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After the tumult of the 1890s, the first decade of the new century turned out to be relatively quiet for the northern Thai church and for the Laos Mission. In the 1890s, the mission wrestled with divisive issues such as self-support, self-government, and paid evangelists. While the mission did opt for some changes after 1900, those changes turned out to be short-term ones. The deeper channels of the mission flowing out of the 1870s and 1880s continued on much as they had in the past. Church-mission relationships did not change. The era 1900-1909 became a decade of "confirmation" in which all of the non-changes and the old patterns entrenched themselves more deeply in church and mission.

The regional church-regional ministry pattern was confirmed by the failure to train or ordain new clergymen and by reinstating the paid evangelist system. Membership in the churches grew by 70% from 2257 members in 1899 to 3821 members in 1909, but only three new churches were constituted with the consequence that the church found itself more regionalized and less localized than ever. The mission itself did not grow: there were 42 missionaries assigned to it in 1899 and 43 in 1909. (1) In fact, unusual amounts of illness made these hard year for the mission. Only in the development of the medical and educational institutions did it seem to make progress.

How little had changed may be seen from the fact that the burning issue throughout the decade had nothing to do with church in the North as such. The expansionist ideology continued to be as strong as in the 1890s, but now the focus had shifted to a new phase: the greater Tai race beyond Siam. (2)

In the late 1890s, both the Presbyterians in northern Siam and the Baptists in Burma evinced an interest in the Kengtung State, one of the Shan States in eastern Burma. Each denomination believed that God called their

They argued that the mission was not called simply to the "Tai" people of northern Siam but rather to the greater Tai race throughout the heartland of Asia. Their argument grew out of the vision inspired by the long tour taken by McGilvary and Irwin in 1893 into Kengtung State. The prospect of opening work there excited Irwin to the extent that he offered to go himself, but the matter came into doubt when the Laos Mission learned that the American Baptist Burma Mission planned to open a station in Kengtung. Irwin's reaction: fine, give the place to the Baptists. Dodd and Briggs, however, rejected that response and urged the Board to move into the area quickly before the Baptists. The Presbyterians, they claimed, could do a much better job there.

From that time onwards, the "Kengtung faction" consistently and frequently called for establishing a Kengtung Station. The mission was more divided. For example, when Dodd took the opportunity of a furlough in 1894 to lobby for Kengtung with the Board in New York, letters from the field showed considerable resistance to expanding at that time. Most felt Kengtung expansion was a good idea but the mission simply could not undertake yet another station. (4) Over the next eight years the issue came up frequently but nothing happened.

Finally, in 1903 Dodd again visited the U.S. on furlough, and this time he convinced the Board to approve opening a Kengtung Station. He returned to the field in early 1904 with great enthusiasm and with reinforcements for the new station. Several other mission members still expressed their doubts. The problem also arose that the Baptists actually did open a mission station in Kengtung in 1901. Nevertheless, the new two-family station opened in 1904 with every indication of success. At first, Baptist-Presbyterian relations were cordial; however, strains in the relationship quickly led to open antagonism. The Baptists wanted the Presbyterians out! In 1904, 1905, and again in 1907, the Kengtung Question was the major issue discussed in the annual mission meeting. Dodd and his supporters fought a strong rear-guard action against those on the Board and in the mission who wanted to close down the station. (5)

The Board finally did order the station closed in 1908 citing financial problems and the comity issue as the reasons. Even prior to this, McGilvary wrote New York to say that he personally felt the mission was working against

Dodd did not give up his dream for expanding the work into Burma, China, and French Indochina. His next move came in 1910 when he made a remarkable thousand-mile journey from Chiang Rai through Kengtung and Yunnan to Canton, China, surveying the extent of the Tai ethnic groups in that vast territory. He then proceeded on to America where in early 1911 he gave a rousing presentation of his findings to the Board. For a brief moment, he had the full and enthusiastic attention of the Board for this new, vast, and totally untouched mission field, and the Laos Mission indulged itself in laying grandiose schemes for 25 new stations and 560 missionaries to evangelize the Tai race. (7) More to the point, Dodd argued that this vast scheme and all further plans for expansion hinged on the reoccupation of Kengtung.

