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Contents' List for 1996  Index for 1996
 Happy New Year! You will have noticed that our numbers are quietly growing. We've been adding about one person a month, and after January 8th there will be two more joining us. I would like to have a small selection of "bests" to send to new readers--HeRDs that will help them get oriented as quickly as possible. I'd like to ask all of you to help by selecting one HeRD that you remember as the best of '95. Most of you don't keep the HeRDs, so you may only remember a theme. That'll be enough. Any other evaluation or suggestions you might have will be appreciated. Your responses will also help by giving me an idea about what you find interesting & helpful. PLEASE HELP ME OUT - AND THANKS.
Here's wishing you and yours the very best for 1996. Peace, Herb
Mrs. C. W. Mason, a trained missionary nurse, related the following story in the LAOS NEWS: The missionary doctor at the Chiang Mai mission hospital diagnosed a 46 year old, 150 pound woman as having an ovarian cyst. "But when the operation was performed a large amount of fluid was found in the free abdominal cavity (dropsy). After most of this fluid had escaped the ovarian cyst was brought into view; it was about 12 inches in diameter and consisted of a large mass of smaller cysts. All was successfully removed, and the patient was a very small woman when taken out of the operating room. Fluid and tumor together weighed 75 pounds. The patient made a fine recovery with no complications whatever." (p. 130)
The longer we delve into the lives and records of the "old-time" missionaries, the more we appreciate the complexity of their lives. They lived in a world as full, as detailed, as rich as our own. And like us, they had their perception of their own historical situation in northern Thailand. Eula Van Vranken, writing in the January 1907 issue of the LAOS NEWS opens a small window on that perception. She wrote that the northern Thai, "...had been characterized to me as a 'loving, childlike teachable people,' and so they seem. They are childish and childlike: the trait is very marked in their Christian faith and zeal. One feels that they must be in the very childhood of civilization with possibilities before them. This impression grows when I learn that for generations they have lived in political bondage to a conquering nation, many in abject slavery, while at the same time there has been a worse bondage to ignorance and superstition." (p. 18)
From our perspective, these words seem naive. Northern Thai culture was in nowise in the "childhood of civilization." Chiang Mai, one-time capital of the Lan Na Kingdom, was founded more than 400 years before the American colonies. That kingdom reached several peaks of high culture from the 14th through the 16th centuries. Van Vranken was writing, however, at a time when the Lan Na Kingdom's rich history was still little known and the devastation of 200 years of chaotic Burmese rule in the 17th and 18th centuries was still well-remembered. In 1907, northern Thai culture was but a shadow of its former greatness, and the penetration of central Thai political, economic, social, and cultural domination was increasing rapidly. It wasn't difficult for Van Vranken and her colleagues to feel an unconscious paternalism about the northern Thai. They perceived only the tragedy and none of the triumph of Lan Na history. From the perspective of church history, the missionaries' interpretation of northern Thai history is important. The missionaries viewed the church, in its social and historical context, as both childish and child-like. And they treated it accordingly. The lesson: how we understand the past matters---it matters a great deal.
It is often difficult for those of us living in the present to appreciate the vast diversity of the past. Early church history provides an example. Protestants have long looked at the early church as being a unified entity. We have engaged in a centuries' long struggle to "return" to the golden age of the early church. Koester in his HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY, however, reminds us that such an understanding of the early church is entirely incorrect. In describing the rapid expansion of the early church, he writes, "However fragmentary the total picture may be, it is nevertheless obvious that the mission and expansion of Christianity in the first years and decades after the death of Jesus was a phenomenon that utterly lacked unity. On the contrary, great variety resulted from these early missions." (p. 94).
Images concerning the past are themselves powerful historical factors. These images frequently have little to do with what actually happened in that past, yet they profoundly influence later behavior. The Protestant attempts to recapture a mythical unified early church is one important example. To repeat the lesson from #108: how we understand the past matters---it matters a great deal.
Dr. James McKean, reviewing the progress of Laos Mission medical work in the 40 years between 1867 and 1907, summed matters up with the following comments: When McGilvary first introduced quinine to the North, people were afraid to try the strange medicine. "Today," McKean wrote, "quinine is widely sold and used throughout the country. It may be found in most of the small shops and country stores. There is no doubt that the use of quinine alone has not only greatly reduced the death rate but has prevented a vast amount of suffering." McGilvary also introduced small pox vaccination. McKean observed, "Today every one believes in vaccination and the numbers vaccinated are growing year by year, recently reaching ten thousand persons in a single vaccinating season of six months." McKean concluded, "The work of our medical missionaries in hospitals and dispensaries and in the homes of the people has appealed strongly not only to the common people but to the princes and rulers as well and has done much to soften prejudice and secure a hearing for the Gospel." [from LAOS NEWS, October 1907, pp. 115-16]
Koester in his book HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY, page 110, describes Paul's missionary method in this way: "On the whole, a picture emerges which is characteristic for Paul's missionary method. He would settle in the capital of a province, together with a few tested associates, gather any Christians already living in the city, and expand his staff; together with these co-workers he would also found congregations in other cities of the area. During his absence he would maintain contact through messengers and letters in order to influence the further building and development of these churches. Paul's missionary work, therefore, should not be thought of as the humble efforts of a lonely missionary. Rather, it was a well-planned, large-scale organization that included letter-writing as an instrument of ecclesiastical policy."
At first glance, the Presbyterian missionaries in northern Thailand appear to have used the same missionary strategy, that is of starting in the provincial centers and then working outwards. There were at least two differences. First, Paul's movement remained a largely urban movement whereas the northern Thai church was predominantly rural. Second, Paul put strong emphasis on the nurture and pastoral care of new churches. The Laos Mission did provide some nurture and care, but it emphasized other forms of work, esp. educational and medical work. These two points, taken together, are important. In Thailand, generally, urban churches have shown an ability to care for themselves much more quickly than have rural churches. Thus, a predominantly rural northern Thai Christian movement requires more pastoral care and nurture. The Laos Mission, however, did not provide that level of care and nurture. It is my contention that the failure to provide adequate nurture and care has had and continues to have a profoundly negative impact on the life and ministry of the northern church.
In HeRDs #68 and #70, I argued that the historian can't deal with God as a factor in human history. The eminent church historian, Georges Florovsky, has made the same point more succinctly. He wrote, "...the Christian historian will attempt to reveal the actual course of events in the light of his Christian knowledge of man, but will be slow and cautious about detecting the 'providential' structure of actual history, in any detail. Even in the history of the Church 'the hand of Providence' is emphatically hidden, though it would be blasphemous to deny that this Hand does exist or that God is truly the Lord of History. Actually, the purpose of a historical understanding is not so much to detect the Divine action in history as to understand the human action, that is, human activities, in the bewildering variety and confusion in which they appear to a human observer." [from "The Predicament of the Christian Historian," in Leibrecht, RELIGION & CULTURE, 1959, p. 166.]
For Protestants everything begins and ends with the Bible. In theory, we construct our faith from it. I would like to suggest that as often as not we bring preconceived personal and cultural ideas to the Bible and "discover" confirmation of them there. An example of this process is provided by the Rev. J. H. Freeman. At the time of Daniel McGilvary's death in 1911, Freeman wrote an article in the LAOS NEWS (October 1911) in honor of that great missionary. He stated that McGilvary's greatest service to the cause of Christ was his vision of the "sheep without a shepherd" and "the fields white to the harvest." The image of the shepherd-less sheep (taken from Zechariah 10:2, 5 and Ezekiel 34: 2, 5, 8) is particularly interesting in this context. Freeman used it to describe the northern Thai people, a people lacking the Great Shepherd, Christ. As he used it, the image is an evangelistic one--that is, it encouraged McGilvary to devote his life to evangelizing the northern Thai. The biblical image itself, however, in its Old Testament context has quite a different meaning. The people of Israel, that is the people of God, were the sheep without shepherds. The missing shepherds were the religious-political leaders of the nation, who have proven faithless. The verses in Zechariah are not evangelistic. They are prophetic. They were a prophetic judgment on certain conditions within the community of the faithful.
The missionaries are hardly unique in their approach to the Bible. From a historical perspective, however, the transformation of this prophetic image into an evangelistic one is important. It exemplifies the missionary approach to Scripture, one that regularly interpreted the Bible out of an evangelistic framework. This approach to the Bible, in turn, had a direct impact on the northern Thai church. On the one hand, it encouraged a massive emphasis on evangelism that still marks the CCT's rhetoric and values today. On the other hand, it failed to furnish the church with the self-critical analysis of the biblical prophetic literature.
Source: J.H. Freeman, "Dr. McGilvary The Man of Vision. The Explorer." Laos News 8, 4(October 1911): 124.
HeRD #113 argued that the Presbyterian missionaries brought an evangelistic interpretation of the Bible to it and then, not surprisingly, found support for evangelism in it. Faye Kilpatrick, an educational missionary working in Chiang Mai, provides us another example. In an October 1936 article in SIAM OUTLOOK, she explained why the mission wanted to convert the students of its schools to Christianity. She cited Isaiah 61:3. The mission, she urged, wanted to give its students a garland for ashes and garments of praise for a spirit of heaviness so they can be called trees of righteousness, etc. The passage itself was written to give hope to the exiled people of Israel. It proclaimed their liberty even in the midst of their captivity. It was directed, that is, towards the suffering people of God. Kilpatrick's use of the passage is entirely unrelated to its original, biblical intent. But she still found in it images and content that helped her understand her own educational work.
In HeRD #113, we considered briefly the historical ramifications of this use of Scripture. If we look at this same data from a theological perspective, I would argue that the transformation of the Bible into a manual for the support of evangelism is a wrong-headed enterprise. It is an ideological approach that binds Scripture to only certain ways of speaking, ways convenient to the beliefs and pre-judgments of the "believer". This use of the Bible has potentially dire consequences for the church. Among them are the failures to engage in social ministries, to nurture of local church life, and to encourage the church to live under continuing prophetic judgment.
