Marriage Training in Poipet

Marriage Training in Poipet

Today is our third day of teaching on marriage in the city of Poipet.  Our teaching team consists of myself, Craig and Anita Baldwin and our translator Monorom, a full-time employee with CHO.

We started on Monday with forty students. By the end of the day on Tuesday our class had grown to seventy as people continued to arrive from the villages surrounding Poipet. We divided the group in two and we teach half the group in the morning and half in the afternoon. Randy Cook, one of our Go Team members from Tacoma, takes the other half and teaches a course on Discipleship, using the Real Life Ministries curriculum we employ at Chapel Hill.

The experience has been delightful! The people are warm, gracious, respectful and eager to learn. Craig and Anita do an excellent job teaching on marriage. Their long obedience to Christ, coupled with vulnerable vignettes from their life and marriage raising four boys connects well with the Cambodians. Throw in a few Eastern Washington farm stories and it’s amazing how language and cultural barrier can come down, especially in Christ!

One man in his forties came up to us at the end of the day on Tuesday and with the few words of broken English identified himself as a police-officer and thanked us profusely for coming and sharing.  A woman from the CHO staff came up to show Anita pictures of her husband and children and thanked her for being here.    

Our curriculum is called Intimate Encounters, a resource we beta-tested last fall on a small group of couples at Chapel Hill. After the Marriage Seminar in February, nineteen couples have signed up to take the Intimate Encounters course starting again in March. The Chapel Hill marriage group will be experiencing the same material we are teaching over our five day period in Poipet.

Our God is a relational God. He created us with spiritual, physical and emotional needs. Those needs are met in marriage, but also in the context of relationship with family and friends in the Church. Our Cambodian Go Team is also growing in relationship with one another as we share stories at the end of our day reflecting on how we saw God at work in the various ministries we participate in.

We’re grateful to be able to use our gifts in service to our Lord!
Bill