As believers in Jesus Christ, we are a caring church family dedicated to sharing our faith, hope and love with immigrants from Burma who have found freedom in America.
We serve refugees from Burma by teaching them the Bible and offering them a Family of Christ where they can be a part of, so they will seek to love God and people. By doing this, we believe that our Arizona Karen Baptist Church will be able to become witnesses for Christ through (1) loving our Lord Jesus Christ wholeheartedly – Matthew 22:37, (2) loving, helping, and honoring one another – Matthew 22:39, (3) exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit in their lives – Galatians 5:22-23, (4) demonstrating God’s love to others through serving – Mark 10:45, and (5) supporting and serving in mission fields to spread the Gospel – Acts 1:8.
Our church accepts the Scriptures as our authority in matters of faith and practice. We affirm our allegiance to Jesus Christ and to His church. We seek for ourselves and others the fullness of salvation found in Christ, and a life lived in meaningful relationship to God. We continually seek forgiveness for our sins, and the renewal of our spiritual life through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We seek to discover, through faithful worship and fellowship at the Lord’s Table, the true meaning of Christian discipleship.
Our church is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA on a national basis, and in the Region with American Baptist Churches of Los Angeles, the Southwest and Hawaii.
Our church, Arizona Karen Baptist Church (AKBC), is made up of about 500 Karen refugees from the Burma-Thai border, recently resettled in Phoenix after surviving atrocious persecution by the Myanmar military Junta.
Our ancestors foretold us that our younger white brother would sail across the sea and bring us “the Golden Book, the Silver Book, the Book of Life” one day. In 1813, Adoniram and Ann Judson arrived in Burma as the first missionaries to Burma. Adonirian Judson fulfilled the role of our young brother and brought to us the Bible. Our faith and hope in Jesus Christ are the sole reasons that provided strength for perilous times in our homeland. That same faith now offers hope for the future in the United States.
When we were resettled in Phoenix, we looked for a church in which to worship. In 2002, Pastor and Mrs. Glenn Ramey of West Dunlap church, now known as Cross Connection International Fellowship, embraced us with love and compassion; they will forever hold a special place in our thankful hearts.
In August 2006, Pastor Tha Hgay and family arrived in Phoenix from Htam Hin refugee camp. He is a graduate of Kaw Thoo Lei Karen Baptist Bible School in Mae La, Thailand. He was ordained in 1995. Pastor Tha Hgay was a pastor of Amala Church in Tavoy for five years. He later served as the Executive Secretary for Bleik-Tavoy Kaw Thoo Lei Karen Baptist Convention for five years. In the Htam Hin refugee camp, Pastor Tha Hgay served as a chairman for 15 churches organized under Zone 1. Upon arriving in Phoenix, Pastor Tha Hgay instantly made coordinated efforts for the Karen Christians to organize themselves better as a church. Pastor Tha Hgay and family relocated to Georgia in 2011.
In July 2007, Pastor Tha Hser relocated from California and immediately got involved in the Karen ministry. He is a graduate of Karen Baptist Theological Seminary in Insein, Burma. He worked as a missionary for five years among the Karen who lived in mountains and practiced animism. He served as a pastor for Tha Nay Klay church and Amo Mission church for 10 years. He lived in Maniloi and Htam Hin refugee camps where he also served as a pastor for five years.
Pastor Tha Hgay and Pastor Tha Hser work together to help meet the spiritual and physical needs of the congregation. In 2008, as more Karen refugees were resettled in Phoenix, we outgrew the West Dunlap Church facility and began looking for a more spacious place to worship.
Pastor Stan Crews and the Monte Vista Baptist Church lovingly opened its doors to the Karen congregation in July, 2008. Our church later made a decision to join American Baptist Churches USA in order to partner in Christ, embrace our shared heritage, respond to the plight of refugees, and engage in collaborative ministries in Burma.
ဒ်ပမ့ၢ်ပှၤစူၢ်က့ၤနာ်က့ၤကစၢ်ခရံၣ်တဖၣ်အသိး, ပမ့ၢ်ခရံၣ်ဖိးဒူၣ်ဖိထၢဖိ လၢအသးအိၣ်ဟ့ၣ်ခီဟ့ၣ်နီၤလီၤ ပတၢ်စူၢ်တၢ်နာ်, ပတၢ်မုၢ်လၢ်, ဒီး ပတၢ်အဲၣ်ဆူ ပှၤဟဲသုးလီၢ်သုးကျဲလၢကီၢ်ပယီၤ ဆူ ကီၢ်အမဲရံကၤ အပူၤလီၤ.
တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်မၤတၢ်ခ့တၢ်ပှၤအတၢ်မၤလၢပှၤဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲလၢအဟဲသုးလီၢ်သုးကျဲလၢကီၢ်ပယီၤတဖၣ်အဂီၢ် ဒ်သိးကသိၣ်လိသီလိအဝဲသ့ၣ်လၢထူကလုၢ်ယွၤကထါ, ပာ်ဖှိၣ်ထီၣ်သကိးသးဒ်ခရံာ်အဒူၣ်ဖိထၢဖိ, ဒီး အိၣ်မူသကိးလၢတၢ်အဲၣ်ဘၣ်ယွၤဒီး ပှၤကညီအပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ. ခီဖျိလၢပမၤသကိးတၢ်ဒ်အံၤအဃိ ပနာ်လၢအရံၣ်ဇိနါ ကညီဘျၢထံတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ကကဲထီၣ်ပှၤအုၣ်အသးလၢခရံာ်အဂီၢ်ခီဖျိ (၁) တၢ်အဲၣ်ကစၢ်ခရံာ်လၢသူၣ်ဒီဖျၢၣ်သးဒီဖျၢၣ်(မးသဲ ၂၂:၃ရ) (၂) တၢ်ဒုးကဲထီၣ်ခရံာ်အပျဲၢ်အဘီၣ်တဖၣ် (မးသဲ-၂၈:၁၉-၂၀) (၃) တၢ်ဟံးစုနဲၣ်ကျဲအပျဲၢ်အဘီၣ်လၢစူၢ်က့ၤနာ်က့ၤတၢ်တဖၣ် ဒ်သိးကဒိၣ်ထီၣ်လၢသူၣ် လၢသးဒီး ကလီၤဂာ်အါထီၣ်ဒ်ခရံာ် (မးသဲ ၅:၄၈) (၄) တၢ်ပာ်ဖျါထီၣ်တၢ်အဲၣ်တၢ်ကွံခီဖျိ တၢ်ကဟုကယာ် မၤစၢၤလိာ်သး (မးသဲ ၂၂:၃၉) (၅) တၢ်ဆီၣ်ထွဲမၤစၢၤခရံာ်အတၢ်သးခုကစီၣ် တၢ်ဖံးတၢ်မၤဒ်သိးပှၤတနာ် ခရံာ်တဖၣ် ကဒိးန့ၢ်တၢ်မုၢ်လၢ်လၢ ယွၤအတၢ်အၢၣ်လီၤအီလီၤအပူၤ (မးသဲ ၂၄:၁၄) န့ၣ်လီၤ.
ပတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်တူာ်လိာ်ဝဲ ယွၤအကလုၢ်ကထါ လံာ်စီဆှံ ဒ်အမ့ၢ်တၢ်စိတၢ်ကမီၤ လၢပကစူၢ်နာ်အီၤ ဒီးပကအိၣ်မူမၤထွဲ အတၢ်သိၣ်လိ န့ၣ်လီၤ. ပပာ်လီၤပသးကျၢၤမူဆှူလၢပကတီဒီးခရံာ်ဒီးအတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်လီၤ. ပဃုထံၣ်န့ၢ် တၢ်အုၣ်က့ၤခီၣ်က့ၤအလၢအပှဲၤလၢကစၢ်ခရံာ်အပူၤ ဒီး တၢ်အိၣ်မူလၢအိၣ်ပှဲၤဒီး အခီပညီ လၢအဟဲခီဖျိ လၢတၢ်ဘၣ်ထွဲဒီးကစၢ်ယွၤန့ၣ်လီၤ. ထီဘိပအၢၣ်လီၤပတၢ်ဂံၢ်စၢ်ဘါစၢ် ဒီး ပဒိးတၢ်ပျၢ် ပတၢ်ဒဲးဘးလၢခရံာ်လီၤ. ပမၤသီထီၣ်က့ၤပတၢ်အိၣ်မူ ခီဖျိ ပပျဲသးစီဆှံမူဒီးမၤတၢ်လၢပသးအပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ.
ပတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဘၣ်ထွဲဒီး အမဲရံကၤဘျၢထံတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်တဖၣ် (American Baptist Churches USA) လီၤ. လၢလီၢ်ကဝီၤတခီ ပဘၣ်ထွဲဒီး American Baptist Churches of Los Angeles, the Southwest and Hawaii န့ၣ်လီၤ.
အရံၣ်စိနါကညီဘျၢထံတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ် ဘၣ်တၢ်သူၣ်ထီၣ်အသးလၢ ပှၤကညီဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲ အဂၤ ၅၀၀ လၢအဟဲသုးအသး လၢကီၢ်ပယီၤဒီးယိၤကီၢ် ကီၢ်ဆၢတဖၣ် ခီဖျိအဘၣ်တၢ်ဆီၣ်ဘံၣ်ဆီၣ်ဘၢအီၤ လၢပယီၤသုးပဒိၣ်တဖၣ်အတၢ်ပၢတၢ်ပြးအဖီလာ်အဃိ လီၤ. အခဲအံၤပှၤသ့ၣ်တဖၣ်အံၤ ဒိးန့ၢ်ဘၣ် တၢ်ပျဲလၢကဟဲသူၣ်ထီၣ်ဘၣ်တၢ်အိၣ်မူအသီ လၢ ဖဲဝ့ၢ်ဖံန့းက်စ် အပူၤ ဒီး ပာ်ဖှိၣ်ထီၣ်အသးဒီးသူၣ်ထီၣ်ဘၣ်ဝဲ ခရံာ်တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်လီၤ.
