An earlier version of this article appears in the article “Jesus in Thailand” in Touchstone Magazine, and many elements also appear in Casey Chalk’s new book, The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands (Sophia Institute Press).

I confess I’m not one for exotic vacations. Before we were married, I joked with my wife that I would be perfectly happy to go on a mission trip to some unchurched land for our honeymoon; she, being the more reasonable one, wasn’t so thrilled with the idea. The very last thing I wanted was to sit on some Caribbean beach, casually sipping daiquiris and wasting away the hours in some otherwise poverty-stricken country. 

It’s highly ironic, then, that my family for three years lived in Thailand, ground zero for exotic beach destinations in Southeast Asia, with its pristine, warm-to-the-touch, cerulean waters, its cheap yet delicious cuisine, and its effusively welcoming hospitality industry. Since returning to the United States, we have often been asked by friends or acquaintances what we liked best about Thailand. Surely its vacation spots, food, or foreign culture is the expected answer. They are taken aback when I tell them the best thing about Bangkok is its predominantly Christian asylum-seeker community.

A Haven for Asylum Seekers

I was entirely unaware that the Asian metropolis had such a community when my family arrived in the summer of 2014. Like most expats who move to Thailand, we had been told to expect sky bars, spicy food, and some of the best beaches in the world just a short jaunt away. We bought a car with the expectation of taking weekend excursions south to Pattaya or Hua Hin, or northward to the elephant-populated national parks. But our very first Sunday at the Catholic parish nearest to our residence exposed us to a very different expat experience.

In a city like Bangkok, one would expect to see a diverse, multinational crowd at any downtown church. There were large numbers of Thais at the church we attended, but also many Westerners, Filipinos, and Africans, and a significant minority of South Asians as well. I introduced myself to one who was distributing bulletins in the outdoor vestibule. He was from Pakistan—as were the other fifteen members of his family, natives of the megalopolis of Karachi who had fled persecution at the hands of Muslim extremists. 

His name was Wilson, and we quickly developed a friendship, his humble and gracious personality—and that of his family—being spiritually magnetic. As my family and his became friends, we learned remarkable details regarding their exodus story. They had been a large, well-respected, middle-class Catholic family in Karachi. Wilson and his wife were both registered nurses; his brother was a medical doctor. 

Trouble started when Pashtun migrants—the same ethnicity as the Taliban who dominate the westernmost provinces of the country—began to harass Wilson’s family. They falsely accused his brother of desecrating a Koran, an offense that often triggers mob violence. The brother fled the country. Two nieces were then abducted and set on fire. I can attest to the veracity of their story: they showed me the burn marks on their torsos. A sister was threatened, went into hiding, and was never heard from again, presumably abducted or killed. So Wilson, with the aid of his bishop, acquired passports for his entire family and took a one-way flight to Bangkok.

Why Bangkok? Because, for more than a decade, the city has been known as a haven for asylum seekers and refugees from across Asia and Africa. Precisely because its economy relies so heavily upon tourism, Thailand has maintained a notoriously relaxed entry policy: visitors can easily acquire a 30-day visa upon arrival. Those same visitors can quite effortlessly overstay their visa without attracting much attention from the Thai authorities. Thus, all manner of people—from religious and ethnic minorities to political dissidents to economic migrants—have made their way to Thailand. Many are from Pakistan, but I also met people from Burma, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Soviet republics of central Asia. 

Ecumenism in Charity at the IDC

For many, including Wilson’s family, getting into the country is just the first step in the long and arduous process of obtaining official refugee status. Once the Wilsons made friends found friends at church willing to help them find housing, they applied for such status to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This process can take years, with the very real possibility that one’s application will be rejected in the end, in which case there is little choice but to return home. In the interim, one is deemed an “asylum seeker,” meaning that he has no formal legal status in the host country, and thus is entirely subject to the whims of the local police and security services. In this respect, Wilson’s family are some of the lucky ones—they have never been apprehended by the Thai police and taken to the infamous international detention center, or IDC.

As my wife and I opened up to more Christian asylum seekers at our parish, we encountered some who had either spent time in the IDC or were under serious threat of being detained there. With the asylum-seeker population estimated to number well over 10,000, the Thai authorities have plenty of targets to choose from. One such person, Michael, along with his wife and three children, became very dear to us. Michael was one of the most pious people I had ever met. He and his wife made and sold rosaries after church. He often journeyed from their one-bedroom apartment across town to attend daily Mass—a dangerously long pilgrimage for someone trying to avoid the authorities. After Mass, he would solemnly make his way to the altar, where he would kneel, hold his rosary aloft, and loudly offer a litany of prayers, begging Jesus to intervene on behalf of his family. When their refugee application was denied, Michael decided to turn himself and his family into the IDC.

We immediately began visiting Michael and his family at the IDC. The scene was emotionally and spiritually overwhelming. Every weekday, visitors like ourselves, carrying all kinds of foods and other goods, lined up at 10:00 a.m. to meet with the detainees, while Thai authorities barked at us, moved us from place to place, and often rejected various items that we had brought, seemingly with no reason. Scores of prisoners in orange prison clothes would then be corralled into a long hall behind a wire fence to see their visitors. Individuals on the two sides would take turns shouting at each other, trying to be heard above the din of a hundred other voices.