But, then, the months dragged out into years. The old problems of money and the Baptists remained. More reams of correspondence and slavishly prepared and minutely documented reports only wasted more time. The Board lost its enthusiasm for the Tai race. In those heady years of global missionary expansion, China, Korea, and the Philippines excited a greater response than the backward, difficult to reach, and apparently unimportant Tai race. Finally, in June 1913 the Board decided that all Presbyterian work in Kengtung must be closed or turned over to the Baptists. At the same time, it gave permission for opening a station in Chiang Rung, Yunnan Province, China when funds became available. The Laos Mission majority by this time had caught the Dodd-Briggs vision of the greater Tai mission and, consequently, felt intensely disappointed in the Board's decision. Long after 1913, the mission still held on to contacts with its former converts in Kengtung State. (8)

As one of the goals the mission pursued for its churches after 1900, it tried to involve the churches in "foreign" missions. Irwin encouraged such involvement in the Training School (see Chapter 5). The Lampang Church showed especial interest in Khamu work. The mission now encouraged the churches to provide financial support with the aim not only of supporting the Kengtung work but also of promoting the church's own evangelistic outreach. (9)

Even so, the impact of this extra-Siam phase of mission expansion was mostly negative. First of all, incredible amounts of time went into an imposing array of surveys and reports "proving" that the Presbyterians had a better claim

Secondly, the Kengtung Station drained off two families, the Dodds and the Callenders, badly needed elsewhere, in a period when the mission was understaffed and over-extended even within Siam. It also wasted many months of time per year for others, such as Dr. Peoples, who were called to serve on committees and commissions regarding the Kengtung Question. (10)

Thirdly, the Kengtung Question further weakened the overall work of the mission precisely because it caused divisions and hard feelings within the mission. Many resented the tactics of Dodd and Briggs, for example, when Briggs threatened to resign at one point if the mission did not vote to support the Kengtung Station before the Board. And the whole issue also caused tension between the mission and the Board further distracting all from attending to the problems of the churches.

All-in-all, the Kengtung Question of whether or not the Laos Mission should have a station in Kengtung State and push expansion northward out of Siam proved to be a potent distraction that brought into sharp relief the self-defeating side of the expansionist ideology: while the purpose of mission work was to "convert the heathen" and create a "native" church, expansionism constantly drew the mission away from that purpose by consuming its energies in touring, itineration, surveying, station building, and then starting the process all over again further down the road. It is paradoxical: the motivation, spreading the Gospel, that brought the missionaries into the North transformed itself into the ideology of expansionism, which then prevented effective evangelism and church work.

While the Laos Mission invested a great amount of its time and effort trying to maintain the expansionist momentum of the 1890s, the only area

The real measure of the growth of the institutions was in missionary assignments. Of its 37 missionaries in 1909 who had definite assignments, the mission assigned ten to medical work, ten to educational work, six were on furlough, four did translation/literature work, two managed the press, and only five members of the mission took as their primary assignment church and evangelistic work. These figures are all the more impressive when compared with those of 1899 when of 33 missionaries with specific primary assignments, nine engaged in "evangelism" which included church work while thirteen had institutional assignments. (11) While some of those assigned other work gave considerable time on weekends and vacations to visiting rural Christian groups, they were limited in what they could do. Effectively, the mission put more than four time the emphasis on institutional work that it did on church and evangelistic work. The missionaries themselves observed that the institutions grew in their demands during the decade while church work received less attention and developed less rapidly. (12)

An important thing happened in this decade: as the churches languished and the institutions grew amidst the great distraction of Kengtung, the northern Thai Christian community found itself with two foci rather than one. Mission attention and resources centered on the medical and educational institutions, which, in turn, became the centers of patronage and employment in the Christian community. The institutions became powerful magnets, and we will see in a latter section of this chapter that these magnets caused a major Christian migration away from Lamphun towards Chiang Mai. Consequently, the church did not encompass the Christian community but had to compete with the institutions, founded entirely outside of its jurisdiction, for the attention of that community.

The Laos Mission found itself trapped in its conflicting commitments to the two foci of the Christian community's life, the church and the institutions. Even as it committed itself to the institutions, the mission wanted to strengthen the churches; and it did try to take steps to that end.