ပမိၢ်ပၢ်လၢပျၢၤတဲတ့ၢ်ပှၤလၢ ပပုၢ်ဒ့ဝါ ကဟဲခီဂာ်ပီၣ်လဲၣ် ဒီးဟဲစိာ်န့ၢ်က့ၤပှၤ လံာ်ထူလံာ်စ့လံာ်ပၢ်ယွၤ လီၤ. ဖဲ ၁၈၁၃ နံၣ်န့ၣ် သရၣ်ဒီးမးမးယူဒၤသၣ် ဟဲတုၤလၢကီၢ်ပယီၤ ဒ်ပှၤစိာ်တၢ်သးခုကစီၣ်အဆိကတၢၢ်ဆူ ကီၢ်ပယီၤ န့ၣ်လီၤ. သရၣ်ယူဒၤသၣ်မၤလၢပှဲၤ တၢ်စံၣ်စိာ်တဲစိာ် ဒီးဟဲစိာ်န့ၢ်က့ၤပှၤပလံာ်စီဆှံ ဒ်အမ့ၢ်ဝဲ ပပုၢ်ဒ့ဝါသ့ၣ်တဖၣ်အသိးလီၤ. ပတၢ်စူၢ်တၢ်နာ် တၢ်မုၢ်လၢ် လၢအသူၣ်လီၤအသးလၢ ပကစၢ်ခရံာ် မ့ၢ်တၢ်တမံၤလၢ အဟ့ၣ်ပှၤဂံၢ်ဘါ ဒီး မၤစၢၤပှၤ ဖဲပလဲၤခီဖျိဘၣ်တၢ်ကီတၢ်ခဲလၢပထံပကီၢ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. ပတၢ်စူၢ် တၢ်နာ်တမံၤဃီအံၤဟ့ၣ်ပှၤတၢ်မုၢ်လၢ် တၢ်ဂံၢ်တၢ်ဘါ လၢပတၢ်အိၣ်မူဆူညါ လၢကီၢ်အမဲရံကၤအပူၤအံၤ န့ၣ်လီၤ.
ဖဲပဟဲစးထီၣ်ဆီလီၤက့ၤပသးဖဲဝ့ၢ်ဖံနံးက်စ်အံၤအခါန့ၣ်,ပဃုဝဲဒၣ်တၢ်ဘါယွၤအလီၢ်ဒ်သိးပကဘါဘၣ်ယွၤလၢသရိာ်အပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ. ဖဲ ၂၀၀၂ န့ၣ် သရၣ်ဒိၣ် Ramey ဒီး အမၢၤ လၢကွၢ်တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဖဲ West Dunlap တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်, လၢဘၣ်တၢ်ကိးအီၤလၢ Cross Connection International Fellowship မုၢ်မဆါတနံၤအံၤ, တူၢ်လိာ်မုာ်ပှၤလၢတၢ်အဲၣ်တၢ်ကဟုကယာ်ဒီး အဝဲသ့ၣ်အတၢ်အဲၣ်ပှၤအတၢ်သးအိၣ်ပှၤ န့ၣ်ပသးပ့ၤနီၣ်တသ့နီတဘျီဘၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ.