Source: Faye Kilpatrick, "Thanksgiving in Siam," Siam Outlook 12, 4(October 1936): 166.
In the Nan Station annual report for 1901, the Rev. Dr. S. C. Peoples closed the report with a list of station needs. Among them were a new mission residence, a good dispensary building, a school building, and a new missionary family. Regarding that family, he wrote, "We want a consecrated, sensible, refined, cultured, strong and loving man, with a wife that is better than himself." Living in an isolated station where missionaries could and did sometimes get on each other's nerves quite possibly encouraged Dr. Peoples to wish for a model family.
Source: S.C. Peoples, "Annual Report of Nan Station From November 1st. 1900 to November 1st. 1901," v. 281, BFM."
A full and fair estimation of the work of Presbyterian missions in Thailand (and around the world) must necessarily take into account the Presbyterian experience itself. The following brief ditty does that far better than any weighty tome I know of.
We know the Presbyterians are tough
because their way of life is rough;
they know that sin and death are fated
and all their acts predestinated.
Need one look any further for a credible explanation as to why among Protestant mission groups only the Presbyterians established a permanent, lasting presence in Thailand?
HeRD #64 painted a rather rosy picture of 19th century missionary life in C'Mai. Missionaries serving in Nan at the turn of the century would have objected to that picture. In their new station, founded in 1895, life was considerably more difficult. Robert Irwin made the following observation in the Nan Station annual report for 1900: "Our temporary residences afford the poorest kind of accommodations. All have thatched roots and no ceiling, and one has woven bamboo walls and floor, part of which is covered with loose boards. Two of these houses are infested with white, black, and red ants, and two with rats." He went on to say that a teak shortage prevented the station from doing anything about these housing conditions.
Source: Robert Irwin, "Nan," in "Station Reports of the Laos Mission for the Year Closing November 30th, 1900," pp. 1315v. 281, BFM.
The Laos Mission list of missionary assignments for 1903 provides one gauge of the its priorities. In one sense it is difficult to measure those priorities precisely since nearly every missionary on the list had several assignments. On the other hand, however, most of them had primary assignments. An analysis of those assignments indicates that the Laos Mission invested most of its time and energy to general oversight activities and to institutional work (hospitals & schools). In 1903, 12 missionaries (27%) gave their time to general station work. This work involved everything from pastoral care and evangelism to educational work to book keeping. Another 12 (27%) were primarily involved in educational (7 missionaries) or medical work (5 missionaries). Still another 9 missionaries (20%) had language study as their first assignment. Four members of the mission (9%) were primarily engaged in translation, literary work, and oversight of the mission press. There remained another 7 missionaries (16%). Two of these 7 had evangelism as their primary assignment. Only one took his first assignment as pastoral care. One engaged in women's work and one in home visitation. The list does not clarify the primary work of three other missionaries, all women.
General mission administration, including oversight of building construction, consumed large amounts of missionary time. Institutional work was, by 1903, a key priority that also took up large amounts of time. The nurture of the church was a secondary activity and, as such, received relatively less missionary time and attention.
Source: No author, "Laos Missionaries and their work," Laos News 1, 1(April 1904): 28-29.
Over the years the mission had to contend with a series of "difficult personalities." These were individuals who made life hard for other missionaries, esp. in the smaller stations where living conditions were frequently close. One such individual was Sarah Peoples in Nan. She was a high-strung individual who suffered from nervous breakdowns and was not easy to live with. In June 1902 Dr. William Briggs wrote a personal letter to the Board of Foreign Missions secretary, Arthur J. Brown, in which he discussed the difficulties facing the Park family, esp. Mrs. Park, in Nan as they tried to get along with Peoples in a two-family station. The Parks were younger missionaries.
Briggs wrote, "The Parks are enduring the situation in Nan, by the Grace of God; and I trust they will endure it until another family comes to smooth matters a bit. Nothing but the Grace of God is sufficient to brace up such a nervous high strung temperament as Mrs. Parks. She has a happy bright spirit, that is so much salvation to her. But there is an end to such endurance I am afraid, and I doubt if the Parks will consent to go back to Nan another year, unless there is a third family there. In this case I think there is just cause for feeling as the Parks do. But I, who know all the parties concerned, feel very sorry for the one who is the cause of the difficulty. She is to be pitied, I believe because I am not certain that she is altogether responsible. The fact remains however that no one woman has been able to endure it so far. Outside of that one case I do not think anyone is justified in complaining about their associates in this mission."
Any balanced evaluation of mission work in the North should keep in mind that working conditions were sometimes difficult in the extreme. Mrs. Park eventually had a nervous break down and the Parks had to leave the mission permanently.
Source: W. A. Briggs to Brown, 20 June 1902, no. 5, v. 271, BFM.
The Laos Mission always aimed for an educated Christian constituency. Considering the problems involved in the introduction of Western-style education into the North, they made remarkable progress towards that end. The LAOS NEWS issue of October 1907 noted, "There are many evidences of increasing interest in Christian education and the influence of our educational institutions is being rapidly felt. Among 49 persons who recently met with the Session of the First Church of Chieng Mai for the purpose of making a public profession of their faith in Christ, 36 were students of our educational institutions." (p. 105). It is quite possible that the turn-of-the-century Christian community comprised something of an educational elite.
One of the most difficult, troublesome issues facing missions is the question of "true conversion." What is a valid conversion? How can one tell when a person is sincere in their conversion? The Presbyterians in the North, from time to time, struggled with this issue and went to some lengths to try to assure the purity of conversion. A motion from the 1917 minutes of the North Laos Presbytery reflects that concern. It states, "Candidates for baptism shall make confession of Christ with the mouth, placing the hand on the Bible, in the presence of the church, promising to truly study and strive to learn the truth until he understands sufficiently to receive the sacraments; all candidates to be left until 6 months or until the session is assured that the candidate is ready to receive the sacraments." The whole point here was to slow down the conversion process in order to make sure that the candidate for conversion was sincere.
If ever a quotation reflected an age and social mentality, the following one does. It reads like something right out of Teddy Roosevelt, the slam-banging, rambunctious American progressive President from early in this century. In an article in the LAOS NEWS of January 1911, the Rev. Henry White wrote, "Christianity has no sympathy whatever with indolence or industrial stagnation. It pulses with ambition, activity, conviction, enthusiasm, and the spirit of progress...The Christian missionary not only seeks to make men clearer thinkers but better wage earners, better industrial producers." This is one of my favorite quotations in all of northern Thailand missionary literature. The vision. The dynamic spirit. The sincerity. Even the naive world view of the pre-World War I era. The quotation serves to remind us, furthermore, how entirely American the Presbyterians in the North were. A firm grounding in American social and religious history is absolutely necessary to understanding the birth and growth of the northern Thai church.
Source: Henry White, "The Aim and Value of Mission Enterprise," Laos News 8, 1(January 1911): 17.
Dr. Carl C. Hansen of the Lampang Station deserves our attention. He eventually was not invited to return to the Laos Mission after complaints were lodged against him with the Board. His colleagues on the field felt that Hansen lacked "proper" missionary spirit. An article he wrote in the Laos Mission's quarterly newsletter for April 1900 provides a hint as to why they looked on him this way. In it he argues that doctors should not take too aggressive a stand against spirit doctors and the like. They should, instead, more gently gain access to the people's homes and hearts. This, he argued, would allow them to see that the missionaries' method of healing is better and "truer". The mission would then be able to rejoice not only in healed bodies but also in saved souls. Hansen, in other words, advocated a "soft" approach--a non-adversarial approach--to evangelism. Mission thinking, however, held that medical mission work was a key to evangelizing the northern Thai. It required an openly, aggressively evangelistic approach. Hansen's milder views, thus, weren't acceptable to the mission generally. The mission leadership must have felt that it was not wise to retain a doctor such as Hansen. He was a danger to their evangelistic program rather than an asset.
Source: Hansen, quoted in "The Laos Mission Letter for the Quarter Ending April 30, 1900," v. 16, BFM
Let's take a day off from Thai church history. Moffet, in the 1st volume of his A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA, describes the "Great Persecution" of the Persian church in the 4th century [pp. 137-145]. The persecution began in about 340 and didn't slack off until nearly 370. Persia had long been Rome's bitter enemy, and the persecution began when Constantine initiated the process that eventually made Christianity the official religion of the Empire. Persia had previously been a refuge for Christians fleeing Roman persecution, but when Christianity became an "ally" of Rome, the Persian government became suspicious. It suspected Christians of secretly favoring Rome and of acting as fifth columnists. The persecutions exceeded anything ever experienced in the Roman Empire. Several general massacres took place, and estimates of the total number killed run as high as 190,000 martyrs. The persecution virtually destroyed the Persian church's organized life. Moffet notes, however, that while the number of victims was much higher than in the Roman Empire, there were far fewer Persian apostasies.
While the members of the Laos Mission objected to many elements of northern Thai society, they were generally impressed with the place of women in it. The following is taken from an anonymously written article in the January 1908 number of the LAOS NEWS entitled "Laos Women." Among several subjects, the author describes the position of women in northern Thailand with these words: "Probably among no other people of similar civilization is woman held in greater respect. Instead of a young groomsman preparing a home for his bride he makes his home with her people. All earnings are brought to her and only with her consent are they spent. Women have secured divorces because of husbands violating this right. If the husband is not all the wife desires she may drive him from the house and disclaim relationship. Marriage contracts are equally binding upon each." [pp. 24-25]
In its annual report for 1891, The Laos Mission's Training School (for evangelists) reported that among its courses were ones on geography and arithmetic. The report justified the teaching of these two course by observing, "These last may properly find a place in such a school because of their apologetic value. A little knowledge of Geography is sufficient to dispose the entire Buddhist theory of the universe; while a bright man can soon learn to calculate more readily in our school than the most learned Buddhist priest can do with his cumbersome Pali formulae."