It was during those initial trips to the IDC that we began to recognize the ecumenical response to Bangkok’s asylum-seeker crisis. One group of women—all members of the Church of Latter Day Saints—scheduled remarkably well-organized weekly visits to the detention center, maintaining an extensive log of all the detainees they knew inside (some Mormon, but many others Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, or even Muslim) and of when those detainees had last been visited. The ladies brought a plethora of supplies to the jail: fruit, noodles, cookies, juice—all kinds of little luxuries the prison authorities would never serve the inmates. 

My wife and a close Evangelical friend frequently joined the LDS ladies on their weekly visits. When I could arrange leave from work, I would accompany them. In a small coffee shop across the street from the IDC, groups would congregate to prepare supplies for various inmates. There I met an Evangelical missionary from Texas who had brought along his teenage children. “I want them to see this so they understand how much an American passport is really worth,” he told me. 

Another time, while exchanging high-decibel words with our Pakistani friends through the wire fence, I noticed a group of young American Evangelicals reading Scripture to a group of Pakistani Evangelical asylum seekers—in Urdu, with an Urdu-language Bible. I once saw a woman from my parish at the IDC, later discovering that she periodically led a group of French Charismatic Catholics to visit inmates. Yet again I witnessed a visitor and an inmate who I presumed were speaking Russian (the inmate had Orthodox iconography tattooed on his body) try in vain to persuade the Thai authorities to allow a pack of cigarettes to be passed across the fence. This was truly an international and ecumenical operation!

Things Different, Things Shared

Over the course of three years, refugees and asylum seekers became some of our closest friends in Bangkok. This is not to say that we enjoyed the kind of relational or conversational familiarity that so easily exists between people of the same culture. Communication between us and those we sought to know—and help—was always difficult. There was, of course, the language barrier, with most of them speaking broken or limited English. There were also socio-economic barriers—what does a middle-class white American talk about with poor, marginalized asylum-seekers from across Asia and Africa? “How was your week? You spent it trying to avoid the Thai authorities, looking for menial jobs, and eating the same rice and noodles every day? Wonderful! How was mine? Well, I got to go wherever I pleased, spent an evening stressed out about my backhand slice, drank beer at a nice skybar . . .”

All the same, we sought to connect with and enter into their lives. Smiles, greetings, questions about the health of family members, and jokes about a priest’s homilies were all an effort to show that we loved them, that we were on their side. Our children played together after church. Pakistani families would make us traditional food to take home—it was so spicy I was often the only one who would eat it. In time, we discovered how much we shared with them—yes, we had different sufferings, different hopes, different needs; but we also shared sufferings, hopes, and needs. 

One such suffering involved my wife, who has celiac disease. This means that in receiving Holy Communion in many places around the world, she needs to drink from the chalice to avoid eating too much gluten. In Thailand, the disease is practically unheard of, and many Thais, including some priests, scoffed at what they perceived was an attempt to get special white-person treatment. Yet Pakistani asylum-seeker altar servers every week ensured that the celebrating priest reserved a small cup of wine for my wife. My family was incapable of helping with their biggest appeal—to be ensured of a “refugee” designation by UNHCR—but we could assist with the little stuff: drafting an email in polished English, conducting research on the Internet, donating used clothes.

Investing in this community was not always convenient. Many times, as I left the church after weekday Mass, usually in a hurry to make a meeting at work, asylum seekers would approach me begging for money. Often the request would come with a heartbreaking story I simply did not have time to hear. At other times, the stories bordered on the humorous. Once an Ethiopian Orthodox man approached me on the street to tell me his story—one marked by adventure, loss, and poverty. He concluded by telling me: “You’ve been to Ethiopia. You know our faith in Christ. You know people from my country don’t lie.” As if an entire nationality could claim perfect fidelity to the Ninth Commandment!

Ultimately, the experience fundamentally changed the way my family viewed our calling as followers of Christ. In the many poor, persecuted Christians we encountered at church and in the IDC, we saw the face of Christ. Indeed, it was through our attempts to suffer alongside our tortured brethren that we were thrust into some of our deepest, if not most painful, spiritual moments. In the wounds and scars of Pakistani Christians, we discovered those of our Savior. Is this not what we should expect from a Lord who so intimately identified himself with his Church? It was indeed Christ who asked the Pharisee of Pharisees on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4, emphasis added). With such an epiphany, how could we not rush to serve our Lord himself, who declared, “Whatever you did for the least of my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:45)?

Staying & Leaving

Eventually our three years in Thailand approached their conclusion. While some of our Pakistani friends remained there, others—maybe providentially—also found their time in Bangkok reaching an end. The Wilson family’s application to UNHCR was rejected, as was their subsequent appeal. Yet there they stayed, week in, week out, serving at the church and praying that one of the rumors that some other country (Canada? The Netherlands?) might take them in would prove true. After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Wilson pulled me aside after weekday Mass. “I hear your new president is a very holy man, and that he will allow us to come to America,” he said. “No,” I hesitated, “I don’t think that’s quite accurate.” A week before we left Bangkok, I was welcomed into his home to share one last lunch on the floor of one of the three small rooms that constituted the entire Wilson family residence. We talked, we prayed, we took pictures, and I departed entrusting their fate to our gracious Lord.

