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 On July 22-25, I had an opportunity to visit Thra'mu Esther Danpongpee and Thra'mu Chitlada (Ann) Kankaeo, former colleagues who continue to do church based research with the Thailand Karen Baptist Convention (TKBC). Their work was formerly conducted under the Office of History, Church of Christ in Thailand. Ach. Esther has shown herself to be particularly creative in finding ways to promote the use of Karen tribal culture in the life of local Karen churches.
Ach. Ann completed a short course on church & community sociological research methods at Ban Nong Ched Nuey for 13 individuals (8 women, 5 men) that is quite impressive. She started with a five-day orientation course that taught the rudiments of conducting interviews and preparing questionnaires. Her students then carried out their own research projects an a range of subjects related to church and community life. Nearly all were acceptable and a few were very well done.
Ach. Esther, meanwhile, continues to pursue her vision of a Karen church firmly grounded in its own tribal culture in a number of ways. Under her guidance, the Ban Nong Ched Nuey Church and the Musikee Association continue to hold annual church & culture camps. These camps involve young people in a wide variety of activities aimed at teaching them to know and value their ethnic heritage. Ach. Esther has recently initiated a program for teaching Karen literacy to young people and adults. She trained some dozen or so individuals to be teachers, and those teachers are now teaching classes and tutoring individuals in learning to read and write Karen.
Both Ach. Esther and Ach. Ann are preparing a project proposal to be submitted to the Baptist Union of Sweden that, if accepted, will allow them to continue their creative and fruitful work for another three year period. Ach. Esther, meanwhile, has been invited to be a resource person at a conference on ethnic peoples in Southeast Asia to be held in Hong Kong this November.
The first volume of Samuel Hugh Moffett's A History of Christianity in Asia appeared in 1992, and immediately took its place as a key source for the study of Asian Christianity. In that volume, Moffett told the story of the Asian churches from their inception up to 1500, when the Christian movement had all but died away on the Asian continent. It has been a long wait for volume two, which was finally published this year and brings the story up to the year 1900. A cursory look at the table of contents and the index suggests that Siam has received its fair share of attention, which means that Moffett's volume two now becomes one the most widely available and therefore influential portraits of the history of Christianity in Thailand.
See my review below.
In its early years, the Office of History produced a number of professional historical studies of local churches. While useful for the historical study of local Thai church history, local church members found little value in these long detailed studies, and eventual the CCT administration refused to fund the printing of longer studies. In later years, the staff of the Office began to work with local churches to write shorter historical sketches at the time of celebrations of local church histories. They are contained in memorial volumes of varying lengths. The latest of these studies has been produced by Janram Chaisri on the history of the Samakitam Church, Wiang Pa Pao. This is one of the oldest churches in the North, and it is good to have a description of its past however brief it is.
The historical narrative section of the memorial volume amounts to 24 of its 48 pages. It is largely descriptive and not intended to be critical in nature. However a substantial amount of research went into the preparation of that narrative so that it represents something more than the usual five page mis-remembrance of the past so often associated with local church historical memorial volumes. The volume itself is handsomely printed.
Citation: Samakitam Church, 123 Years of the Gospel in Wiang Pa Pao (A.D. 1882-2005): Samakitam Church. Wiang Pa Pao: Samakitam Church, 2005.
I came across this website in November '05. The CSCA is a part of Trinity Theological Seminary, Singapore, and it aspires to become a research center for the study of the church in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia. It contains some resources, notably back issues on line of the journal Church and Society in Asia Today (begun in 1998). A quick look through found nothing specifically on the church in Thailand, but this looks like it will be an increasingly important resource for the larger study of Asian Christianity. The website can be found at: www.ttc.edu.sg/csca/csca.htm.
Under the direction of Dr. Philip Hughes, the Office of History of the CCT is conducting a two-year study of "young people and religion" (the age span is 15 to 25) in conjunction with the Religious Studies Department of Mahidol University and the Christian Research Associates, based in Melbourne. The project has a number of goals. It intends to provide data to the CCT on the attitudes of its young people towards faith. On a larger scale, it is studying the similarities and differences in religious outlook of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian young people in Thailand. Finally, at the global level, it will do a comparative study of Thai and Australian young people using comparable data from a major study of youth religiosity now being conducted in Australia.
The project will be completed in 2007, and the results of the study will be available through all three of its participating agencies. It may well be that a summary of those findings will appear in a projected HeRB 14 that might well appear in about July 2007.
The Payap University Archives will be moving from its present location at the Kaonawarat Campus of Payap University to a much larger and, it is to be hoped, permanent home on the main campus. It will take over most of the old main library building now that the library has moved into its new facilities. The move may begin as soon as this coming August or September (2006). Those who intend to go to Chiang Mai in the near future to use the archives should be in touch first in order to be sure it will be open to them.
I'm no longer checking user statistics for herbswanson.com on a regular basis. The last time I reported on user stats was two years ago in June 2004. At that time this website had just over 27 hits per day. By way of contrast, for the week of July 4-10, it had 871 hits for an average of just over 124 hits per day. As of the 10th, it had received a grand total of 48,442 hits since its inception in March 2003. The actual number is somewhat higher because a technical glitch wiped out the original counter early on.
Users include scholars & other researchers, those interested in the church in Thailand, and the descendents of former missionaries. The pages users most often visit are: (1) HeRB; (2) Bibliography of Materials Related to Christianity in Thailand; and (3) "Prelude to Irony." While there are undoubtedly many extraneous hits, this level of use is more than ever motivation to maintain and, when I can, update the contents of the website.
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