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 The local bookstores in Chiang Mai currently carry a little cartoon history of the city entitled, Chiang Mai History, Cartoon Version (Chiang Mai: Chiangmai Urban Studies Center, 2000, 2001) written by Isara Guntang. It is published in two versions, northern Thai and central Thai. In both version, page 14 contains a brief description of missionary history beginning with the Rev. Daniel McGilvary's arrival in Chiang Mai in April 1867 (nothing is said about his family). The cartoons include a picture of First Church Chiang Mai, a missionary giving vaccinations, McCormick Hospital, a portrait of McGilvary, and Sophia McGilvary teaching young girls to sew on her front porch (the beginning of today's Dara Academy). The text portrays the missionaries as engaging in three activities, evangelism, medicine, and education.
The story of Chiang Mai is presented as a grandfather telling his granddaughter about the history of the city, and in the last frame of page 14 the girl summarizes missionary history by saying, "Wow! The farang caused our community to progress, really."
Ach. Isara is to be credited for accurate research. The booklet uses proper Christian wording and gives accurate dates. Giving the missionaries a full page in the 28 pages of text is fair, and I have to confess that I was a little surprised to see mission work mentioned at all. If the summary is simplistic, it is surely not wrong, although it is interesting that the summary frame credits all farang with introducing progress into the city rather than just the missionaries. Still, it is heartening to see the role of the missionaries acknowledged in this brief popularized version of northern Thai local history.
The on line edition of Bangkok's second-ranked English newspaper, The Nation, for July 28, 2005 carried the following brief item on its front page:
"A student asked one of his former teachers at Thammasat University after the latter was named deputy prime minister: 'Sir, have you sold your soul to the politicians?' The academic-turned-deputy premier replied: 'No, I haven't sold my soul. I just rented it out.'"
Those who know anything at all about the history of Protestantism in Thailand will know that Karl Gutzlaff was one of the first two Protestant missionaries to conduct evangelism in Siam, arriving in 1828. As was often in the case in the early days of Protestant missions in Siam, Gutzlaff was not all that interested in Siam itself. He saw it, rather, as a step towards China and devoted his work in Bangkok exclusively to the overseas Chinese in that city. His time in Siam bore little fruit and cost him the life of his wife. He soon left Bangkok to pursue his goal of evangelizing China. Gutzlaff, thus, quickly passes from the stage so far as we are concerned, leaving little if any direct legacy to be passed on to the churches of Siam.
Karl Gutzlaff, it turns out, went on to have a long and controversial career as an independent, part-time missionary in China, a career that causes one to wonder what might have happened if he had stayed on in Bangkok. In 1834, he accepted employment in China as an interpreter and official of the Department of Trade of the British Government, a position he held until his death in August 1851. On the side, he conducted independent missionary work and seems to have gained more evangelistic success than most full-time missionaries working for denominational mission boards. That success, however, generated a great deal of controversy and opposition because his approach contradicted the common wisdom of other missionaries in China. Gutzlaff believed that the Chinese churches would have to evangelize China themselves and that missionaries should work only as teachers and supervisors of Chinese evangelists. He also believed that Chinese converts did not have to "complete" their conversion by acquiring theological instruction before being baptized. In 1841, he established the Chinese Union in Hong Kong to carry out his goal of Christianizing all of China, and within a short time he began to report impressive successes by which dozens of evangelists were gaining hundreds of converts a year. He trained the evangelists and then sent them to the interior to evangelize particular localities. As an independent missionary, he depended on overseas funds to support his work, and he sent back a stream of optimistic, enthusiastic reports to Britain and Europe, which reports generated considerable funding for his work. He also took a tour of Britain and Europe that also won him numerous supporters and substantial funding.
The Chinese Union is a remarkable example of a conscious attempt to contextualize the Christian message. Gutzlaff did not engage in a great deal of theological training, thus encouraging the Union's evangelists to interpret the Gospel in Chinese ways. He employed a patron-client approach based on a deep sense of mutual trust between himself and the evangelists. He encouraged the evangelists to take a leading role in the Union on the premise that if he treated Chinese Christians like children then they would behave like children. He also thought that the missionaries should dress, eat, and live like the Chinese themselves.