We see here yet again a central dynamic of the Laos Mission's thinking and work in northern Thailand. It's primary mission was evangelism. An important method for conducting evangelism was modernization. The ultimate concern was to not only convert individuals to Christ but to also transform all of northern Thai culture including its cosmology.
Source: "Report of the North Laos Mission Training School for the Year 1891," 23 February 1892, v. 9, BFM. #2. [the date on the calendar is Feb. '91 but it has to be Feb. '92]]
Among evangelical Protestants in Ante-bellum* America, the idea of "benevolence" was an important concept for understanding how evangelicals related to others. Although it included a definite humanitarian flavor, at heart benevolence meant concern for the spiritual health and eternal destiny of those who were not evangelical Protestants. Griffin in a 1957 article in the MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL REVIEW describes it as "...an infinite concern for other people's souls." Ante-bellum American evangelicals created out of this infinite concern a "benevolent empire" of voluntary societies devoted to the conversion of the whole of American society to true Christian faith. The American Presbyterian missionaries in Thailand brought the idea of benevolence to their work here. Indeed, it is not wrong to look on the Siam and Laos Missions as American evangelical voluntary benevolent societies. In their work they showed the same mix of "spiritual" and "humanitarian" concerns as did American evangelicals. Benevolence, thus, forms another one of the strands of the missionary web of thought and behavior. It is particularly useful for understanding missionary motivation.
*For those not familiar with American history, the term "Ante-bellum" refers to 19th century American history prior to the American Civil War (1861-1865). It is most generally used to refer to the 1820s through the 1850s.
Source: Griffin, "Religious Benevolence as Social Control, 1815-1860." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44(December 1957): 426.
HeRD #127 described the evangelical sense of benevolence the Presbyterian missionaries brought to their work in Thailand. D r. William A Briggs, as a young missionary working in northern Thailand, gave particular voice to that concern in a July 1893 article in WOMAN'S WORK FOR WOMAN. He wrote, "No words can tell the darkness, the depth of sinfulness that lies thickly around us; and no words can tell the joy, when, by God's grace, the blind receive sight, the deaf hear, and the heart, once so low in sin, is changed and begins reflecting as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, and the tongue once used in the hypocritical worship of wood and stone is singing praises to the King of kings, Jehovah Jesus." (p. 189). The sense of joy Briggs felt at the conversion of "the lost" reflects the deep benevolent concern for the souls of the northern Thai that he and most of his colleagues felt. It was that concern and that joy that impelled the missionaries to conduct evangelism.
Source: W.A. Briggs, "Outfit for Laos Land, Woman's Work for Woman 8, 7(July 1893):189.
In HeRDs #127 and in #128, we looked at the idea of benevolence as it was worked out in Presbyterian missions in Thailand. While there was a strong evangelistic content to it, it also contained decided humanitarian feelings as well. The Rev. J. H. Freeman, stationed in Lamphun, stated in his book ORIENTAL LAND OF THE FREE that if missionary medical work had done nothing else but show Christ's love by relieving suffering it was still worth all of the time and effort invested in it. He cited the example of quinine, which had relieved a great deal of human pain, as an example. He argued that missionary medicine had added years to the life span of the northern Thai people. Freeman, however, also claimed that these humanitarian benefits had an evangelistic value, that is this Christ-like relief of pain and suffering won a hearing for the message of Christ's love. [pp. 138-140]
Freeman, as well as other humanitarian statements by missionaries, provides an important corrective to the criticism of the missionaries that they only helped people in order to win converts. Their benevolent concern to "win the souls" of the northern Thai was, it is true, seldom far from their thinking. And not all of them would have agreed with Freeman's statement that relieving suffering was sufficient justification for missionary medicine. Yet, none would have denied the spirit of his remarks--that is, that the mission's humanitarian ministry was an important part of its total mission. Dr. James W. McKean, put it well when he wrote in an 1894 letter to the Board of Foreign Missions that missionary physicians, "...can make their lives of untold benefit to this people, both in the relief of suffering and in the bringing them to the light of the Gospel."
Source: James W. McKean to Speer, 22 January 1894, v. 11, BFM.
More thoughts on Paul and northern Thailand (see HeRD #111). Chadwick, in his book THE EARLY CHURCH, makes the following observation: "Perhaps the chief reason for Paul's success was his extraordinary versatility and capacity for adapting himself to the situation of his audience: he had the power to translate the Palestinian Gospel into language intelligible to the Greek world, and thereby became the first Christian apologist." One of the themes that we've been working on in previous HeRDs is that the Laos Mission was not particularly adaptable and gave much of its efforts over to changing northern Thai society to fit Western religious and social patterns. What, then, is a Pauline approach to northern Thai culture and society? Paul participated in a radical re-formation of Jewish Christianity in order to make the Gospel available to the Greeks. Should the old-time missionaries have engaged in an equally radical re-formation of Christianity to make it available to Thai culture and society? Paul's faith, evidently, allowed him to engage in significantly reshaping Jewish Christianity, but Protestant missions in Thailand have eschewed that SPIRIT while struggling to import the (Westernized) FORMS of Pauline & New Testament Christianity into Thailand. It's almost as if we've adhered to the spirit of Paul's opponents, who wanted to preserve Christianity as an essentially Jewish religion. I would argue, in fact, that the missionaries' attitudes and actions were much more in line with those of the Judaizers than of Paul.
The Rev. Daniel McGilvary, the most important single missionary to serve in northern Thailand perhaps ever, held an interesting mixture of ideas. On the one hand he was a classical Old School Presbyterian conservative. On the other hand he sometimes showed an inclination to openness not usually associated with the Old School. In particular, he was far more accepting of other Protestants than many of his compatriots. In an 1859 article in the NORTH CAROLINA PRESBYTERIAN, he expressed his pleasure that the North Carolina Methodists were sending a missionary to China. He hoped that the Baptists and the Episcopalians of North Carolina would also send out missionaries. He avowed, "Here is one common cause where the hearts of all people of God may be one. Here they may throw down their weapons of warfare and unite in one common cause, in one glorious onset on the powers of darkness...The cry of the exulting enemy from without, should hush the contentions of the church within, and lead her under all her ensigns to rally around the peaceable standard of the cross in these eastern nations so long ruled over by the prince of the powers of darkness." Once again, if we can work around the 19th century rhetoric a bit, McGilvary's words could be taken to still be quite relevant to the life and mission of the church in Thailand today. It might depend mostly on who or what we take to be the "powers of darkness."
Earlier HeRDs have already made the point that the study of early church history provides data for the comparative study of the church in Thailand. The following, taken from Chadwick's THE EARLY CHURCH, is particularly informative. In writing about issues facing the church he states, "The determination of which moral faults did or did not involve exclusion, and for how long, was a pastoral problem that deeply exercised the minds of the Church's leaders well into the third century. Not less difficult was the thorny question whether and at what point intellectual deviation should lead to censure." Chadwick observes that the necessity of translating Christianity into the social and intellectual world of the Greeks made these issues esp. difficult. (pp. 32-33) The missionaries faced precisely these same problems, that is, what constituted proper moral behavior, what were the limits of that behavior, and how to deal with transgressors. They also had to give the church a "proper" theology and decide what constituted the limits of that theology. The Presbyterians in Thailand, however, differed in their approach to translating their faith into the Thai cultural setting. They, in fact, made relatively little attempt to "translate" at all.
The very first churches were Jewish. They included the Jerusalem Church, churches in the surrounding countryside, and probably churches in Galilee. Very little is known about any of these churches, including the Jerusalem Church itself. After a brief period, it came under the leadership of James, the brother of Jesus. His "rule" may have included the country churches as well. These churches eventually suffered persecution, and James was martyred in 62. Up until that time, Jerusalem had retained its position as first among all churches, but then continuing persecution forced it to migrate to Pella where it was led by a cousin of Jesus and then descendants of his family. One church historian writes, "This later community is tied to the earlier one by the fact that kinsmen of Jesus and James held the leadership. But this new community has no more significance for the church as a whole. It is no longer the 'original community.'" [Conzelman, HISTORY OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY, p. 111] The Jerusalem church and its satellite then passed out of the history of the church. We know nothing about their fate.
Jewish Christianity persisted, but in Syria rather than Palestine. It encompassed an active missionary program that attempted to counter the influence of Paul and other "Gentile-friendly" movements. The Syrian Jewish churches had no older or special connection to the Jerusalem and Palestinian churches and were created out of the general Christian missionary movement. They separated from other churches over the issue among Jewish Christians concerning accepting uncircumcised Gentiles into the church. These churches also persisted for a time, and there were still small Jewish churches in Syria in the 4th century. They eventually, however, became an anachronism unacceptable to the vast gentile Christian majority who distrusted and disliked their adherence to Jewish religious practices. [see Chadwick, THE EARLY CHURCH, p. 22] Gentile Christianity came to treat them as a heretical sect, named "Ebionites" after the Hebrew word for "'poor." After the 4th century, Jewish Christianity passed entirely out of history.
What is the connection of all of this to Thai church history? Church historians make it clear that the world-wide Church is the legacy of the Jewish church. The decision to open the church to the Gentiles was taken by Jewish Christians, acting it seems in the spirit of Jesus himself. In whatever country we live, including Thailand, the church is lives because the Jewish church transcended the prejudices of its religious and cultural heritage.