ဖဲလါအီကူး ၂၀၀၆ န့ၣ် သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဂ့ၤဒီးအဒူၣ်ဖိထၢဖိဟဲတုၤလၢ ထါမဟ့ၣ်ပှၤဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲဒဲကဝီၤ ဆူ ဝ့ၢ်ဖံန့းက်စ် လီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်အံၤဖျိလံာ်စီဆှံကၠိ ဖဲကီၢ်သူလ့ၤကညီဘျၢထံလံာ်စီဆှံကၠိ အိၣ်ဖဲ မဲၢ်လး, ကီၢ်ကၠီၣ်တဲၣ် န့ၣ်လီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်အံၤဘၣ်တၢ်ပာ်စုအီၤဖဲ ၁၉၉၅ နံၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဂ့ၤကွၢ်တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ် ဖဲ အမလးတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ် ဖဲ ဒဝဲၣ် ၅ နံၣ်လီၤ. ဝံၤဒီးအမၤတၢ်ဒ်နဲၣ်ရွဲၣ်ခိၣ်ကျၢၢ် ဖဲ ဘလံး-ဒဝဲၣ်ကညီဘျၢထံ ခဝ့ၡၢၣ် ၅ နံၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. ဖဲအအိၣ်ဝဲလၢထါမဟ့ၣ်ပှၤဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲဒဲကဝီၤအခါ, သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဂ့ၤကဲဝဲ တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ် ၁၅ ဖှိၣ် အပှၤပၢၤလီၢ်ဆ့ၣ်နီၤ ဖဲလီၢ်ကဝီၤ ၁ အပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ. ဖဲအဟဲတုၤလၢ ဝ့ၢ်ဖံန့းက်စ် ဒီး သရၣ်ဒိၣ်ဂဲၤလိာ်ဝဲလၢပှၤကညီခရံာ်ဖိတဖၣ်အကကရၢကရိထီၣ်တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်န့ၣ်လီၤ. ဖဲ ၂၀၁၁ န့ၣ် သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဂ့ၤ ဒီး အဒူၣ်ဖိထၢဖိ သုးအသးဆူ Georgia ကီၢ်စဲၣ် လီၤ.
ဖဲ လါယူၤလံ ၂၀၀၇ န့ၣ် သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဆၢထိဟဲသုးအသးလၢ California ဆူ ဝ့ၢ်ဖံန့းက်စ် ဒီး တဘျီဃီ နုာ်လီၤမၤဃုာ် တၢ်လၢတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်အပူၤလီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဆၢဖျိထီၣ်လံာ်စီဆှံကၠိဖဲ ပှၤကညီဘျၢထံယွၤဂ့ၢ် ပီညါဖၠၣ်စိမိၤ ဖဲ ဝ့ၢ်အ့စ့ၣ်, ကီၢ်ပယီၤ န့ၣ်လီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဆၢစိာ်တၢ်သးခုကစီၣ် ၅ နံၣ် လၢပှၤကညီလၢ အအိၣ်လၢကစၢၢ်ကလိဒီးဘါသံးခိၣ်မုၢ်ဃါ အကျါ န့ၣ်လီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်ကွၢ်တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဖဲ သန့ချၢၣ် တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ် ဒီး အမိၤတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ယံာ်အနံၣ် ၁၀ လီၤ. သရၣ်ဒိၣ်အိၣ်တ့ၢ်ဖဲ မဲာ်နံၢ်လွဲၣ် ဒီး ထါမဟ့ၣ် ပှၤဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲဒဲကဝီၤတဖၣ် ဒီး ကွၢ်တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဖဲန့ၣ် ၅ နံၣ်လီၤ.
သရၣ်ဒိၣ်သးဆၢထိ ဟ့ၣ်လီၤအသးနီၢ်နီၢ်ဒီးဂဲၤလိာ်လၢခရံာ်အတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်အပူၤလၢာ်သူၣ်လၢာ်သး ဒ်သိး ကလုၢ်အီၣ်လုၢ်အီတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဖိတဖၣ်လၢနီၢ်သးတခီ ဒီး ကမၤစၢၤတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဖိတဖၣ်အနီၢ်ခိအတၢ်လိၣ် အဂီၢ်စ့ၢ်ကီးလီၤ. ဖဲ ၂၀၀၈ နံၣ်န့ၣ် ပှကညီဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲတဖၣ်ဟဲတုၤအါထီၣ်ဒီး တၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်လိၣ်ဘၣ် သရိာ် လၢအဒိၣ်လီၤ.
Pastor Stan Crews ဒီး Monte Vista Baptist Church တူၢ်လိာ်ပတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ် လၢတၢ်အဲၣ်တၢ်ကွံ ဖဲ လါယူၤလံ ဖဲ ၂၀၀၈ နံၣ်လီၤ. ပတၢ်အိၣ်ဖှိၣ်ဆၢတဲာ်လၢကဘၣ်ထွဲဘျးစဲအသးလၢ American Baptist Churches USA ဒ်သိးပကမၤသကိးတၢ် လၢခရံာ်အတၢ်မၤအပူၤ လၢတၢ်ပာ်ဒိၣ်ပာ်ကဲတၢ်စံၣ်စိၤတဲစိၤလၢ ပလဲၤခီဖျိတ့ၢ်ဒ်သိးသိး, ဒ်သိးပကမၤစၢၤပှၤဘၣ်ကီဘၣ်ခဲတဖၣ်, ဒီး ဒ်သိး ပကမၤသကိးတၢ်ဒ်သိးသိး လၢ တၢ်သးခုကစီၣ်အတၢ်ဖံးတၢ်မၤတဖၣ်လၢကီၢ်ပယီၤအပူၤန့ၣ်လီၤ.