PART TWO : LORDS OF THE HARVEST

Chapter 4 :	MODELS FOR MINISTRY
Chapter 5 :	TRAINING FOR MINISTRY
Chapter 6 :	CHURCH AND MINISTRY

The Indian Church today is the result of the preaching of the early missionaries interpreted in the light of the organizations which they set up. In the Christian mission, the first thing which the Indian observed as the Christian missionary.

Though the influence of the mission pattern is to be seen in the whole life of the Indian Churches, yet there is a special sense in which the Indian ministry has been influenced by it and which illustrates its limitations.

This attempt to develop the Church without at the same time developing the ministry has deformed the conception of the Church, of the Sacraments, and of the ministry itself.

Michael Hollis
Paternalism and the Church,
pp. 40, 51

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Chapter 4

MODELS FOR MINISTRY

Discussing the importance of leadership for human communities is something akin to trying to discuss the significance of air for life. It is so fundamental, so commonplace, and so elemental that we naturally lose sight of its significance on a day-to-day basis. Yet, the role of the leader is so necessary to us that it is literally a part of our biological make-up. The very idea of a "leaderless" human community is impossible. What could such a thing be? The viability of any human organization depends on its leaders. Those groups with a tradition of good leadership are the ones most likely to have a viable social, institutional, and organizational life.

The purpose of this chapter and the two that follow is to examine in detail the church leadership relations, strategies, and philosophy of the Laos Mission. The Laos Mission itself assigned great importance to developing church leadership as a key to strengthening the churches. Issues of church leadership were inexorably entwined with the sociocultural attitudes of the mission, the nature of northern Thai social structures, and the late nineteenth century missionary movement ideal of establishing self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing "native" churches. Ultimately, the issue of church leadership in the northern Thai church had to do with power — who had it and how they exercised it. (1)

When we examine how an organization or an institution makes its decisions, maintains authority, and structures power relationships, we have reached its nuts-and-bolts center. The facade of organizational philosophy and public relations statements dissolves into the reality of how human relationships are actually structured.

Throughout the history of the Laos Mission, "church leadership" meant mission leadership of the church. Since leadership is a social role, it is important

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The most striking single characteristic regarding the mission's exercising leadership responsibility over the northern Thai churches was that its leadership existed prior to and outside of the community it created. In normal situations, societies and communities and their leaders exist together: leaders arise out of the community and have their existence for the sake of the larger community. Leaders are members of the community. They express the cultural milieu of their community. They, normally, share the values, the language, the habits, the prejudices, and the general world-view of the people they lead.

However, the northern Thai church did not even exist when the Laos Mission began in 1867. The mission, rather, "called" into existence the church. Instead of the society raising up leaders for its needs, the situation was reversed: the leaders raised up a church to meet a set of needs defined by the leaders. Furthermore, the leadership, in effect, decided a priori how the community should take shape, what its values should be, what activities it should engage in, and what should be the qualifications for membership in the community. (2)

The result was an abnormal and unnatural relationship between leaders and followers. In a more normal situation, mutual dependency binds leaders and followers together so that the leader cannot move too far away from the needs and wants of the followers. In this case, the leaders could and did exist entirely apart from the followership and derived no power from association with it. That is, leadership in the northern Thai church did not depend upon the church for its training, for its status, or for its livelihood. Quite the opposite. While the leaders were quite independent of those who followed, the followers through their membership in this new community depended on the leaders, the missionaries, for training, for status, and quite often for their livelihood. One-way dependency built itself into the very existence of the Christian community in northern Siam.

Likewise, the skills required for leadership in this unnatural situation did not arise from within the community led. The pre-community leaders brought those skills with them from outside the community and, thus, enhanced the unnatural one-way dependency structure of the community. Those who wanted to be leaders had to learn leadership skills from and become like those who already were leaders. Anything that had been previously learned in the

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The structure of traditional northern Thai society contributed to the further development of a one-way dependency community because it seemed to have a structure similar to that of the mission-church structure. Traditional northern Thai society based itself on patron-client relationships in which every individual in the society had a place in the hierarchy of relationships. (3) People very naturally thought in terms of phi-nong (older-younger) relationships by which each individual had a place above or below those with whom he or she came into contact. Every member of society had a patron, a person socially superior to oneself to whom one owed respect and service.