Mission and Church. As the 1890s drew to a close and the Laos Mission came to think that its northern Thai clergymen could not pastor the churches (see Chapter 6), it stopped ordaining northern Thai into the ministry. Yet, it also saw the need for a better system of church supervision because the churches and rural Christian groups did not receive sufficient attention. Thus, in 1896 the North Laos Presbytery established a Committee on Presbyterial Oversight chaired by McGilvary and composed entirely of missionaries. The purpose of the committee was to create better understanding between the mission and the churches, to encourage self-support, and to oversee the churches. Although it had a great deal of authority, the committee failed to solve the problem of how to give more attention to the churches. By 1900, the mission felt even more urgently the need to work more closely with its churches, and to have a more direct supervisory role in their administration; but it took until 1903 for the mission to structure a closer relationship. In that year it ordered every station to divide its churches into districts with one missionary assigned responsibility for each district. The mission instituted, in effect, a formal structure for church governance without even referring the matter to presbytery. It created a de facto episcopacy with missionaries serving as bishops. (13)

After 1903, most of the missionaries related to institutions fell into the pattern of giving weekends and holidays to working with the churches. Mission reports and correspondence after 1903 suggests that the mission made considerable effort to work more closely with the churches. Even so, the whole system of weekend pastorates did not function effectively. More distant churches and groups continued to be ignored. The weight of other work plus the constant struggle with illness hampered all church work. Although more structured, the "new" system instituted in 1903 did nothing more than confirm the patterns of church and mission relations that first arose in the 1870s. It confirmed the primacy of the mission over the churches while ignoring for most of the decade

The North Laos Presbytery. After its official founding in 1885, the North Laos Presbytery remained closely linked to the mission since all of the ordained missionaries sat as members of it. According to later accounts, presbytery meetings, held in December with the annual mission meeting, were largely a matter of form attended by the "natives" at the behest of the mission. The fact that the meetings fell right around harvest time made them more than inconvenient for the men attending. However, after the tense meeting of 1895, the presbytery drifted into a period of decay in which it met only occasionally mostly just to rubber stamp mission decisions. Finally, the annual mission meeting of 1906 received a report from its Committee on Laos Presbytery which recommended that presbytery should begin meeting regularly at a time other than December. The next year, the presbytery called a special meeting for December in order to reestablish the presbytery on a firmer basis.

In March 1908, the presbytery held its first meeting in the "new" era. Although the number of missionaries attending was still fairly large, the presbytery showed its more northern Thai character by focusing on key issues relevant to the life of the local churches including the very thorny issue of intermarriage with Buddhists. (14) Since the mission wanted the presbytery to be more of an independent body, presbytery decided that it would hold its 1909 meeting away from the mission centers. It met at Wiang Pa Pao, and of twenty delegates only three were missionaries. The meeting elected Kru Pannya moderator and discussed the invitation of Siam Presbytery to appoint a committee to investigate the establishment of a national Siamese church. It also considered sending its own "missionaries" into French territory to work with the Khamu. (15)

The 1910 meeting elected Kru Semo as moderator and again discussed key issues for the life of the church. More than ever, the presbytery took on a northern Thai identity. By and large, the presbytery continued to develop in this direction in later years although after 1911 the missionaries again took greater part in its deliberations. (16)

In actual fact, while the rebirth of the presbytery did give the church greater voice, and, perhaps, a new sense of its own identity, it did not give the church greater authority over its own life. Something more than merely

The first of these movements was the holding of station conventions organized by the missionaries for strengthening the churches, giving them a greater sense of unity, introducing new ideas and projects, and involving

These conventions brought together as many church members from throughout a station as possible for several days of meetings, services, and activities. Besides worship and entertainment, the meetings included opportunities for discussions on important topics, Bible study, health education, asking questions about faith, and participating in evangelistic work. (17)

Generally reported as successful, useful, and entertaining, there is no record of a convention being held after 1907. It is likely that conditions in the mission after that period hindered holding further conversions since the years 1908 and 1909 were particularly bad years for missionary health. They were also lean years financially. More than likely, the stations had neither the will nor the money to conduct conventions after 1907. (18)

A second movement that swept the churches in this decade was the chapel building movement. Even in 1867, McGilvary wanted a chapel as evidence of the permanency of Christianity in the North. The mission built its first chapel on a corner of station property in 1876; from that time on other churches and village Christian groups built small bamboo chapels from time to time. Chiang Mai Church occupied its permanent building in 1891, and in 1890 Chiang Mai Station included groups in 22 village that held regular worship of which nine had their own chapels. (19)