For Michael and his family, eight months in the IDC were enough. Every family member had suffered some type of debilitating sickness, their son so terribly that a Filipina benefactress persuaded the Thai authorities to allow the boy—quite unconventionally—to be transferred to her care. Just as my own family was preparing for our trans-Pacific move, Michael declared to me that he had lost hope that staying in Thailand was a better option than returning to Pakistan—conditions in the IDC were that terrible. 

Within a few days, we, in coordination with an extended network of faithful friends representing a dozen nationalities across many time zones, worked to arrange all the necessary documents and funds required to ensure the family’s safe return to their native land. I even temporarily became the guardian of Michael’s son before he was returned to his family—some Thai immigration ministry form, now probably locked away in a forgotten filing cabinet, attests to that fact, with my signature! A few days before my own family departed Thailand, Michael, his wife, and their three children boarded a plane back to Karachi, back into the jaws of the persecutors who had driven them out of the country five years before.

Caring Across Traditions

As we returned to our own native land, far removed from our persecuted, imprisoned, or impoverished brethren, several thoughts stirred in my unwary soul and reverberated in my muddled intellect. On the one hand, I was inspired by how the plight of the oppressed had served as the impetus for such beautiful ecumenical moments, when a common call to care for Christ and his Church had drawn people from such varied religious, national, and linguistic backgrounds to the same places and faces. Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mormons were all at one point on Michael’s visitor list at the IDC. Never once during all those visits did anyone bother to debate or condemn another religious tradition. We were simply too busy doing the work of Christ to bother with something that seemed—by comparison—so peripheral. 

This is not to say that debate and criticism isn’t a healthy, essential aspect of ecumenism. Indeed, I would never endorse an indifferentism that elides the essential differences between Catholicism and other religious traditions. Ecumenism, properly understood, does not mean that we downplay or ignore our theological and ecclesial divisions, which are real, and are impediments to realizing true unity. Nor does it mean that Catholics should in any way compromise their faith when interacting with members of other faith traditions, which would undermine the Church’s witness as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in an era which so desperately needs Catholicism’s theological coherence, clarity, and integrity. Ecumenism means charting an authentic middle way between the extremes of capitulating to an indifferentism that views other religions as simply a different manifestation of our own, and viewing people of other religious traditions as scorned members of a lower caste, as Jews in the New Testament viewed Samaritans.  Ecumenism means identifying, acknowledging, and debating our differences, often passionately, but also recognizing that there are times when collaboration in works of mercy can accomplish some greater good. Indeed, that effort itself is a way of making progress in the divine mandate to follow Christ, be His witness, and pursue the unity He prayed for in John 17. People are more open to learning about our own unique faith tradition when they have reason to trust us, and when we have earned social capital with them.

Sometimes certain realities — like the existential threats to Christians — must force us to reevaluate and re-contextualize our differences and work to ensure that all those who identify as Christian are not overrun by the forces of evil. Such has been the clarion call of Christian ecumenical movements since the First Crusade, Lepanto, and the Second World War. Alexios I Komnenos, Pope Pius V, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer all shared a common ability to perceive the kinds of danger that threatened the very survival of anyone identifying as a Christian. I discerned that same aptitude in so many of the interactions I had with men and women across the spectrum of Christianity in Bangkok.

On the other hand, this unique ecumenical experience, aimed at addressing the needs of the persecuted and the marginalized, helped me see the biblical roots of just such a mission. Scripture is filled with stories of immigrant peoples in need of a haven: Abraham fled to Egypt during a great famine (Gen. 12:10); the entire Israelite community, numbering 70 people, later fled once again to Egypt in the face of another famine (Gen. 42–47); and David, on the run from King Saul, sought asylum with the king of Gath (1 Sam. 21:10). Most importantly, the Holy Family fled the murderous King Herod by seeking refuge in Egypt (Matt. 2:13–23). 

My point is not political—all pro-immigration policies are not inherently divinely sanctioned, nor are anti-immigration policies de facto censured by the biblical record—but the desire to help asylum seekers and refugees, which was evident in every Christian tradition I encountered in Thailand, suggests to me that God has placed deeply in any soul singed by his Holy Spirit a passion for the lost, the oppressed, and the wayfaring. The current political atmosphere in America, which defines our own immigration debate, had, I think, clouded my ability to see that prior to my time in Thailand. 

Since return stateside in 2017, my family has been eager—anxious, even—to locate those in this truly blessed and prosperous land who, whether their suffering is religious, economic, or political, are in need of a friend. Indeed, our Lord has called us to that very task. Yet if I’m entirely honest, I admit that I need such persons more than they need me, for it is in their faces that I discover the face of the risen Lord.