The Karen People

One hundred and fifty years ago the first missionaries to ever leave America headed for an unheard of place in Southeast Asia called Burma. They labored for 7 years tirelessly without seeing one convert. They were trying without success to convert the staunch Burmese Buddhists. Little did they know that all around them was a tribe of people who were not Buddhist and while in practice they were Animist (worshipping trees, pigs and flowers) they believed something else that made them unique. If the missionaries only could have understood the songs they were singing as they passed the mission each day, ancient songs from the time of Adam and Eve that told a story of one God that created the world and of a precious book that their white brothers would bring to teach them about the God they knew existed but knew nothing about. These were the Karen people. God had put eternity in their hearts and prepared them to receive the gospel. When the missionaries finally did preach the gospel to them it lit a flame in their hearts that spread like wildfire from village to village and from tribe to tribe as the Karen themselves became the missionaries taking the gospel to over 10 tribes in SE Asia from India to Thailand and into Laos and Cambodia. God had chosen them and kept His truth alive in their hearts through the centuries through their songs and legends for this specific purpose and at that time people were converted to Christianity in such numbers as had not been seen since the book of Acts.

But 150 years have passed and the fire has cooled for most of the Karen and in its place is a stale religion, most don’t even know what Christianity means anymore. The songs they sing are the ones their great-grandparents sang and there is no meaning in them, only the routine of Sunday morning. But God has a plan, just as He always has had for these precious people. People so devastated by poverty and persecution, people who are so poor and so ignorant that they unthinkingly sell their children into prostitution and scarcely have any hope of their circumstance ever being different They live without knowing their fine heritage and their importance to the plan of God for Southeast Asia. They are the carriers of revival and they always have been. These are my people. The ones God has given me eyes to see as He sees. He is raising up a generation of Karen people that will worship Him again and when they do the whole of Southeast Asia will follow as it didbefore. They are so hungry for God. For He has put eternity in their hearts. To this end we have translated the worship music of the HillSongs of Australia into the Karen language and are endeavoring to record them on CD for distribution. Imagine having no worship songs in your own language! Because many are illiterate we are also providing audio Bibles, in their language, so they can hear the Word of God and let it change them and set their religion ablaze once more. Jesus must become real again. And when He does there is nothing and no one who can stop them for they are chosen and prepared by God since the beginning of time to be His messengers to a lost world.