The members of the Laos Mission scattered about in their stations fit into this social pattern very well. They became members of the patron class. (4) As late as 1914, William Clifton Dodd noted that most of the converts were former "serfs" who were only just beginning to see the missionaries in a less majestic light as simply leading influential members of the Christian community. (5) The mission owned large pieces of property upon which it built impressive buildings including massive (by northern Thai standards) homes. This highly visible ownership of land in-and-of-itself lent the missionaries considerable status. In northern Thai society, land meant power over others: power to hire, power to lend, power to be generous or to withhold generosity, power to make merit, and power to make one's children powerful. People admired wealthy landowners for their great merit. (6)

The average missionary had a number of personal servants, and the mission employed significant numbers of Christians. It was only "natural" for northern Thai Christians to relate to the members of the mission as patrons. The "unnatural" birth and form of this community meant, however, that the missionaries did not necessarily have to accept the reciprocal obligations expected of natural northern Thai patrons. There was a fundamental lack of communication at a very basic level between the missionaries and their converts: while the converts looked to the missionaries as their patrons, an adult to adult relationship based on reciprocity, the missionaries looked upon the converts as children, a relationship based on one-way dependency.

The dependency of the converts on the mission was even further streng­thened by the converts' relationship with the rest of society. Every year, missionary

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Finally, convert dependency also grew out of the social situation of the converts: most of them came from the lower classes. We might also add that, as noted in previous chapters, other significant groups of converts included those who were sick and those accused of witchcraft, people who sat at the edges of society. These people all had needs that the mission could fulfill. They were not about to bite the hand that fed them.

In sum, the social situation and historical origins of the Christian church in northern Siam encouraged in a remarkably coherent and consistent way church dependence. The fact that missionary leadership came prior to the church, that it took the form of patronage, and that it led an oppressed minority group of those on the fringes of society gave missionary leadership of the church a unique potency, one the converts could not rival.

The form mission church leadership took fostered in its churches an unnatural dependence on the mission. The mission's doctrine of the church, further encouraged that dependency relationship. Indeed, the missions doctrine of the church, its ecclesiology, takes its rightful place next to the mission's ideology of expansion as a powerful source of motivation and action. That is, what the missionaries thought about the church in northern Siam strongly informed their relationship with it.

What was the church? As far as the Laos Mission could see, the church was essentially an agency for evangelism. Evangelism was not just one task of the church among others but rather the very reason for the church's existence. (9) Mission literature generally makes little distinction between evangelism and church activities in general. All church activities, including the visitation and oversight of church members, were taken to be just different forms of evangelism. In the years prior to 1900, mission reports almost always placed church activities under the heading of "evangelism". Mission work assignments

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The mission believed that the northern Thai church should be primarily, essentially, and fundamentally an agency for converting the North. This meant that the mission did not, as a rule, look upon its churches as communities but rather as agencies, the "best" agencies, for completing the work of the mission itself. (13) The Laos Mission's model for the church, then, was the mission itself.

Leadership training usually meant preparing church leaders to be evangelists. Those "native" leaders judged to be most successful as church leaders were the ones who won substantial numbers of converts. The mission measured the spirituality of the congregations largely in terms of numerical growth and the strength of Christian communities not yet organized as churches by the numbers of new families and/or individuals joining the community. The ideal, successful, and faithful church was the one actively and successfully engaged in evangelism. The mission also assumed that if a church failed to grow numerically there was something wrong with it. Indeed, they believed the church that did not grow numerically soon began to whither both in numbers and spiritually. (14)

In trying to understand why the northern Thai church became what it was, it is disconcerting to encounter time-and-again a pattern of Laos Mission activity in which the mission's ideology consistently pulled its attention away from the churches. Just as its expansionist ideology pulled the mission constantly outward and away from the church so its ecclesiology focused its concerns outside of the life of its churches. With its heavy emphasis on evangelism, the mission tended to ignore Christian education, pastoral care, and congrega­tional program within the churches. As we will see, it also drew northern Thai church leadership away from the churches.

