History of Saimai Baptist Church

Saimai  Baptist  Church  was  planted by Japanese missionary and his wife , Hirokazu and Ayako Izumi  in  1988.  They are with the Japan Independent

Baptist Missionary Society.  It is located in the district of Saimai in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand.  In 2000 , Bro Izumi  had a serious illness and was required to return to Japan for treatment for an indefinite period of time. He called a fellow missionary, Rev Jason Goh, and asked him if he would consider taking the work.

Rev Jason Goh and his wife, Poh Lai are missionaries sent out by an independent Baptist Church in Singapore. They have been serving in Thailand since 1999. Before Rev. Jason and his wife started to work in Saimai Baptist Church, they were helping another fellow missionary in Thailand, Rev David Speights, who is with the Baptist Bible Fellowship. The Church they were helping was Nonthaburi Baptist Church. During that time, their primary focus was Bible school and leadership training for the nationals.

When Rev Jason Goh decided to help the work in Saimai, he took a young man from Nonthaburi Baptist Church with him. His name is Kittikorn Jaisirisuay (Noom). Noom was under the leadership and training of Rev Jason until 2003.That year, Noom became the co-pastor of Saimai Baptist Church. In the same year, the Church decided to move to the town area of the district of Saimai called Wongsakorn.

In 2004, Rev Jason announced to the church his intention to step down as missionary-pastor and his desire to let Noom become the sole pastor of the church. He also told the church that he would stop his financial contribution to the church for the reason of wanting the church to become totally indigenous.

Even though the church has 20 regular members, strong leadership, doctrinal stand, and though it is self-governing and self-propagating, it still lacks one aspect and that is, financial stability. The idea of opening a language center came up. This would serve to be a great tool to draw people to the church. Since the students will be paying a fee, the money will provide the financial stability of the church. On the top that, Pastor Noom will have many opportunities to come into contact with people and that itself presents many opportunities for outreach with that, the Student Learning Center of SLC was started.

SLC solely relies on native English speaking as their teachers. The teachers are Christians and are strongly encouraged to share the gospel with the students. Even though the church hasn’t seen a lot of converts but many have heard of God and His love since the start of SLC.

Right now we have 3 Filipino Teachers. They are teaching voluntarily since they wanted to be used by God in serving and sharing the knowledge in teaching English to the Thai students.