The real movement in chapel building began after 1900, and especially after 1903 a passion for erecting church buildings swept the church. Many of those chapels remained simple structures, but a significant number were constructed of more permanent materials. The mission supported and promoted this movement for three reasons: first of all, it felt that involving the churches in building programs made them more active and self-reliant; secondly, the buildings "proved" that Christianity was here to stay; and, thirdly, the missionaries believed that good church buildings attracted more converts as Buddhist society tended to judge Christianity by the quality of its buildings. (20)

In this period, at least twenty new chapels were erected in eighteen organized churches. The most impressive of these was the Hyde Park Chapel

The chapel building movement showed that the Christian community now had enough "mass" to build its own buildings. Although the regional church framework remained potent as ever, the village Christian communities began to fill out somewhat. Communities remained scattered but were larger than previously. The chapel building movement also provides further insight into the mission's "theory of indigenization" (see Chapter 5 also). In the case of chapels, the mission accepted without question northern Thai cultural values regarding the place of beautiful, elaborate/ornate buildings in religion—values that paralleled the missionaries' own society, which also constructed elaborate religious structures. The Laos Mission unquestioningly accepted and pursued a basic northern Thai cultural value even while branding the society and culture as "heathen." Whereas Buddhist temples represented darkness and evil to the mission, it readily accepted the value by which such buildings were desired. This meant, in effect, that the mission attacked the form while accepting the basic content of the underlying values behind those forms. Indigenization, then, was a matter of changing forms to protect the "purity" of the church but accepting basic values so as to remain evangelistically attractive to non-Christians.

The third church-wide movement in the North in this era was the rural parish schools movement. Realizing that its highly valued educational system did not reach into the rural areas very well, the mission encouraged a "second level" of schools, ones located in the villages and run by the churches. The first mention of such a school goes back to 1885, but the actual movement to establish village schools throughout the church began about 1902. The movement sought to put a Christian school within the reach of every Christian child and to form the basis for a church-wide educational system. In 1903, Chiang Mat Station had twelve village schools while Chiang Rai had one. In 1904, the mission included fourteen day schools with sessions of from three to eight months each. (22)

Although the schools often started with the assistance of or at the instigation of missionaries, the churches administered the schools and often funded them (at least in part) as well. One of the most difficult problems facing these schools was finding teachers, and the schools often had to depend on young people who had studied for some time at one of the boarding schools.

In 1908, six years after the village school system started to grow, the mission's educational system included five boarding schools, 23 village and urban day schools, and three training schools totaling 1096 students. It was not until 1912 that the village students formed a truly significant part of this system:

Their number rose from 350 in 1911 to 801 (out of a total of 1677 in all schools) in 1912. This sudden increase may be attributed to a mission attempt to compete with the rapidly expanding government-sponsored system of temple and public schools. The growth in the village schools was tempered by the fact that in many of them, the ones without direct mission supervision, the terms were short and the pupils fewer. (24)

While it is difficult to evaluate some aspects of the village schools, they did represent a positive change in the churches particularly because they often grew out of the desire of village people for a better education for their children—a desire just then emerging. (25) Unlike other mission institutions these schools were located in the churches, run by and for the churches. They represented an attempt to get some Christian education, at least for the children, into the churches. Even though they depended on the urban schools for teachers, some support, and to continue the education of better pupils, the schools represented an exercise in self-reliance in church work in the North. They further symbolized the growth of the rural communities into groups large enough to actually sustain their own educational programs, however humble.

Church migrations represent the last movement of the decade I will discuss here. Two congregations experienced serious changes because their members migrated to other areas.

Although all three of the Lamphun area churches experienced migration problems after 1900, that migration affected the Wang Mun Church the most seriously. The movement of Christians out of the area began in 1901 when Noi Lin and a group of nine families moved from Wang Mun to Wiang Pa Pao for economic reasons. By 1906 half of the Wang Mun people and a total of about 75

Freeman, the resident missionary in Lamphun, cited three reasons for this migration of Christians away from Lamphun: first of all, mission employment in Chiang Mai, especially at the Mission Press, attracted many; secondly, the desire for a better life and higher income compelled many to go to the Chiang Mai area for jobs or land; and, finally, the students sent to the Chiang Mai schools from Lamphun usually stayed in Chiang Mai. (27)