One of the central ideas in 19th century Presbyterian missionary thinking was that human reality is divided into two great kingdoms, those of God and of Satan. This conception powerfully shaped missionary attitudes about Thailand, which they considered to be under the sway of Satan. Satan was, for them, as real and as personal, though not as powerful, as God. One of the clearest statements of the this view point comes not from Charles Hodge. Hodge, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, was the premier American Presbyterian theologian and during his long career at Princeton taught several of the Thailand missionaries. In his book THE WAY OF LIFE, Hodge wrote, "Disregard of [God's] authority is the greatest crime of which a creature is capable. It is rebellion against a being whose right to command is founded on his infinite superiority, his infinite goodness, and his absolute propriety in us as his creatures. It is apostasy from the kingdom of God to the kingdom of Satan. There is no middle ground between the two. Every one is either the servant of God, or the servant of the devil. Holiness is the evidence of our allegiance to our maker, sin is the service of Satan." [II.II]
We should take particular note of the concept of "no middle ground." Missionary Protestantism has largely adhered to this dualistic concept in its approach to Thailand. It is not too much to say that one can't understand the Thai Protestant church apart from its dualistic heritage.
Missionary literature contains a variety of names for Satan including "the enemy of souls," "the adversary," "the tempter," the prince of cunning," and the "father of lies." We are hardly surprised at these conceptions of Satan. One we might not expect, however, is the image of Satan as the reaper. Mary L. Cort, working in the Siam Mission's Phet Buri Station, central Thailand, expressed this idea in an 1875 article in WOMAN'S WORK FOR WOMAN. She wrote, "I had no idea how many reapers were needed in these Eastern lands till I looked out over the harvest fields myself, and saw everywhere Satan busy with his myriad reapers, while here and there a few faithful souls GLEANING a little for Christ." She went on to assert that, "WE should be the myriad reapers."
Altha Eakin, a veteran Presbyterian missionary of the Phet Buri Station, felt the power of Satan with clear force. In a May 1912 article in WOMAN'S WORK she wrote that evangelistic touring brought her, "...face to face with the lowest type of heathenism among the Siamese women. It is impossible to put into words the appalling nature of the situation: How to bring high, holy thoughts of Christ down to the level of the mind that has never had a high thought; how to find some common ground to begin to teach; how to really love these almost naked, shaven-headed women, with their mouths overflowing with betel and their minds saturated with superstitions, and with obscene thoughts reigning that we would not harbor for a moment. This is the kind of woman produced by centuries of servitude UNDER THE RULE OF SATAN." (p. 106, emphasis in the original).
Perhaps what is most striking in Eakin's statement was her profound sense of alienation from Thai women. She struggled to find a common ground with them. She felt there were serious impediments to meaningful communication on religious subjects. She found Thai woman difficult to love. They were black-mouthed and foul-minded. They were trapped under the rule of Satan. Eakin was not alone in her sense of being alienated from Thai-ness, and these images of alienation are found frequently in Presbyterian missionary literature.
Source: Altha L. Eakin, "Ups and Downs of Touring in Siam," Woman's Work 27, 5(May 1912): 106-107.
Helmut Koester in his INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT, vol. 2, makes the following observation about the early church's second Christian generation: "We do not know the name of a single Christian from the decades that followed the deaths of the apostles of the first Christian generation, from the period of about 60-90 CE. The second Christian generation has thus become completely anonymous for us. All the Christian writings extant from this period were either anonymous or written under the pseudonym of an apostle from the first generation..." (p. 279). Koester notes that for major segments of the early church, such as Syria (except Antioch) and Egypt, this situation continues well into the 2nd century. It's strange to think that we know far more about the early life of the northern Thai church than is known about a whole generation of the early church. It is striking, in fact, how much more conjectural is our knowledge of first-century Christian history in general than is our knowledge of 19th century Thai church history.
District Eleven, Nakon Pathom, is one of the smallest districts in the Church of Christ in Thailand. Historically, however, it may be one of the more important. In recent years, it has contributed a CCT Vice-Moderator, Ach. Samrit Wongsan (1979-1986), Moderator, Ach. Arun Tongdonmuan (1983-1990), and the current General Secretary, Dr. Sint Kimhachan. Ach. Arun is now serving as Vice-Moderator and Ach. Samrit in the important position of Director of the CCT's Pastoral Ministry Unit. In a larger sense, it is the only C.C.T. district whose missionary origins are entirely European rather than North American. The British Disciples' of Christ first began work in the Nakon Pathom area in 1904 and eventually founded a small Christian community that formed the core of today's District Eleven. The British Disciples brought with them an intense ecumenical commitment. They participated fully in the formation of the Church of Christ in Thailand in 1934. After World War II, the Disciples' Mission--by then largely comprised of American missionaries--and the American Presbyterian Mission were the only two missions to integrate their work fully into the C.C.T. and place their missionaries under the authority of the C.C.T. The Disciples-District Eleven story, thus, is important to the larger history of the C.C.T.
Church historians generally identify two major wings of the early church, namely the churches in Palestine and those beyond Palestine. The first wing is sometimes styled the "Jesus movement" and the second the "Christian movement". Evidently a major issue among historians of the early church is how these are to be clearly distinguished. Fiorenza, in her book IN MEMORY OF HER, makes the distinction in this way: "Whereas the Jesus movement in Palestine was an alternative prophetic renewal movement within Israel, the Christian movement was a religious missionary movement within the Greco-Roman world, preaching an alternative religious vision and practicing a countercultural communal lifestyle. Both movements created tensions and conflicts with respect to the dominant cultural ethos. But where the Jesus movement could appeal to Israel's tradition as its very own religious tradition over and against certain practices within Israel, the Christian movement as a new religious group intruded as an alien element into the dominant cultural-religious ethos of the Greco-Roman worlds." (p. 100)
It is intriguing that the Jesus movement was apparently entirely suited to its cultural setting while the Christian movement was not. Yet, the Jesus movement soon came to an end while the Christian movement continues down to the present. The indigenous church died and the alien church prospered. This raises some central issues for church life in Thailand. Is it possible that the question of indigenization is NOT a major issue for the Thai church? Or, is it that in both the Christian movement and the Thai church the need to deal with indigenization issues was/is an important aspect of church life? Is the alien nature of the Thai church largely irrelevant? Or is the church's life found in its search to adapt that nature to Thailand cultures?
Fiorenza in IN MEMORY OF HER, page 113, makes the point that virtually every party and faction in first century Judaism was committed to preserving the existence of Israel, the elected people of God. They all sought God's intervention, which they believed would lead to Israel's freedom from Rome and the eventual establishment of God's rule over the world. Fiorenza writes, "All these diverse Jewish renewal movements of the time were strongly concerned with how to realize in every aspect of life the obligations and hopes of Israel as the kingly and priestly people of God. They sought to hasten God's intervention on behalf of Israel by scrupulously doing the will of God as revealed in Temple and Torah." She goes on to note, "The proclamation of the BASILEIA [kingdom] by Jesus and his movement shared this central theological concern for the renewal of the people of Israel as God's holy elect in the midst of the nations. However, the Jesus movement refused to define the holiness of God's elected people in cultic terms, redefining it instead as the wholeness intended in creation."
It is striking that the early church began as a renewal movement. The search for renewal has continued throughout the history of the church; and it emerged as a central concern yet again in the time of the Reformation. The significance of all of this for the Thai church is that the concept of renewal has been a key theme here as well, especially since the mid-1920s. From that time through the 1970s the churches employed revivalism as their chief means of renewal. In the last 15 years, as I've mentioned in pervious HeRDs, the CCT has shifted its focus from revivalism to employed pastoral care as the best way to attain local church renewal.
HeRD #140 described the importance of the theme of renewal for the early church and the Thai church. The contemporary singing group, Boyz II Men, in a love song entitled "On Bended Knee" capture that theme aptly.
"Can we go back to the days our love was strong?
Can you tell me how a perfect love goes wrong?
Can somebody tell me how to get things back the way they used to be?
Oh, God, give me the reason. I'm down on bended knee.
I'll never walk again until you come back to me.
I'm down on bended knee."
The Boyz song, of course, is seeking reconciliation with a girl friend--even so, one senses the kernel of a hymn in their lyrics.
The study of early church history is important for Thai church history in at least two ways. On the one hand, in provides new perspectives and subjects for studying the Christian movement in Thailand. On the other hand, the early church constitutes one of the chief sources of the Thai church's past. HeRD #140 suggested that the subject of church renewal began with Jesus and his movement and has persisted through time to become a key theme in Thai church life. This is also true of Jesus' emphasis on healing and wholeness. Fiorenza in IN MEMORY OF HER observes of Jesus' miracles, "While there is much discussion as to whether miracles are scientifically possible and whether the miracle stories are historically 'authentic,' there is insufficient attention paid to the vision of being human that is realized by the power of God active in Jesus. The basileia [kingdom] vision of Jesus makes people whole, healthy, cleansed, and strong. It restores people's humanity and life. The salvation of the basileia is not confined to the soul but spells wholeness for the total person in her/his social relations." (p. 123) The "old-time" Presbyterian missionaries viewed their own mission very much in these terms--it was a mission aimed at the whole of human life. In HeRD #129 we saw that missionary "benevolence" included a humanitarian as well as spiritual component. This is to say that the church down to the present and down to Thailand has retained something of Jesus' way of thinking and methods of working .
Just couldn't pass this one up. Chadwick in THE EARLY CHURCH appraises the rapid growth of the early church with the claim that, "The practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success. The pagan comment 'See how these Christians love one another' (reported by Tertullian) was not irony. Christian charity expressed itself in care for the poor, for widows and orphans, in visits to brethren in prison or condemned to the living death of labour in the mines, and in social action in time of calamity like famine, earthquake, pestilence, or war." (p. 56) Worth a thought or two.