Gutzlaff, inevitably, created a major stir among Protestant missionaries in China with this approach. Other missionaries, including colleagues working for the Union, criticized him for being naive about the Chinese and for failing to ensure that they understood the Gospel correctly. Many of the Union's converts lapsed and some were habitual opium smokers. His critics also charged that Gutzlaff inflated his figures of converts and created a false impression in his correspondence with overseas donors. These critics were eventually able to undermine much of the confidence those donors had in Gutzlaff, who faced serious opposition by the time of his death. His problems were compounded by his own personality. He was a strong, dynamic person, but he had no tolerance for criticism or opposition. He wrote off his critics as enemies of the Gospel.
His later career in China sheds some light on the personality and perspectives of one of the first two missionaries to Siam. He was a highly dedicated visionary who seems to have had the courage of his vision. He was also arrogant and self-assured to a fault.
That career also anticipates an important controversy in the nineteenth-century histories of the both the Baptist and Presbyterian missions in Siam, namely the stance that missionaries took in their relationship to the converts. One set of missionaries in both denominations tended to trust the converts and wanted to give them a major role in church life. This group of missionaries also tended to form personal patron-client relationships with the converts. They were, invariably, the most successful evangelists of the overseas Chinese and the Siamese. A second set of missionaries opposed the first set, voicing the same set of arguments against them as Gutzlaff's critics used against him. The tensions created had a major impact on Baptist work in Bangkok and on the Presbyterian Siam Mission, an impact that seems to have severely limited the number of converts gained by both missions. Had Gutzlaff stayed in Bangkok, he surely would have been just as controversial a figure there as he was in China.
Last November (2005), I attended a one-day conference on the subject, "What is Gnosticism?" held at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. During one of the "break out" sessions, which discussed diversity in the early church, a participant claimed that the sudden discovery by academics of diversity in the early church sounds much too convenient. It is, he argued, nothing more than a postmodern armchair reading of our own age back into the past. He also observed that whatever "the academics" think, "History is what happened." We can't change it.
Wrong. Several participants, including my humble self, quickly jumped on the errors of these sentiments. First, history is decidedly not "what happened." The past is what happened and cannot be changed. History is what historians write about the past, and it changes all the time. Second, it is normal for historians to change their views of the past as their own societies and cultures change because that change opens up new perspectives on all of reality including our understanding of the past. A prime example in American history is the history of American slavery, which before the 1950s and the rise of the civil rights movement was thought to have been largely beneficent. Third, as our discussion leader pointed out, since the 1940s discoveries of large amounts of new documents from the early church provide concrete reasons for reinterpreting early church history and the understanding that it was a much more complex phenomenon than earlier generations of church historians realized.
Finally, it has to be said that people who do not understand the past almost invariably think of the past as being one thing. The fact is that the past was just as complex and varied as is our present. Whether we're talking about the churches of Thailand, Australia, the United States, or any other nation, there are vast and rich differences in how Christians think, worship, and behave. The early church was no different because it was no less human.
An article posted on The Christian Post website on 9 June 2005, noted that it is difficult to identify an evangelical core group in the United States because only relatively small numbers of "evangelicals" display all of the key markers of evangelicalism. The Gallup Organization conducted a poll in April 2005, which sought to identify the percentage of evangelicals in the United States. It used three central beliefs to discern who are evangelicals including a literalist view of the Bible, engagement in evangelism, and having a born-again experience. While fairly large numbers of Americans agreed to one of these three, only 22% held all three. The Gallup Organization concluded that while many Americans identify themselves as evangelicals only a relatively smaller number adhere to those tenets that evangelical leaders most frequently identify as being essential to evangelicalism.
My own more modest investigation of evangelical and ecumenical perspectives in CCT churches in the North found a situation in those churches similar to the Gallup Poll findings. Most people do not hold to a rigidly consistent perspective that can be identified clearly as being ecumenical or evangelical. Of the CCT participants involved, core groups of less than 10% each answered consistently as evangelicals or ecumenicals. Evidently the situation in the United States is not actually so different.