According to mission thinking, the northern Thai church was a missionary society, and the best church leadership was that which successfully converted people to Christ. This ecclesiology demonstrated a remarkable confusion of biblical roles in the organization of the church as well as a seriously limited

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Interestingly enough, the Laos Mission would have readily agreed that it had to continue to evangelize the church after conversion. This brings us to the second important element in the mission's understanding of the northern Thai church. Just as it, first of all, looked upon that church as being essentially an evangelistic society so, secondly, it defined the church in northern Siam as "child-like". Since the mission regarded northern Thai society as heathen and consequently, uncivilized, it could not help but feel that its converts remained "tainted" with the heathenism of their culture. This, in turn, meant that they were not adults-in-Christ; they had not yet grown up into the Christian faith. Indeed, they were like children in mission eyes because of their supposedly easy-going manner, sloth, lack of hygiene, and propensity to laugh all the time. They were short, too. They lacked discipline. In general, the members of the mission looked upon their converts as child-like, and for them that usually meant "childish". (16)

The missionary view of the church as being child-like had a deep impact on the life of the church and on the leadership the church itself produced.

First of all, the Laos Mission took a strongly parental and proprietary attitude towards the churches. Missionary literature so endlessly repeats the litany of "our" elders, "our" natives, "our" Christians, "our" churches, "our" evangelists, "our" ministers, "our" helpers, and "our" assistants that one gives up trying to footnote the obvious. Whatever the theory of mission-church

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Secondly, the churches did not have an independent voice of their own. The Laos Mission largely took important actions and made major policy decisions without even considering consulting the churches. With one notable exception in 1895 (see Chapter 6), the mission dominated the deliberations of the North Laos Presbytery, theoretically the voice of the church, until well into the twentieth century. In fact, the mission continued to make major policy decisions about the life of the church without reference to presbytery throughout its history, for example, the decision it took in 1916 formulating a clearer policy on baptism. (18) At the local church level, the individual missionaries, appointed as "stated-supplies," completely dominated the life and program of the congregations. They looked upon the elected elders of the church as being "a board of advisors" composed of "native assistants." (19)

Thus, the church government developed by the Laos Mission did not function in a Presbyterian manner except at the most superficial and formal level. The mission did not adhere to the Calvinist precept that places responsibility for the ordering of church life at least partly in lay hands, in the hands of the churches themselves. (20) The northern Thai church was run on an episcopal form of church government in which the missionaries exercised (from outside of the church) absolute power over local congregations and virtually acted as self-appointed bishops over groups of congregations. Individual missionaries hired and paid elder-evangelists, assigned duties to elders, settled local disputes, established local schools, and appointed teachers. (21) The missionaries believed that they had to do these things for the churches because the churches were incapable of caring for themselves. The mission's understanding of the church in northern Siam as child-like carried more weight in its thinking and behavior than did its inherited doctrines of representative church government.

Thirdly, in actual point of fact, the relationship of the convert community of new Christians to the mission did take on the aspect of a parent-child relationship. Just as children depend upon their parents for sustenance and protection, so the "native" Christians tended to cluster around the mission stations and seek their means of livelihood there. The mission encouraged this dependency through its need for teachers, medical assistants, evangelists, personal servants, and skilled craftsmen. It hired Christians whenever possible,

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Although there are no figures available, the mission records indicate that a large percentage of Christians depended entirely or in part on the mission for their income. Thus, situations like that at the Ban Tho Church (organized 1913) arose in which the Mission Press employed half of the men in the congregation. The leadership of the churches was particularly likely to be employed by the mission, as they were the ones who displayed talents the mission valued. In 1906, for example, 140 of the "pick of our Christians" enrolled in the mission's vaccinators' class, which class taught men how to give vaccinations from which, in turn, they received an income. (22)

This child-like financial dependency of the churches on the mission had a number of repercussions. Briggs expressed particular concern that the mission created a new set of values and appetites in which converts wanted to have a better life, one like the missionaries had. He feared that the mission could not begin to satisfy such appetites. (23) Furthermore, the dependency of the converts on the mission only served to enhance the already high status of the missionaries in convert eyes. It served to confirm the patron image. At the same time, the financial policies of the mission began to create a hierarchy of privilege and wealth within the church itself. Some "natives", especially household servants, received relatively large salaries from the mission while others did not benefit so greatly from the mission's largess. Finally, some converts developed an expectation that when they needed money the mission would oblige them. They could become resentful of the mission when this expectation was not lived up to. (24)