We probably should save this for December, but perhaps we could all use a bit of Christmas cheer in February! Christmas, 1888. The Cheeks, Sarah and Dr. Marion, hosted a grand social function that lasted from December 23rd through Christmas Day. Cheek, a former member of the Laos Mission, was a timber merchant. Sarah, also a former member of the mission, belonged to the famous Bradley family and was the sister of Sophia McGilvary. In her memoirs, Sarah reported that it took months to plan the event. They had to have gifts for 300 employees made and food and entertainment arranged. On the 23rd, they entertained all of the teak people. For the evening of 24th they invited Chinese merchants and "native friends" to "dine in European fashion." They feasted on a Chinese meal and watched a variety of entertainment including "war dances." Sarah noted that the people entertained on the 24th, were merchants and other people used to having the best. The festivities climaxed on the 25th when the Cheeks hosted the Prince and Princess of Chiang Mai, their retinue of over 50 retainers, the English Consul, the Siamese Commissioner, the missionaries, and still more merchants. The Prince's dancing girls provided the entertainment. Sarah Cheek's memoirs conclude her description of this Christmas by noting, "This was the last public demonstration the Cheeks gave."
Source: Sarah Cheek, "Memoirs of Mrs. Sarah Cheek," n.d., pp. 7-11, in McGilvary Family Papers.
HeRD #144 described one of the grandest Christmas celebrations ever held in "old" Chiang Mai--Christmas, 1888. The Mae Dok Daeng Church celebrated the previous Christmas, 1887, in its own royal fashion--as reported by McGilvary in a letter dated 3 January 1888. Three missionaries, including Dr. McGilvary, attended the festivities. On Christmas Sunday they baptized three new Christians, and in the ensuing week they joined with the church in a week of prayer that would have included daily services, probably several times a day. They met with the session to conduct church business and to examine applicants for baptism, and they also visited around in the homes of the members. Although we don't have a record of it for this occasion, missionary visits of this kind frequently involved the roasting of a cow or of pigs, which required special permission from the authorities. The missionaries stayed through to New Year's Day.
It is worth noting, that from the perspective of the history of pastoral care in the northern Thai church, this was an important occasion. It was a "pastorally intense" moment in which the sacraments were celebrated, homes visited, services held, and church business conducted. The church seems to have burst into unusually active life in the presence of the missionaries. This was hardly strange as only they could, at that time, conduct the sacraments or moderate a session. We should also note that there had been Christians in Mae Dok Daeng for about 12 years so that celebrating the Christian "high festival" of Christmas was still a relatively new experience there.
Source: McGilvary to Cornelia, 3 January 1888, McGilvary Family Papers.
Some missionaries just didn't make it in the North. One of the saddest of these tales concerns the Rev. Chalmers Martin. He arrived in 1884 and proved to be an outstanding missionary. He was deeply motivated, picked up the language quickly, performed capably, and got on well with the northern Thai. He and Dr. McGilvary became fast friends. It turned out, however, that Martin couldn't stand the climate. After a courageous struggle, he and his family left Chiang Mai in September 1886. Not long before they left, McGilvary wrote, "Mr. Martin is a man in a thousand. I shall never cease to be grateful that he came and shall always, I trust, feel the impetus that he has given me. I never had an associate that so impressed me for his disinterested single devotion to the cause of Christ. His piety is calm and unobtrusive but deep." McGilvary continued, "It is our prayer that he may be spared to return. But what of poor me! How am I to get along without him? With work that a half dozen could not do to fall on one." He concluded, "Nan Ta, our best assistant and elder, just heard of Mr. Martin leaving and has been in to console me and be consoled by it. We talked over it and then prayed together over it and took counsel of how we could best utilize our native workers. He is feeling as bad as I am and says we will not find such another man soon." McGilvary years later wrote in his autobiography, "I never had felt so thoroughly crushed as I was at his departure. During three whole years [sic.] we had lived in the same house, and worked together hand in hand in the evangelistic work, of which he was very fond." (p. 283) One can't help but speculate on the impact Martin, had he stayed, might have had on the Laos Mission and the northern Thai church.
Source: McGilvary to Margaret McGilvary, 17 August 1886, McGilvary Family Papers.
The Rev. Robert Irwin served the Laos Mission from 1890 until 1906, when ill-health forced him to leave the mission. In 1911 the Irwins returned to Bangkok where he took up work with the American Bible Society. The following year, the Bible Society Agent in Bangkok, Dr. Carington, died, and Irwin took his place. In a chatty, friendly letter dated 15 October 1912, Irwin affirmed his deep interest in the work of the Laos Mission and offered all the assistance he could give in providing and distributing Bibles in the North. Having visited that field twice just prior to assuming his duties as Agent, he avowed "I remember my former two visits with keen pleasure and am eager to get back again. It is like going home." Not a few other missionaries in the North have felt the same way when they returned from furloughs or other extended absences. It was just as though they were going home. [Also see HeRD #38]
Source: Robert Irwin to Laos Mission, 15 October 1912, Records of the American Presbyterian Mission.
This past semester, it's been my privilege to teach a class in the history of CCT pastoral care at the McGilvary Faculty of Theology, Payap University. Most of the students in the course have pastoral experience. About a month ago, one of the students asked in class, "What does Thai culture have to do with pastoral care?" When I threw the question back to the whole class, three answers came out. First, we can't use Thai Buddhist styles and forms in the church because the members won't accept them. Second, as pastors we don't get the respect and honor accorded Buddhist monks or to Korean Protestant pastors. Third, some people praise the church's more democratic processes and esp. its openness to women because these are so different from Buddhism. In other words, Thai culture is a "problem" or it is something they consider as being apart from themselves. I asked then, "How is it of benefit to us in a positive sense? What's its POSITIVE role in pastoral work?" A long silence followed. The feelings of distance from Thai culture were painfully real in that moment. Pastoral care, as practiced in the CCT, is a social role alien to its own culture; and pastors experience this alienness as a confusion, an inability to articulate, and as a question mark without any hints of an answer.
Here's a new direction. In his A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT, Urban observes that in the struggle to define the unity of the Trinity, the early church came to view the three Persons of the Trinity as sharing a common "material" substratum that they identified with the Father. Urban then explains why the church used "father" rather than "mother" to name this unifying substratum. He writes, "The choice represents a shift in the understanding of reproduction. In very early times, the material source symbol was the mother. Hence there were mother goddesses, closely associated with birth and fertility. The baby coming out of the mother was an apt example of 'material causation,' with the mother 'that from which something is made.' But later, when more about reproduction became known and the indispensable role of the father became clear, the analogy shifted to plant reproduction. the father was thought to plant a seed in the ground. This shift had already taken place in the Hebrew Scriptures, where the male secretion is called 'seed.' In this view, the women did not provide the substance of the child. That came with the seed. The mother provided only the food for the seed to grow and the womb in which it was housed." Urban concludes that, given this view of sexual reproduction, it was impossible for the early church to view the unifying "material" of the Trinity as anything but male/father. (pp. 60-61)
The Presbyterians in Thailand frequently drew on biblical images of planting and reaping to describe their own work. They sowed the seed so that one day there would be a grand harvest of conversions. They referred to various aspects of their work, especially the distribution of tracts and portions, as "seed-planting." There's food for thought here. ONE, the biblical view of sexual reproduction is wrong, yet that view was central to missionary self-understanding. TWO, evidently the heart of missionary thinking about their work and identity was profoundly, if unknowingly, male-oriented. THREE, and following on One, the biblical view proposes an active and passive agent in planting and reaping. This parallels the missionary approach to the "Siam" and "Laos" fields. They were the active, change agent and the "natives" were the passive, changed ground. It's as though they took the "active" male role and the northern Thai played the "passive" female role.
An aside: it is striking how strongly influenced all of our thinking is by our physical natures. In this case, human sexuality encompassed the very conception of God.
In justifying a historical approach to the study of theology, Linwood Urban makes the following comment: "Every great movement is a developing phenomenon." [A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT, p. 3]. Our study of such movements, then, is not done at rest. Even as we study it, our subject is changing, receding, taking new form. And we, too, are changing. At the moment, I'm in the process of writing a new history of northern Thai Christianity. The one I wrote over a decade ago is now inadequate, partly because we have far more documentary and secondary material than I had access to in the early 1980s. Equally important, however, is the fact that the northern Thai church's situation has changed a great deal even in a decade. We literally see its longer past through altered lenses, and the issues we focus on have shifted (from the role of CCT institutions to the emergence of pastoral care, for example). At the same time, I've changed too. All of this motion affords the opportunity of studying northern Thai church history anew. "Lay people" frequently seem to think that our knowledge of the past should be fixed and unchanging, when in fact all human knowledge is in motion. Even our knowledge of those closest to us, those persons we love most, changes over time--as they change and as we change and as our relationships change. While it is true, thus, that we STUDY the past, the real subject of our research, inevitably, is the present. We look from our moving point on the stream of time out and back across the timescape of the past. Our ultimate goal is to make sense of that moving point by understanding where it came from and how it came to be moving in just the direction and speed it is now moving.
Ach. Prasit Pongudom, a colleague at the Office of History, is working on a paper on the relationship of missionary medicine to "traditional" medical ways. About a month ago he interviewed Dr. Boonchom Ariwong, an 86 year-old Christian doctor who started practicing medicine in Chiang Mai in 1937. Dr. Boonchom provided Ach. Prasit a new, more complex picture of the development of Western medicine, long dominated by missionary medicine, in relationship to northern Thai culture.
