Every year, more than 30 million visitors come to see Thailand. They come for golden temples and night markets, mountain mist and island beaches. Thailand is one of the most visited countries on earth.
Yet it remains one of the least reached with the gospel. Fewer than one in a hundred Thai people are evangelical believers. In 73 of Thailand's 77 provinces, fewer than 2% of the people are in church. Behind the beauty that draws the world lies a deep spiritual lostness: millions who have never heard the name of Jesus in a way they could understand, and villages where no one has ever been told.
That is why we built Pray for Thailand, a free interactive prayer map that lets you pray for Thailand one province at a time.
Church attendance alone doesn't show the gap. So the map measures something sharper: gospel deprivation. How many villages have no church, no believers gathering, and no local witness? How many people could live their whole lives without meeting a single follower of Jesus?
The answer is sobering. Of Thailand's villages, 84% have no church. That is nearly 66,000 villages, home to more than 65 million people outside any church. In much of the country, it's not that people have heard the gospel and turned it down. They have simply never had the chance.
Gospel deprivation is not just a statistic. It's a grandmother in Mae Hong Son who has prayed to spirits all her life. It's a university student in Chiang Mai searching for meaning. It's a rice farmer in the Northeast who has never once held a Bible. Each one is loved by God, and each one is still waiting.
More than a century ago, A. B. Simpson, founder of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, wrote words that still ring true for Thailand today:
"Prayer is the mighty engine that is to move the missionary work."
— A. B. Simpson
Every church planted in a Thai village began with prayer. Every open door, every softened heart, and every worker sent into the harvest was first asked for on someone's knees. Before strategies, before trips, before budgets, the work of reaching Thailand moves forward on prayer.
Jesus put it plainly: "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field" (Matthew 9:37-38). The map is our way of helping you ask, specifically and faithfully, for every corner of the nation.
Pick one province a day and pray through its prayer points. Pray as a family at the dinner table, with your small group, or with your church on a Sunday. Take one region a week, or pray for all 77 provinces over the course of a few months. Then share a prayer card with a friend and invite them to pray with you.
When you tap a province, ask God for the specific things you read. Ask Him to send workers. Ask Him to open hearts. Ask Him to raise up Thai believers who will carry the good news to their own neighbors. And ask what part He might have for you.
Prayer is where it starts, but it's rarely where it ends. As you pray for Thailand, God may stir something more in you. You might join a short-term mission trip to Chiang Mai and see the villages you've been praying for. You might become a monthly partner helping our Thai and foreign missionaries plant churches where there are none. Or you might take our free course, The Mind of a Missionary, and learn to think like the heroes who carried the gospel to the hardest places.
However God leads, it begins the same way: on our knees, for one province, one village, and one person at a time.
Open the Pray for Thailand map, choose a province, and start praying today.