so excited to chat with you. And you mentioned that Alpha is a good tool in gradually transforming your church culture, right? And your local community. Can you share more about that?
Nattavee
Okay. Thank you and greetings to everyone. I will say that my church is a Presbyterian and Baptist church. So it’s quite traditional but what I’ve seen the Alpha changed to the church culture is like from people that move from watching and sitting. When we say like for evangelism activities, most people will not like participate much.
And when we talk about the events, like evangelistic events, mostly what we used to do is just inviting people like famous people to come. And then we ask the church members to invite friends to come.
So the activities will be just only sit and watch. And see what is happening and just listening, but for Alpha this move from watching to participating and getting involved.
So the church members changed from just being like passive to proactive more like we just started to invite friends and Alpha helped us a lot because it’s very easy to invite friends to just come and just eat dinner together, chit chat and this changed a lot.
We see new guests coming and we see like the church member they love to serve and they love to help in Alpha.
Theresa
Amazing. That’s so, yeah, I love that. Passive to proactive. The key transformation right there.
And you mentioned that your church is a Presbyterian church is a very traditional church and you share meals. So like the experience of the Holy Spirit. Maybe, can you share more about that?
Nattavee
Yes. When talking about the Holy Spirit in a traditional church, you may have a picture that we’re not really familiar to the Holy Spirit, and we don’t really talk about the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We rarely know that the gift still exist or not. But I don’t want to blame the church because it just the style of the church. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Yes. But with Alpha, we are starting to see that God is still working in his miraculous ways. He is still at work for the miracles, like the gift of the Holy Spirit is being redeemed back to the church when we were with Alpha weekend for the Holy Spirit weekend.
And with Alpha healing night, like “Is God still healing today?” And you will see the work of the miracle of the Holy Spirit through the events.
I would say the example for the healing, like for the week “Is God Still Healing Today?” In the guideline, it that states that the staff has to gather together and pray and ask for the Word of knowledge that there will be any sickness tonight?
And I can say for one example that we have a list, right? And it’s very specific, like one example that I hear the Word of knowledge that God will heal a person that has a sore left-arm.
It’s very specific.
When we say the list, people come out and after we finish, we ask people to share and that lady came out and she said that she has a sore in her left arm because of an accident.
Yes. And she never told anyone. So it must be God. Only God can know this.
So the church started to believe that yes, the gift of the Holy Spirit still exists today.
We can hear God directly especially the Word of knowledge that we can help people and we can reach out and we can help people, start to feel and experience the Holy Spirit.
Like through the Alpha weekend, the people that were never touched by the Holy Spirit, they were touched. And they were overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit.
Theresa
That’s really beautiful. Yeah.
Maybe a final question is, do you have anything to add of how has Alpha impacted your church?
Nattavee
Yes. I would say that the church has become very lively. Moved by the new believers that come in.
And we see that Alpha is the… Alpha is creating the space for us to be new leaders, because in traditional church, we may not see a lot people serving.
It may seemed like the ministry is limited to like worship, sermon and just reaching out.
But not much. In Alpha, we have new serving areas, like cooking, washing dishes, like welcoming people.
And when we have new believers come in the church, we see that people like enjoy, welcomed and meeting with their friends.
Theresa
Thank you so much.
It’s really so inspiring for us to hear and thank you so much for your time in sharing with us.
Nattavee
Thank you so much.