Dr. Boonchom claims that as a young physician he learned how to "do" medicine in the North from Dr. Edwin C. Cort, the director of McCormick Hospital in Chiang Mai. Dr. Cort's style emphasized hard-work and a sacrificial approach that, among other things, required the McCormick doctors to travel far out into the country-side when calls came in for help. In those days, most of their patients were the desperately ill. The village doctors with their traditional methods had given up and the choice was between calling in the missionary doctor or dying. Dr. Boonchom emphasized that Dr. Cort's method was a person-centered, deeply caring approach. As practiced in Chiang Mai today, "modern" medical techniques are generally disease-centered rather than person-centered. Doctors treat diseases not people. Ach. Prasit had been viewing the introduction of Western medicine by the missionaries as the initiation of the process that has introduced disease-centered medicine to the North. Dr. Boonchom provided him with a different picture--one in which the Western doctor's philosophy of medical care actually fit very well with northern Thai values of generosity and compassion. There is no question but that the well-spring of Dr. Cort's approach was his Christian faith, so that what we have here is an example in the indigenization of Christian faith and theology. It appears that missionary medicine was philosophically closer to "traditional" northern Thai medicine than it is to current medical attitudes.
In HeRD #122, we heard echoes of the Teddy Roosevelt Era of American progressivism. The Rev. Newell Preston offers us another example of how that vibrant political ideology influenced missionary thinking in Thailand. Writing in 1919, Preston noted that Siamese were physically well-endowed, comely, and graceful people. They had quick minds. He went on to state, however, that they were debilitated because of disease and an unhealthy social environment. He argued that if they were given the "proper advantages,"--including a religion that teaches the Fatherhood of God, the essential unity of humanity, convicts the people of sin, makes the truth sacred, and offers a perfect moral idea--then Siam would become a great power in the world. Preston contended that the Siamese had yet to achieve anything because Buddhism lacked a dynamic to impel them upward and onward. He wrote, "A nation without spiritual powers is mere floating deadwood." Power, he contended, comes only from a great, living faith which meant that the Siamese would only attain a powerful position when they caught a vision of the living God. Only with this power could they solve the problems of ignorance, disease, illiteracy, and alack of education. He urged that "the heart of Siam" must undergo a new birth, and he hoped that the American people would help the Siamese on the "Road of Achievement."
Dr. Vachara Sindhauprama in his Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Modern Education and Socio-Cultural Change in Northern Thailand" states, "The urban elite, the princes and high officials at the upper echelon of [northern Thai] society, were the first group to encounter the external forces coming into Lan Na since the second half of the nineteenth century." (p. 112). In a strictly chronological sense, Vachara is correct since those changes began before there was a Christian convert community. The church emerged in the mid-1870s, however, and a strong case could be made that from that point onwards it experienced modernization more intensely and directly than any other social group in the North. In the 1870s, the political elite had been subjected to modernizing influences for only a decade or so, and a strong anti-Western and anti-modernization faction dominated the political scene in Chiang Mai. The Christian community, meanwhile, significantly encountered the West through the missionaries. Their daughters and sons were educated in a Western setting. They received Western medical care. The structures of the church were Western in form as was its worship. A number of Christians became proficient in English. The first northern Thai to study in the West, See Mo, was a Christian. Christians entered the capitalist money economy well ahead of northern Thai society generally. The list goes on and even includes the importation of Western building and construction skills. Any relatively complete study of the beginnings of modern social change in the North would have to give prominent attention to the Christian community.
In order to provide a bit of variety to HeRD, I've asked Dr. Mike Leming to guest HeRD the next three HeRDs. Mike is Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at St. Olaf College and visits Chiang Mai frequently. Thank you, Mike.
The Karen Baptist churches of Thailand have, from their beginning, been relatively independent from direct American spiritual influences. While their Burmese brothers and sisters were initially evangelized by the American Baptist missionaries in the 19th century, the Thai Karen received the gospel from Burmese Karen missionaries. The reason for this was that Thai borders were relatively closed to influence from white "farang" due to fears regarding colonialism. Therefore Karen churches from Burma sent Maw Klo, Shwe Mya, and Saw Kay as lay missionaries to Thailand.
The following statement in 1881 by Justus Vinton (American Baptist missionary leader) clearly indicates the American missionary "respect" accorded to the indigenous Burmese Karen church and its lay preachers. "Native preachers are brave when bravely lead but we must remember that they are to be used as the English government uses sepoys--under white officers. 49 good Karen preachers led by a wide awake aggressive missionary are worth more than 50 missionaries...but 50 native preachers alone would do little without guidance."
Despite this "support" given to the first three Karen missionaries sent to Thailand, more than 500 Thai Karen converted to Christianity in Lampang within a matter of a few days. A few weeks later the missionaries (none of whom were ordained) were forced to return to Burma in order to seek help in building the new Karen Christian community in Thailand. Significant in this story is the continuity that exists within the contemporary Thailand Karen Baptist churches. Even after 100 years, the Karen churches in Thailand remain self-directed, evangelistically-oriented, and strongly influenced by non-ordained leadership.
Source: Anders P. Hovemyr. I n Search of the Karen King . University of Uppsala Press, 1989.
When the first three Karen missionaries were sent to Thailand from the Burmese Karen Baptist churches they were lead by Maung Htwe, a "quack doctor, indulged in the black arts, charms, magic and in just about everything that caters to the needs of the superstitious" (U Zan, Karen historian, n.d.). Maung Htwe lead the Burmese churchmen because he knew well the area to which the missionaries would be traveling. Justus Vinton (American Baptist missionary leader) described Maung Htwe as "too vile for description but of consummate ability" and ordered that the Karen missionary party "not to allow him to remain an hour in their company." The Karen preachers disobeyed these orders because they viewed Maung Htwe's presence as more of a challenge than a problem and decided to work with and share their faith with Maung Htwe before preaching to the Karen of Thailand. As providence would have it, Maung Htwe became their first convert in Thailand.
Aware of Vinton's disapproval, Maung Htwe promised not to return to Burma until "by hosts of converts he shows God's seal of approval." After more than 500 Thai Karen converted to Christianity in Lampang, the missionaries were forced to return to Burma to seek pastoral help in building the new Karen Christian community in Thailand. Maung Htwe was left to care for the new converts. Justus Vinton lamented: "Worst of all they left the reprobate (Maung Htwe) in charge of Christ's tender lambs. Shame fills me when I think that the devil's man stuck to his post while Christ's men flinched at the moment of victory." But history redeemed Maung Htwe as the Karen of Thailand were experiencing their own Christian redemption. The Karen historian, U Zan (n.d.), describes the work of Maung Htwe in Lampang with these words: "Maung Htwe carried on his work of caring for the new converts as best as his lack of any training would permit. It was said that the services he conducted were just one long session of Bible reading. He just read verse after verse from chapter to chapter which ran into hours of back-breaking and sleepy duration. His flock told him to preach instead of going on the way he did. He said, 'Look here folds, I don't have the training and the qualifications of those teachers. I wouldn't know how to preach even if I had wanted to. I know how you feel, but let me tell you this, -- I'm just like any one of you here. All I know is read a little, and that's just what I'm trying to do, banking heavily on your simple faith. I want to hold you all together only through your faith and not through any skill of mine.'"
A year later when six Karen pastors came to Lampang as reinforcements to continue the work among the Thai Karen, they found the Christian community had survived under the enduring care of Maung Htwe. Maung Htwe served and provided continuity for the Christian Karen community in Lampang for another 25 years until, in 1906, he finally returned to Burma and died--never having been fully recognized by the American Baptist Missionary Union in Burma.
Source: Anders P. Hovemyr. I n Search of the Karen King . University of Uppsala Press, 1989.
Burmese Baptist churches and their "daughter" churches in Thailand have long been governed by a set of rule widely known as the "Burma Rules." Among its regulations, are a set of stringent rules governing ordination. By these rules, only ordained pastors can serve communion and baptize believers. For the Karen churches pastors must be proven to be worthy of ordination. For this reason they often serve for many years before they are offered ordination and perhaps even longer before they accept this honor and responsibility. Furthermore, a church must be in need of an ordained pastor before ordination is offered to one serving as the pastor. Therefore if a "retired pastor" lives in the village and is able to serve communion and baptize believers, ordination is not a pressing need for a congregation and therefore will not be offered.
In my research on the Christian Karen of Musikee area (Chiang Mai Province, Amphur Mae Chaem), I discovered that in 1931 three families became converted to Christianity under the preaching of Thra (pastor) Baw Ney. These families became the nucleus for the first church which later spread to become the Musikee Area Association of Churches of the Karen Baptist Convention.
Pastor Baw Ney evangelized the entire area by foot preaching to the Karen of Musikee while the first church in Teemeagala was cared for in his absence by his first converts and his wife. Due to the stringent "Burma Rules" that required a church to be self- sufficient and the pastor to be married, the Teemeagala church did not become an official church until 1940 (a month after Baw Ney was married and officially appointed as pastor). Because Thra Baw Ney was not ordained until 1954, whenever there was a baptism or communion, an ordained minister had to be called from Chiang Rai--more than 200 Kilometers away. The first time a scheduled baptism was held in the Teemeagala church, and an ordained pastor from Chiang Rai was in attendance, 40 people were baptized in the river Musi Klor (or Mae Chaem River).
Pastor Baw Ney only consented to be ordained because he was strongly influenced by the American Baptist missionary A. Q. Van Benschoten, Jr. During a three week visit to the Musikee area, Van Benschoten insisted that Baw Ney receive ordination for the benefit of the Christians in the Musikee area. With the assistance of an ordained Karen Baptist pastor from Chiang Rai, Rev. Van Benschoten ordained Baw New in the Teemeagala church in 1954--23 years after he first came to Musikee as evangelist and pastor.
Today Rev. Baw Ney is 86 years old, the Teemeagala church has more than 300 members, and there are 31 Karen Baptist churches and hundreds of baptized Christians in the villages where Pastor Baw Ney preached during those early years. The present and second pastor of the Teemeagala church is Thra Baw Ney's son, Timothy. He has served since 1980 when his father "retired," but to this date he has yet to be ordained. In April of this year, Thra Timothy will receive ordination at the annual meeting of the Thailand Karen Baptist Convention.
