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Commenting on their lack of converts, the members of the Presbyterian Siam Mission wrote to the Board of Foreign Missions in New York City, "Surely there could hardly be a more striking proof of heathen helplessness and ruin than this, their insensibility and indifference to divine things. The glorious themes we bring before them-all new and unfamiliar to their minds, surely enough, one would think to arrest the attention if not to call out the wonder and gratitude of the most besotted soul-fail to excite any emotion, or to awaken any permanent desire. Our words are as the empty wind. The story of the cross is as an idle tale; or if perchance any profess to wish to learn more perfectly of this strange way, we have always had reason to fear they were desirous of making merchandise of faith, and had some ulterior purpose to gain." (Source: Board of Foreign Missions, The Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions (New York: Board of Foreign Missions, 1859), 73.)

There is little question but the people of Siam initially greeted the Protestant missionary message with a general lack of interest and did treat it as empty verbiage and idle tales. Where I differ with the analysis offered in the quotation is in who was to blame for the failure in communication.

One of the marks of Christian theological thought in Thailand is that, among Protestants at least, "Thai theology" is largely informal. There are no Thai theologians of any note and no major or classical works by Thais themselves to be cited. Peter Jackson, writing about historical Thai Buddhism, sheds some light on one reason why this might be. He writes, "Theoretical innovativeness in doctrinal interpretation has not been a historical feature of Thai intellectual life. The interpretation of Buddhist teachings has been a static field, the primary concern of Buddhist monks being with the conservation and faithful reproduction of holy texts and established commentarial interpretations from one generation to the next." (Buddhadasa: Theravada Buddhism and Modernist Reform in Thailand. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003).

If Jackson is correct, the Thai church has not inherited from Thai Buddhism an inclination towards doctrinal reflection that might lead to theological innovation. Missionary nervousness in former times about any hints of "native Christian" ideas that did not conform to their understanding of the Bible only served to reinforce a disinclination towards systematic theological musings.

Recently, The Blue Book of Missions for 1905 (Henry Otis Dwight, ed. New York: Funk & Wagnall's, 1905) came to hand. The book contains a number of interesting pieces of information including:

In 1905 it cost US$1.19 per word to send a telegram from the USA to Siam. By comparison it cost $1.22 per word to send a telegram from to China, $1.53 to Japan, and $1.11 to Singapore.

In 1905, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. had the second largest number of missionaries, 837, of any Protestant missionary agency in the world. Britain's Church Missionary Society had the most with 1,344. The third largest sending church was the Methodist Episcopal Church in the U.S. with 709 missionaries.

The Blue Book gives Siam's population as being "about 5,000,000" and estimates that the country includes 3.6 million Buddhists, 1.6 million animists, and 15,000 Protestant Christians. For the Protestants, it states that there were a total of 3,250 communicant members in two missions (Presbyterian and Baptist) and gives a total for "professed Christians" of 14,400. The Blue Book also reports, "The most progressive parts of the fields in Siam are the stations among the Laos in the north and among the Chinese of the Southern provinces." (p. 62)

"What is happening to Christianity in Britain? On one level this is relatively easy to answer. Seven in ten of us call ourselves Christian but hardly seven in one hundred attend church. We are spiritual but not religious. We believe but tend not to belong. The church, like other establishment institutions, no longer commands our confidence. On a macro scale, we are slipping from being a nominally Christian nation to a sub-Christian one."

Nick Spencer, "The Barriers to Belief," Quadrant (September 2003), 1.

Carrefour is one of Chiang Mai's large Western chain stores, which contains a enormous variety of goods arrayed across acres of floor space in one huge auditorium-like space. One day in late September, I hurriedly stopped at Carrefour for just a few items on my way home and witnessed an intriguing little event take place. One of the checkout lanes was clearly, unmistakably marked in Thai and English, "Ten Items or Less." A woman in her 40s two people ahead of me in that lane, however, had a shopping cart loaded with items, which she proceeded to nonchalantly stack up on the sliding counter top. The young cashier had already glanced this woman's way a couple of times with a troubled look, but she proceeded to check and bag her groceries and goods without a word. The woman blithely accepted the service as if she was in any other line in the store. Finally, the cashier told her the tally with the barely audible comment, "This is actually the ten item line." The women, now facing the rest of the line, replied with a slightly embarrassed smile, "Te, he. Oh, tee, he, I didn't notice." And off she sailed, having saved her self several minutes by going through the fast lane.

The various morning, noon, and evening markets in the Chiang Mai valley do not have lines of any sort, to say nothing of ones that are marked "Ten Items or Less." Such things come with the new, westernized mega-stores that have hit the city in a big way in the last few years. The people of Chiang Mai have, in the past, notoriously paid only as much attention to signs, including traffic signs and lights, as is convenient. The situation is changing and not changing, and this tiny incident indicates the tension in values people now feel. While the customer seemed to feel little conflict in ignoring an inconvenient sign, the young cashier exhibited a more complex set of values. On the one hand, she was concerned to keep people with more than ten items from using her lane. On the other hand, she clearly did not want to cause an upset and, as a younger woman, she probably felt she could not find fault with a woman twenty years her senior. She, in the end, took the middle path between

While, superficially, things Western are more and more dominant in the global village, the basic values of non-Western societies continue in force. The sign at Carrefour may represent a foreign expectation "imposed" on the people of Chiang Mai, but in a totally Chiang Mai-ian encounter the axial values at work remained northern Thai. Don't take signs seriously. Do not cause an upset. Be respectful of an older person (and a customer). It was, in sum, the tiniest of passing dramas, which still encapsulated key personal values of how to behave in the global village-and how to create northern Thai space in that part of the global village that sits on the banks of the Ping River.