Fourthly, since it assumed that converts had a child-like nature, the mission showed little inclination to train them for church leadership. By-and-large, the highest office that the "native" could aspire to was that of missionary "assistant." I mention this point here in passing only to suggest the roots of an issue that we will examine more closely in the next chapter. That is, that the mission simply did not expect and could not believe that these childish people made good leaders. One does not ask a child to lead. One does not expect a child to lead.

Finally, many members of the Laos Mission believed that their presence would be required for many years to come to care for the still immature church. In an official mission statement of 1912 made in response to questions sent by a visiting Board deputation, the mission stated:

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The foreign missionary is necessary (and for two or three generations, will continue to be necessary) as leader, teacher, and counselor of the native church, which in the last analysis is the efficient agency for preaching the Gospel to every creature. Without an adequate number of foreign missionaries the growth of the native church will be slow and the evangelization of the entire field will be delayed. (25)

Once again, the fundamental view of the mission that the church was child-like and its equally fundamental view that the essential task of the church was evangelism meshed, the one supporting the other. The pattern of missionary thinking consistently placed themselves at the head of the church, denigrated the potential role of the "native" leader, and saw their own role, place, and position as being key to the life of the church.

Viewed from within, the mission's understanding of the church had a logical consistency. Yet, the fact that the view was logical does not mean that it reflected the actual potential of the church to create and sustain its own life. Missionary ecclesiology in northern Siam did not begin with the actual situation of northern Thai society and culture or with the real and potential abilities of its converts. It began, rather, with its own ideological perspective that the society was "heathen," "uncivilized". It began with the largely unacknowledged assumption that the indigenous traditional society did not have its own integrity that might contribute something to the creation of a northern Thai church. Given this assumption, the strong dynamic of the ideology of expansion, and the church's dependence on mission leadership, we have all the makings for extreme paternalism. The nature of traditional northern Thai society with its structures of patron-client relationships did not challenge missionary assumptions and attitudes and, superficially, seemed to the missionaries to only confirm what they already knew.

At the last, the mission's doctrine of the church in northern Siam only contributed to making the church more fully dependent on the mission.

Before closing this section, we need to look briefly at the way in which the mission physically organized its churches. The "necessity" of mission leadership for the churches plus the geographical distribution of the churches determined the organizational structure of the church.

The distinctive pattern of the northern Thai church throughout the history of the Laos Mission was what I have chosen to call (for want of a better

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Organizationally, in sum, the typical northern Thai "church" was an artificial construct that reflected the unnatural origins of the church by being little more than a conglomerate of scattered groups and persons.

Churches, like other human communities develop their own styles of leadership, styles that differ. Styles of church government vary by denomination, by culture, and from congregation to congregation. These styles of leadership do not, somehow, suddenly appear full-blown. They accrue through practices developed over the years, a recapitulation of the organization's problem-solving experience. In this section we will look at how missionaries led the northern Thai church and the leadership traditions they created for it.

The Laos Mission had to cope with two very serious limitations on its ability to lead the churches. First of all, there was the problem of health. Secondly, mission structures and procedures further limited the effectiveness of mission church leadership.

Health. Missionary health... a constant concern... an ever present source of strain, of care, of worry. The inescapable fact of missionary life was that physical and mental breakdowns occurred regularly and posed a constant threat to and limitation on the effectiveness of missionaries.