Fiorenza's IN MEMORY OF HER, page 168, asserts that early Christian missions moved in a context marked by the "remarkable expansion of oriental mystery religions" in the western Mediterranean. Many of them reached Greece and Roman ahead of Christian missionaries "thereby creating the climate in which a new Eastern cult such as Christianity could be propagated." She goes on to state, "the wandering preachers of that day manifest a whole range of missionary propagandists, from philosophers, prophets, itinerant preachers, mendicants, and sorcerers to the traveling merchants, state officials, immigrants, slaves, and soldiers. Common to all were mobility and dedication to their philosophy or religion."
In Thailand, historically, the very concept of "missionary" was experienced as an alien intrusion, welcomed in some ways and resisted in others. In the time of the early church, however, the Christian missionary movement swam in a vast sea of missions. Missionaries were common and accepted as a part of life. Two questions. FIRST, what does it mean for Protestant missions to be an alien intrusion instead of working in a "missions-rich" context? SECOND, does the significant difference between early church and Thai contexts render the New Testament useless as a source for missionary methods in Thailand? It would seem possible, perhaps likely, that using a Pauline approach in Thailand, for example, would be wrong-headed.
Meeks, THE FIRST URBAN CHRISTIANS, insists that early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. He states, "Antioch, center of political, military, and commercial communication between Rome and the Persian frontier and between Palestine and Asia Minor, was one of the three or four most important cities of the empire and the home of a large and vigorous Jewish community. There developed the form of missionary practice and organization which we call Pauline Christianity, but which was probably characteristic of most of the urban expansion of the movement." (p. 10) He goes on to write, "In those early years, within a decade of the crucifixion of Jesus, the village culture of Palestine had been left behind, and the Greco-Roman city became the dominant environment of the Christian movement. So it remained, from the dispersion of the 'Hellenists' from Jerusalem until well after the time of Constantine. The movement had crossed the most fundamental division in the society of the Roman Empire, that between rural people and city dwellers, and the results were to prove momentous." (p. 11)
I'm not sure just how Meeks' observations relate to the church's historical situation in Thailand. At the very least, we should note that while the CCT has been a largely rural church, its city churches have been more successful in attaining a balanced, well-financed congregational life. At the same time, old-time missions were generally less successful in evangelizing the cities. It is certain that urban Thai church history should receive more attention than it has to date.
One central issue in the study of northern Thai church history is the relationship of rural Christian communities to the urban-based mission stations. By-and-large, the stations dominated the rural groups. They not only determined policy and ran things, but they also provided most of the religious resources local Christian groups relied upon. The sacraments were performed only when the missionaries or urban-based clergy appeared. They also did much of the evangelism and Christian education that was conducted in rural areas. There has been some reason, from the context of northern Thai culture, to see that relationship as "unnatural"--that is, imposed from outside. Prior to the full centralization of the North into the Siamese nation-state, villages and towns enjoyed a great deal of local autonomy. It was only with the "colonialization" of the North by Bangkok that the social and political center dominated the rural hinterland.
In light of this, Chadwick's brief description of Christian expansion in his THE EARLY CHURCH is interesting. He writes, "It was a natural missionary strategy for the Church to make the towns its first objective, and it became normal to serve the rural congregations, in the region under civil administration of the city (which might be very large), by sending out deacons." It was only by the 4th century that rural congregations were "served by a resident presbyter." (p. 48) In other words, the early church followed the same pattern as the northern Thai church. The church was urban-based and urban-administered until, eventually, local churches obtained their own clergy. Does this suggest that the "natural" pattern of Christian expansion is urban to rural? Or are the northern Thai and early church experiences entirely unrelated and it is mere happenstance that they share certain traits?
Many of the 19th-century Presbyterian missionaries who came to Thailand shared a profound, sweeping vision of their mission. They came to achieve nothing less than the creation of a Christian Siam. The Rev. Robert Irwin, writing to the Board of Foreign Missions in 1891 cried out, " I long for the dawn of that day that shall release this land from its cruel superstitions and heathen bondage and when life and immortality shall be brought to light through the gospel." His words echoed those of the Rev. William Buell, one of the Presbyterian Church's first two missionaries to Thailand. In an 1843 letter to the Board, he called on Christ, "Oh blessed Saviour! may a brighter and happier day soon dawn on this benighted land!" He prayed that the Gospel would spread rapidly until no one in Thailand was ignorant of salvation or estranged from God, "...the fountain of all life––the Source of every good!"
If we allow for forms of expression that now sound strange to us, Irwin and Buell are perhaps not so alien or distant from our "modern" situation as we might think (or wish). Many feel that Thailand today is a "benighted land" living in bondage to cruel superstitions. Most of those superstitions, as we've said in earlier HeRDs, are now imported from the West, Japan, and Korea! We still affirm God as the fountain of life and source of good, and I suspect most of us agree that Thailand's hope is in knowing God. On the question of how, where, and in what guise we can know God in Thai contexts, however, there would be profound disagreements among HeRD's readers.
The missionary longing for a Christian Siam (see HeRD #160) is a recurrent theme in Presbyterian missionary records. The Rev. J. S. and Amy Thomas, writing from Phrae in 1897, wrote regarding the Chinese residents in that city, "Their souls are as precious in God's sight as are the souls of the most intelligent white people. Christianity will make this people what it has made Europeans, Americans, Canadians. God help us that we may be instruments in His hands in lifting this people upward, and in lifting our Saviour up before them." Nearly forty years later, the Rev. Gaylord Knox, also a missionary in Phrae, preached a sermon before the 1935 meeting of the American Presbyterian Mission's annual meeting. He avowed, "Should we address ourselves to this harvest with the self sacrificing, complete abandonment of the Christ then can we hope. The rich harvest will be presented to the Lord of the harvest. The Kingdom of Siam will become the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ."
Sources: J. S. and Amy Thomas to Dear Friends, 27 October 1897, v. 13, BFM; Gaylord Knox, "The Harvest is Rich but the Labourers are Few," typescript [1935?]. Maen Research Papers.
HeRDs #160 and #161 described the Presbyterian missionaries' visionary goal of creating "A Christian Siam." It wasn't a dream that they suddenly discovered on the docks of Bangkok or the rivers of the North. As is true of all of their key ideas, the longing for a Christian Siam had its roots in the missionaries' own culture. Handy in A CHRISTIAN AMERICA states, "From the beginning American Protestants entertained a lively hope that some day the civilization of the country would be fully Christian. The ways in which the hope was expressed and the activities it engendered varied somewhat from generation to generation, but for more than three centuries Protestants drew direction and inspiration from the vision of a Christian American. It provided a common orientation that cut across denominational differences and furnished goals toward which all could work in their own style and manner." (pp. ix-x). The missionary translation of the search for a Christian America into a vision of a Christian Siam profoundly influenced the activities they engaged in and the strategies they pursued in planting the Christian religion in Thailand. That vision encouraged them to invest themselves in the "civilization" of Thailand on the premise that social and religious change were but two sides of the same coin. Both led to the Christianization of Siam.
Source: Robert Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities , 2nd ed.(New York: Oxford, 1984): ix-x.
In honor of Leap Year Day, here's a long one. It was originally written with publication elsewhere in mind. It is a fun piece and worth the read for those who have the time especially if you are a fan of detective novels or like puzzles of any kind.
A quarter of a century ago Robin Winks edited a delightful volume of essays entitled, THE HISTORIAN AS DETECTIVE: ESSAYS ON EVIDENCE. His thesis was that historians and detectives engage in the same venture. They assembled and order evidence to discover whodunit and why. In the Winksian spirit I offer you, "The Mysterious Case of Dr. Vrooman's Toothache." How much did it REALLY hurt, Charlie?
The case begins with a statement in McGilvary's autobiography, page 159. From April through July 1872 McGilvary and Dr. Charles W. Vrooman, mission physician, took the Laos Mission's first extended tour of exploration. McGilvary states that they had to cut trip short and hurriedly return to Chiang Mai because Vrooman got an excruciating toothache. It was so painful, in fact, that Vrooman begged McGilvary to pull the tooth. The reluctant McGilvary only managed to break it, and Vrooman then had to go to Bangkok to have the tooth attended to professionally. McGilvary is explicit, clear, and detailed in presenting these facts. Although he was writing nearly forty years after the event, one would hardly expect him to disremember the events surrounding the toothache. There is a slight problem. Missionary records from the 1870s make no mention whatsoever of Vrooman's toothache. They aren't just silent. They are silent in a way that contradicts McGilvary's account of the good doctor's toothache.
The relevant evidence is as follows. FIRST, in his account of the tour, Vrooman stated that they had traveled through heavy rains, rains that hindered their progress and made the tour difficult. He concluded that their, "Health was little affected by these unpleasant experiences. We escaped with less sickness than did the natives who accompanied us." [Vrooman, undated letter, in FOREIGN MISSIONARY 32, 4(September 1873): 119-122.] Admittedly a toothache is not a "sickness," but would a man who had been through the intense pain of an aching tooth have written such a cheery conclusion? He also makes no mention of having to cut the trip short for any reason. SECOND, in a letter dated 7 November 1872, Vrooman explained that he went to Bangkok because of poor health due to nervousness and the ill affects of the climate's "malarial influences." In April 1874, he remembered that during July 1872 he was unwell and received permission to visit a seaport. The minutes of the Laos Mission state that, "Permission was given Dr. Vrooman to visit Maulmain on account of his health." [Minutes of the Laos Mission, 17 July 1872; Vrooman to Irving, 7 November 1872, and Vrooman to Irving, 15 April 1874, v. 3, Records of the Board of Foreign Missions] He doesn't attribute his trip to a tooth ache, but to a general physical condition. And going to a seaport for a toothache just doesn't make sense. Going to a seaport was, however, one way 19th century missionaries coped with general physical debilitation. THIRD, missionary records from both Chiang Mai and Bangkok for the years 1872 or 1873 contain no mention of Vrooman's toothache. They are silent concerning an event that we would expect to have been mentioned, even if only in passing.
