David Thomas: Working with youth to change the world

MOSES LAKE — Moses Lake Alliance Church pastor David Thomas grew up much differently from you or I. Having been born in France and spending most of his childhood in Zaire, known today as the Congo, he gained a unique perspective into the struggles and hardships of a Third World country.

Thomas’ parents served with Africa Inland Mission (AIM) during his childhood and still serve with AIM to this very day, now working primarily stateside getting them ready for their trip to the continent. His middle and high school years were spent in the U.S. however, as he attended Toccoa Falls College in northeast Georgia and received a bachelor’s degree in history.

“I never actually taught history though,” he said with a chuckle. “I met my wife at Toccoa Falls and we got married in the chapel there. We both had a desire and felt like God had a calling on our lives to be in missions work specifically with missionary kids in a boarding school of some kind, or a missions school.”

That calling didn’t come to fruition until a couple of years after Thomas and his wife Bethany graduated from college. David worked a couple of different non-missions-related jobs after graduation, but the calling that was placed on his heart never left. In February 2008 the whisper in his ear from God to do missions work morphed into a full blown shout, as the Thomases were made aware of Dalat International School in Penang, Malaysia.

“It was very clear that God was calling us to move to Penang and teach. My wife was a guidance counselor there for five years and I taught physical education for five years,” Thomas remembers. “In the meantime I became a youth pastor there and planted a youth group in the church that we went to there in Penang.”

While working with the youth in his church in Penang and ministering with Young Life, a non-denominational Christian ministry, the Thomas’ realized they were being called into full-time youth ministry. With Bethany’s position requiring six months notice before resignation, the Thomases turned in their resignation to Dalat with no set plans for where they were going to end up.

Four months into the six months, the Thomases learned about a job opening at Moses Lake Alliance Church (MLAC). It is over 8,000 miles from Penang to Moses Lake, and the Thomases made the decision to pack up their belongings and make the trek in 2013, as David accepted a position as the high school and college pastor at MLAC.

In a drastically different cultural landscape Thomas went to work ministering to local youth and involving himself in the community. But if his normal day-to-day work load wasn’t already enough, a couple of years ago Thomas developed a partnership with Envision, the millennial mission arm of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) denomination, to start working with the Family Empowerment Centers, a CMA church plant operation in Chicago. MLAC’s main ministry in Chicago is a soccer-based Vacation Bible School (VBS), but youth teams from the church also have the opportunity to go around the city doing service projects.

“We go to a community called Rogers Park in Chicago. It’s inner city, but it’s also kind of different. It’s 1.8 square miles, 65,000 people and they have over 90 ethnicities within Rogers Park,” Thomas explained. “It’s just crazy. And then over 40 first languages are spoken there. So a lot of political refugees and a lot of people that have moved from countries that are war-torn and find a place to live in Rogers Park.”

The challenges the teams Thomas takes to Chicago can be dealt with and parents of the youth can rest easy knowing their kids are generally safe from harm’s way. But that assurance of safety dips for parents for reasons out of Thomas’ control when their kids travel to MLAC’s overseas missions outreach in the African country of Burkina Faso.

Burkina Faso is a country that has been mired in religious violence for a number of years, with the violence culminating in January 2016 when an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group raided a luxury hotel in Burkina Faso’s capital city, Ouagadou. The attack left 29 dead and over 50 wounded and serves as a stark reminder to Burkina Faso’s visitors of just how dangerous traveling to the country can be. Those factors weigh heavily on Thomas and the youth teams he takes to the country.

“There is a lot of communication, which has to be excellent. There is a lot of training and preparation that goes into the teams. We do about 10 preparation trainings. We call them carpentry schools,” he said. “They are everything from cultural training conversations, to physical labor training, team building activities and there is a lot of prayer time that goes into those trips. Both of them, Chicago and Burkina Faso, we spend the same amount of time training for each trip.”

MLAC has been sending teams to Burkina Faso for over 15 years, with the church supporting Kevin and Bonnie Oberg, who are based out of MLAC. When the Obergs start a church in a village, the primary mission of the youth from MLAC is to help construct a church building for the new church.

The buildings, which Thomas described as hangars, can comfortably accommodate about 120 people and typically take between three and six hours to put up. The pieces are pre-fabricated and the main job is the assembly of the pieces, digging holes and cementing in the holes.

“The other thing that we have been able to do is teach English at an English as a Second Language school there,” Thomas noted. “We also have been able to do some hospital ministry, a sort of story telling ministry at a hospital in (the country of) Mali. But the partnership is to come alongside Kevin and Bonnie in what they are doing, which is ministering to the local churches.”

What’s next for the world traveler is perhaps his most difficult sell to parents of youth. Thomas is in the planning stages of an outreach to a country in the Middle East to work with and put on vacation Bible school camps for Syrian refugees at an outreach center.

A tremendous undertaking? Yes. Countless hours of planning and fretting over every little detail? Most certainly. But Thomas says he is excited and thankful for the challenges associated with the new mission field and can’t wait to see how the trip will not only have an effect on the youth, but on himself as well.