On 6 December 2005, the Presbyterian News Service (PNS) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) posted a news item entitled, "Researcher says membership losses pushing Canadian churches to brink of 'extinction'" According to the data reported in the article, the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) lost 53% of its total membership between 1961 and 2001. In the same period, the United Church of Canada (UCC) lost 39% of its total membership. Even the Pentecostals are reported to have lost 15.3% of their membership, although the period of loss was not clear.
One of the researchers quoted, Keith McKerracher, projected the extinction of the ACC by mid-century. Such predictions have become common in many Western nations, especially in Europe, although other researchers point out that most denominations like the ACC and the UCC have enough strong, growing congregations and higher judicatories to avoid actual extinction. That is, statistical decline will come to end—but not before denominations are significantly smaller still.
The question, as raised frequently on this website, is whether the churches of Thailand, esp. the Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT) face a similar future. While the picture is mixed, it is possible and even likely that within a decade or two the CCT will begin to show some statistical decline. Like virtually all mainline denominations around the world, it is almost certain that the CCT will not be able to find ways to reverse the decline when and if it begins.
Years ago, a long-time convert to the Christian faith told me that before he became a Christian himself he hated the sound of Christians singing. It sounded alien. He now feels very different about singing in church and, like most Christians, finds both power and comfort in the music of the church.
These thoughts came to mind as I was reading Doran & Troeger's book on modern-day worship in the United States, Trouble at the Table: Gathering the Tribes for Worship (Abingdon, 1992). In arguing for the importance of church music to the life and work of the church, they write, "A church that neglects music will eventually find its powers for outreach and justice eroding." (page 58) In the Thai context, we might add to this sentence another that reads, "A church that neglects music will also eventually suffer a loss identity and a diminished integrity."
Putting aside for the moment the question of whether Thai churches should sing and use more identifiably Thai music or not, the very fact that Thai Christians sing together (in good times and bad) is an all but indispensable part of their faith and their identity in the Thai context. It is a gift from the missionary era, one that churches today continue to emphasize to the benefit of the church and its neighbors. It is true that Thai churches would do well to develop a more widely used "indigenous" hymnology. It is also true that they do equally well to incorporate praise music into their worship life. But, it would be sad if the churches stopped singing the songs they have inherited from the "old days," songs that have been an important element of their very identity as Christians. There is still power and meaning in those hymns.
In an article on the interpretation of the history of India published in the 26 January 2006 on line edition of the Christian Science Monitor, the author writes, "Communities use history to define themselves - their core ideals, achievements, and grudges. Small wonder, then, that history is frequently reevaluated as political pendulums shift, or as long-oppressed minority groups finally get their say. History, and efforts to revise it, have touched off recent controversies between Japan and its neighbors over its World War II past, as well as between France and its former colonies over the portrayal of imperialism."
Sometimes, one wishes history weren't taken so seriously. It would be easier to write histories that more accurately reflect the actual events of the past and to propose historical explanations on the basis of the realities of the past rather than the politicized exigencies of the present.
Another example of the power of history described in #5 (above) also comes from the Christian Science Monitor, this time in its 12 May 2006 on line edition. The article is entitled, "Backstory: Cry over a Hue." It describes the historical restoration of an old southern U.S. mansion, once owned by one of the South's leading spokesmen for slavery and the Confederacy during the American Civil War era (1860s). It turns out that the mansion was originally painted a garish shade of pink, which strikes modern eyes in the South as ridiculous. Many, including a descendent of the original owner, insist that such a distinguished gentleman would never paint his home such a color. It turns out, according to the article, that such bright colors were common in the earlier and mid-19th century in the U.S. The evidence that this particular mansion really was painted pink is solid, and there is even a portrait painting of the owner's daughter with the building in the background, painted in pink.
This is just one more case of the public (well, a portion of it) imposing their personal tastes on the past while railing at historians for offending their sensibilities. It's not that historians get it "right" all the time, because they don't. It's just that they're more likely to be closer to the reality of the past more often—whether that reality offends them or not.
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