In the strictest sense, this evidence doesn't contradict McGilvary's account of the Vrooman toothache since no reliable source states that Vrooman did not have a toothache. But we could hardly expect such. If he had a toothache no one would state he didn't. If he didn't, why in the world would anyone say he didn't? The silence of our records, technically, proves nothing. But it should make us at least suspicious. Vrooman's toothache was not a minor matter. It was important enough that McGilvary remembered it after nearly four decades. He cited it to account for having to cut short a very important trip . It was unpleasant, furthermore, for him to have inadvertently broken his colleague's tooth. On the other hand, if Vrooman went to Bangkok to have a broken tooth pulled, why doesn't the mission's official minute state as much? Why did Vrooman originally plan to go to Maulmein BECAUSE it was a seaport? Why didn't Vrooman himself give the toothache as the cause of his trip? This silence is particularly perplexing because at no point does the alleged toothache explain anything about Vrooman's actions during the period June-October 1872. The toothache, in fact, complicates matters. Some of Vrooman's actions and statements make less sense if he had the toothache than if he didn't. There is reason, furthermore, to doubt McGilvary's tale. He wrote it long after the fact, and he could have disremembered the event. His autobiography, furthermore, sometimes confuses dates and events rather seriously.
Where does this leave us? Did Vrooman have a toothache or not? We don't know for sure. The weight of the evidence suggests that he probably didn't. We still don't have, unfortunately, a clear question to our original question. "How much did it REALLY hurt, Dr. V?"
Dr. Vachara Sindhuprama's thesis on "Modern Education and Socio-Cultural Change in Northern Thailand, 1898-1942" (Hawaii, 1988) provides us with an insight into the importance of missionary records for the general study of northern Thai history. In presenting the several reasons for his study, Vachara states, "In addition, as far as the methodology of this project is concerned, mission records show [the missionaries'] response to government educational policy and display the responses of the people to modern education in general. At a time when writing tradition was not so widespread among the people, source materials which reveal the interaction between education and society are not easy to find. Hence, northern Thailand is one of the most appropriate regions of study as far as this type of sources is concerned." (p. 5) Over the last decade, an increasing number of scholars have utilized Laos Mission records for the study of northern Thai history, precisely because there are so few other records available esp. for social historians.
Chadwick in EARLY CHURCH HISTORY observes, "Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it penetrated the upper classes of society in the first instance. Christians believed in the equality of men and women before God, and found in the New Testament commands that husbands should treat their wives with such consideration and love as Christ manifested for his church." (pp. 58-59). He claims, however, that the doctrine that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28) "…was not taken to mean a programme of political emancipation, which in antiquity would have been unthinkable. The social role of women remained that of the home-maker and wife. At the same time, Christianity cut across ordinary social patterns more deeply than any other religion, and encouraged the notion of the responsibility of individual moral choice in a way that was quite exceptional." (p. 59).
Chadwick holds that IN THEORY the church recognized the equality of the sexes, but IN PRACTICE it remained sexist. Yet, he and other historians emphasize the loving nature of early church society. Fiorenza, in IN MEMORY OF HER, finds considerable evidence showing that women were equal in the earliest church. They exercised all of the offices of the church and frequently were wealthy patronesses of local congregations. She argues that the early church met in homes, precisely where women played the largest social role and had the most authority.
Two thoughts. First, Fiorenza is likely correct in charging that most early church historians have agreed with Chadwick that women never had actual equality in the church when there is evidence to the contrary. Second, we should consider the possibility that the early church was in significant part a woman's movement. As we look around Thailand's churches today, we find women, on the whole, far more active in the faith than men.
Dr. Vachara in his thesis on education and socio-cultural change in the North, observes of missionary schools that "The great attraction of the mission schools was the teaching of English. As the British and their subjects became increasingly involved in this region, English became a language of frequent official use. Parents who expected their children to become government officials could see that it was advantageous to have them learn English." Even after the founding of government schools, the upper class continued to send their children to mission schools. Vachara supposes, "The ruling elite probably had no other reason for sending their children to the mission school beyond the desire for their boys to learn English directly from native speakers, and these were accessible only in this Christian school." (p. 64) This is yet another variation on the old theme of "missionaries and modernization."
The role of James, brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem Church, leads us to further reflections on the relationship of church to culture and other faiths. It appears that James stood midway between those Jewish Christians who viewed "Christianity" as a Jewish sect (the so-called Judaizing party) and those who sought a clean separation from the Jewish temple and cult. James fully participated in Jewish legal and cultic life but realized that other Christians did not share his sense of attachment to the Jewish "mother faith." He was, thus, quite willing to accept Paul's position that gentile Christians should not have to be circumcised and convert to Judaism. James' view contrasts with that of Paul. James and the Judaizers took a "soft" stand regarding Judaism, while Paul took a "firm" stand against some aspects of Judaism. James and Paul both took an accepting "soft" stand regarding gentile culture while the Judaizers took an intolerant "hard" stand. All three, presumably, shared a rejectionist hard stance against "pagan" religion. A crude chart would look like this:
"PARTY" |
JUDAISM |
GENTILE CULTURE |
PAGANISM |
Judaizers |
soft |
hard |
hard |
James |
soft |
soft |
hard |
Paul |
firm |
soft |
hard |
It is striking that James' authority as head of the "mother church" was accepted by all parties including Paul. His soft-soft approach, thus, was a viable option for Christian practice. It is also striking that all 3 parties took a hard line stand against pagan cults. One could NOT, thus, remain FULLY Greek and be a Christian in the sense that a Jewish Christian could remain fully Jewish.
Turning to Thailand, we should note that Thailand Protestantism has long taken a "Judaizer" position regarding both Thai culture and religion. It rejects both. In terms of the above schema, that approach is at odds with the dominant stream in the early church, one that was either soft or firm on Judaism and soft on culture. What this means for the Thai church depends in large measure into which column we place Buddhism. From the perspective of the Thai church, inevitably rooted in Thai culture, the first column might be most correct. Buddhism, that is, is the "mother-faith" of Thai Christianity rather than Judaism. Is it not possible that a "Jamesian" soft stance vis-a-vis Buddhism is a viable Christian alternative in Thailand? A "Pauline" approach that is selectively firm in terms of Buddhism yet open and accepting in terms of culture would be another alternative. Least viable, from the perspective of the early church, is the Judaizing approach now actually in place.
After describing briefly the process of urbanization in northern Thailand after 1900, Dr. Vachara in his thesis, "Modern Education and Socio-Cultural Change in Northern Thailand, 1898-1942," observes, "Both the government and the mission school systems fitted perfectly into the pattern of movement from rural to urban areas. Government model schools or missionary boarding schools in the cities drew prospective students from district and village schools. Upon graduation, or in many cases even before finishing the highest grade in school, they could find jobs away from home. Some even had a chance to attend prestigious schools in Bangkok, the largest and the fastest-growing urban center of the country, through either government or missionary connections." (pp. 130-131)
From the perspective of local church history, the fact that urban mission schools acted as a magnate drawing rural Christian children into the cities had at least two important consequences. ONE, this movement provided numerous individual Christians with opportunities for education and new directions in life, directions that many preferred to returning to the country-side. TWO, particular historical cases, my personal observation, and common sense suggest that most often it was/is the more capable young people who came into the cities and who then pursued careers that kept them from returning "home" to the country-side. Urban churches and Christian institutions have benefited from this process. Rural churches have been weakened through exporting of some of their best young people to the cities.
A central theme for northern Thai church and missionary history is the emergence of mission institutions as the focus of missionary activity. After 1900 the mission's schools, hospitals, and press increasingly dominated Laos Mission thinking and consumed its resources. This was the result of a conscious policy. In a letter from Dr. Arthur J. Brown, Board secretary, to the mission dated 7 April 1910, Brown shared the contents of a lengthy Board policy statement for developing work in northern Thailand. That policy was arrived at in conjunction with members of the Laos Mission who were in the States on furlough. It read, in part, "The most serious defect of our present work is the lack of a sufficient number of competent native ministers, evangelists, teachers and physicians. We have a small native force in proportion to our missionary force and expenditure. Our work cannot be properly done or placed on a stable basis as things now are. It is too largely dependent upon missionaries. There are not enough of them to do anything like what needs to be done, while furloughs bring the work of some institutions almost to a standstill. We have neither the men nor the money for reinforcements large enough to handle our great and growing work by missionaries alone, or even in chief part. Even if we did have the men and money, it would not be wise to make everything depend upon foreigners. It is vital that we should at once take measures to secure a larger native force. Pioneer evangelistic work can often be done by untrained Christians, but congregations and schools require educated leaders. We shall never see a strong and self reliant native church unless we have the right kind of men to lead it; and we shall never have these men unless we have schools to develop them."
This policy statement reflects trends that were already taking place in 1910, trends that led to the rapid growth of Laos Mission institutional work. That trend also led the mission and the Thai church in later years to locate much of its Christian education and leadership training efforts with institutions rather than with local churches.
In preparation for a course on early church history from the perspective of the Thai historical context, I've been going through my preliminary research looking for trends and ideas. One especially important issue is how Presbyterian missionary thinking in Thailand concerning the world is similar to or differs from early church models. My research suggests that in aggregate the early church tended to be quite withdrawn from the larger world. It created its own
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