During the 1870s and 1880s, health problems were a key factor in

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A summary of the general state of mission health shows that in the period 1900 — 1910 the work of the mission suffered from a debilitating instability resulting from frequent health problems. In 1900 the mission doctor in Chiang Mai made about five hundred medical calls on station members, one of the worst years in a decade. Records show that the years 1902, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1909, and 1910 were all especially bad years. Even into the next decade, health remained a constant worry with years like 1915 and 1916 being unusually difficult. Smaller stations, such as Nan, were hardest hit and sometimes found it difficult to sustain any program at all. Rev. H. Vincent compiled another set of statistics showing a direct correlation between the ideology of expansion and mission health. From November 1905 to August 1908, the eighteen missionaries assigned to Chiang Mai Station all remained in the mission. But of the 38 assigned to other stations exactly half, nineteen, resigned. (28)

The mission tried to help its members escape the ravages of illness by giving furloughs, periodic visits home. Because numbers of mission personnel were constantly going back to the United States for reasons of health or to take their regular furlough, the mission found it necessary to transfer other members back-and-forth to cover for those absent. Thus, one of the chief characteristics of the Laos Mission was its frequent shifting of personnel. The Denmans, transferred from Chiang Rai to Nan in 1905, wrote of the serious problems facing those so moved: a great deal of time and money wasted in packing and shipping and unpacking; a loss of effectiveness as one's former work was dropped (and suffered or lapsed thereby) and a whole new situation had to be learned; and obstruction of the missionaries' relationships with the people.

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Yet another related problem had to do with the psychological make-up of the missionaries themselves. For them, mission work involved a special calling. Many of them believed in their calling and had a deep commitment to it. They felt driven to expend themselves to fulfill their calling, and many of them gave their time, their energies, and their talents in a sacrificial way. They tended to take on more work than they could carry including a lot of peripheral mission business and administration work. The fact that they did not rely on their "native" assistants for many tasks further burdened them with responsibilities. The Rev. C.R. Callender, a veteran of the mission, wrote in 1911 that because of the fewness of workers and the many opportunities to serve, the Lampang Station members were "...kept pretty close to the danger line of breaking down. "(30)

Finally, the mission's concern for the health of its members compelled it to engage in activities that consumed great amounts of time that might have otherwise been given to church work. The mission felt that it had to build large, comfortable homes for its missionaries as a preventive health measure. The building and maintaining of those homes took time, energy, and resources. The mission also believed it necessary for the mission to order large amounts of American and European supplies and foodstuffs from Bangkok and overseas to help its members survive the climate. (31) Rev. William Harris expressed deep concern about all of the administrative time these activities consumed. As the mission's treasurer for many years, he felt that the ordained clergymen of the mission not only lost valuable time that they could have been using for church work but also set a very poor example for the churches because they spent so much time on "secular" concerns. (32)

The limits of missionary health and related factors had a direct impact on the church because they limited the missionary's time and ability to work with the churches. In different periods, churches such as Chiang Mat, Chiang Dao,

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Mission Structures. Even if missionary health had not been such an important limiting factor on the mission's ability to lead the churches, that ability would still have been greatly limited by a second factor: the administrative structure of its own organization. The Laos Mission began as a small, uncomplicated two-family organization with no need for elaborate structures. It developed only slowly and did not really begin to expand until after 1890. But, as we have seen, in the decade of the 1890s mission work expanded rapidly both institutionally and geographically. Mission churches grew more rapidly. By the mid-1890s, the administration of the mission became much more complex and required more attention, needed more coordination. (33)

Over the course of the years, the mission developed a number of organizational mechanisms to cope with its increased load of administration. These mechanisms included the annual mission meeting, the body with the most power, and annual meetings of the North Laos Presbytery, permanent and special committees, and eventually a standing executive committee. The mission appointed from its number a secretary and a treasurer.

Taken in its entirety, this was a weak and cumbersome administrative mechanism. Although, for example, the annual mission meeting could and very occasionally did take effective action to change the basic direction of mission policy and activity, by-and-large it was a poor way to run a mission. First of all, the annual meetings consumed great amounts of time, time that might have been put to use in other ways. The meetings always lasted several weeks, usually about a month including travel time. A great deal of time went into the planning and preparation of the annual meeting, normally held in December. Thus, missionaries were gone from their stations or otherwise engaged in meetings for at least four weeks every year. Secondly, the annual meetings

