VALLEY FORGE, Pa. (ABP) — American Baptist Home Mission Societies have translated six popular online church resources into Karen, a language spoken by increasing numbers of Burmese refugees settling into Baptist churches in the United States.
According to American Baptist New Service, more than 70,000 Karen, Chin, and other ethnic refugee groups from Myanmar have been resettled in more than 130 U.S. cities and 40 states. Those ethnic communities are located in 30 of the 34 regions comprising American Baptist Churches USA.
American Baptist Home Mission Societies — formerly known as National Ministries — has been working with Burmese refugees in the United States since 2006. American Baptists' historical link to those same people groups, however, dates to 1813, when American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson first visited Burma.
Renamed Myanmar by the military junta that has ruled the Southeast Asian nation since 1962, Burma's regime is one of the world's worst violators of religious freedom and human rights. Many Burmese Christians have fled to other countries, including the United States, to escape oppression.
Because of their spiritual kinship, Baptist congregations across the United States have taken a leading role in taking in Burmese refugees and helping them to build a better life.
The American Baptist resources translated into Karen — tonal dialects spoken by 3 million tribal people — are from American Baptist Home Mission Societies' Church Life and Leadership workshops. Formerly promoted as Training Time Workshops, resources available in both PDF and hard-copy format allow small-group training in a variety of areas of church life led by conveners that are not experts in the subject.
The new Karen resources cover preventing child abuse in churches, teaching the Bible to children, three workshops dealing with youth and one on deacon ministry. In addition to Karen and English, the workshops are also available in Spanish and French.
With 1.3 million members in 5,500 congregations across the United States and Puerto Rico, ABCUSA claims to be one of the most diverse Christian denominations in the country.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.