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The network of mission committees did not work even as well as did the annual meeting, this in spite of the fact that the mission dealt with specific issues largely by appointing committees to deal with those issues. Many of the committees, standing or special, met only infrequently or not at all because committee members were busy and scattered among distant stations. Even when the committees did function they had little real authority. Although committees were supposed to oversee various aspects of church and mission work, the actual pattern of action was this: the stations took what actions, on property matters for example, they deemed necessary and only then, after the fact, informed the "proper" committee about their decision "requesting" committee consent. Even key committees found it difficult to find time to deal with mission problems. (35)

In effect, while the missionaries administered the church as strong executives ("bishops"), they left themselves with no effective executive body or individual to administer the mission. The executive officers, secretary and treasurer, had no real authority of their own. The executive committee was not strong either. (36) McGilvary chose not to impose his will or desires on the mission, especially after the mission began to grow in the 1890s. It is doubtful if he could have done so in any event, since even when he did offer advice (which often proved to be quite insightful) it was not always accepted by the mission. McGilvary served as more of a general model for what the mission held to be the "ideal missionary" rather than as an effective administrative leader. (37)

As a result of this administrative situation, the Laos Mission drifted with the currents: it had no strong policies, no unified course of action even when a consensus of opinion existed. Changes were fitful and often ineffective. (38)

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These structures encouraged individual missionaries to go their own ways, to think that they could do almost anything that they wanted to do, and to ignore or even work against stated mission policy. Different stations had different policies and procedures. There was even competition between institutions within the same station where individuals would actually try to undercut the work of colleagues. (40) The administrative situation of the Laos Mission was chaotic and, in a very real sense, law-less. In a report highly critical of the Laos Mission's weak structure and its members' propensity for going their own way, Dr. Robert Speer observed that the members of the mission needed to develop "a different attitude toward all constitutional authority both toward the Board and toward the field." (41)

It was ironic that those very individuals who gave so much effort to "protecting" the churches from errors in doctrine, behavior, and administration should come in for criticism on the charge of lawlessness. In a larger sense, it was ironic that the ones who frequently looked on the "native" church as childish should themselves be so poorly organized, so poorly disciplined, and so inept. In the largest sense, it was tragic that those who suffered the most were the people in the churches.

Interpersonal relationships within the mission only compounded the administrative weaknesses of the mission because the mission tended to be politicized and factionalized. Serious personality conflicts existed with the mission and within the stations. Differences of vision erupted into open conflict. Petty problems assumed disproportionate significance. At some points, life in a station became almost unbearable, a cauldron of conflict and emotion. (42) All of this caused one young missionary to quote the veteran Dr. Mason, "The mission field is just like a great big family only without the family love. "(43)

The model of local church leadership that grew out of mission ideology, ecclesiology, and practice emphasized distance between leadership and

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The experience of the churches with leadership was one of distance in which the powers-that-were stood far removed from the life of the average Christian and did not participate in their lives. The missionary church leader appeared to be a person of immense wealth who was not tied to the rhythms of plant-and-harvest, plant-and-harvest. (45) In a most profound way the mis­sionary "pastor" functioned as an absentee pastor.

Based on the attitudes and practices of the Laos Mission in its relationship to its churches, the leadership model it provided for them may be summarized in this fashion: it did not respect the integrity nor the rights of the individual churches. It did not make decisions in consultation with the churches nor even see that it should do such a thing. It did not trust the churches. It did not share power. Yet, the Laos Mission did not recognize that it had responsibilities to those in authority above it. The members of the mission acted as a law unto themselves. In its relationships within the mission it often showed a lack of cooperation and mutual forbearance. It was an ill-disciplined form of leader­ship not likely to create strong churches.

Hans-Ruedi Weber succinctly summarized the situation facing the northern Thai church in his general description of the situation of the church living under mission leadership in the missionary era. He writes that the period of missionary guidance of the churches was deadening. It resulted in pater-

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But this has happened at the expense of the most important level of church life, the life of the local congregation where most laymen and laywomen get their spiritual food and where they should be helped in their response of obedience to the demands of the gospel. The flock, in its unimportant village church, was left with the poorest quality of shepherds. (46)

Weber's critique carries this study now on to describe how the mission's model for church leadership actually worked. For, this model, based on distance, distrust, instability, lack of respect, irresponsibility, and ill health did become the style of leadership that the mission developed in the church.

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