The Chiang Saen Church, still one of the strongest and most independent of the churches, also experienced migration. The congregation suffered for the fact that most of its members lived on the French side of the Mekong River and were denied contact with the mission by French authorities. Finally, in 1906 eight of the Christian families decided to move over to Pa Kuk in British territory, and twenty non-Christian families moved with them. At first, the church had trouble settling in to its new site, but it soon recovered and grew rapidly. In 1917, the church had ninety members and still had a reputation for strong leaders and a strong congregational life. (28)

During this decade the presbytery established only two new churches in northern Siam: in 1902 it organized the Muang Phrao Church, which split off from Chiang Dao. And in January 1906, it reorganized the Chiang Rai Station churches by adding substantial territory to the Wiang Pa Pao Church, reducing the territory of Chiang Rai Church, and creating the Nang Lae Church. In 1906, the Kengtung Station established a church, which remained on mission rolls for many years but eventually quietly faded away. (29)

As seen in Chapters 1 and 2, the church faced serious problems in its relations with society from the day that Nan Inta received baptism. Not only was the new religion closely linked with foreigners in the general public's mind, but it also challenged traditional society and beliefs in many ways. After 1900, the church continued to experience repression, especially in those areas where it had only recently entered. (30) And even-though the general impression we have is that outright repression and persecution was less intense, the church still had to face certain issues in maintaining its life in the midst of a Buddhist society. [<128]

The Shan Rebellion. The Shan Rebellion of 1902 represented a crisis in the life of the church. That rebellion started in Phrae when a group of Shans (from what is now eastern Burma) rose in rebellion against the Siamese authorities, killing many Siamese and pressing the local Chaos into support of them. Suddenly, the Christian community had to choose between loyalty to the Siamese central government, with which there existed widespread dissatisfaction, or the representatives of rebellion. The Christians lived in all of the areas—Phrae, Nan, Lampang and Chiang Rai —threatened by rebellion, and it did not help matters for them that the Laos Mission was again in yet another period of internal weakness.

In all known cases, the Christian community sided with the Siamese, and in some instances it actively assisted the government in suppressing the rebellion. In Phrae itself, for examples, Christians helped ethnic Siamese escape the city while the Christians themselves refrained from looting. Siamese authorities in Muang Thoeng showed particular pleasure with the Christians there because they were virtually the only ones who did not flee the city when attack seemed likely. Briggs reported that in Chiang Rai Christians played an important role in carrying government dispatches, in uncovering and reporting a plot against the authorities, and in setting a calming example for others. (31)

Thus, like its missionary patrons, the northern Thai church showed a solid inclination to support the Siamese government's policy of centralizing its power in the North. The impression that the Christian community stood in the forefront of the forces of the economic, social, and political modernization in northern Siam is strengthened by its response to the Shan Rebellion. In any event, that response distinguished it from the larger society, which had no particular love for Bangkok. The tiny Christian minority saw its interests allied with and tied to the most powerful agent, the Siamese government, for social change in the North. (32)

Intermarriage. Whenever Christians gathered to discuss their concerns and problems, one of the issues they always brought up was that of Christian-Buddhist marriages. These marriages were often short and unhappy, and the mission discouraged them because it found it difficult to teach or maintain the "sanctity of marriage" in them. The missionaries also worried that Christian children might come under "bad" influences. Christians themselves disagreed on whether or not one should marry a non-Christian, and one of the sources

Thus, those social and family problems that faced the very first generation of converts back in the 1870s remained a problem forty years later. Christians continued to be socially isolated and their religion a source of interpersonal tension. One of the peculiarities of the Christian minority was that its minority status had no ethnic foundation, and since it was scattered geographically as well, the community remained quite vulnerable to social pressure and tension. That tension often followed the individual Christian right into her or his home.

Legal Status. Like every other facet of traditional society, the legal system in the North grew out of the religious center of society. The legal status of Christians, again a problem since Nan Inta frustrated his patron by his refusal to work on the Sabbath, also continued to be an issue. As late as 1905, the local government in Phrae still forced Christians to do corvee labor on Sundays, something that so greatly disturbed the Christian community that at one stage it considered passive resistance to such orders even if it meant going to jail.

The Christians in Lampang faced a similar problem. The Chao Muang there required that all of his subjects perform corvee labor except on the Buddhist lunar holy days, which seldom coincided with Sundays. The Christian community dealt with the problem by asking the resident missionary, Taylor, to intercede for them and request that Christians be allowed to pay a tax in place of the labor. Later, when the Siamese Commissioner moved to institute just such a system for all of Lampang, he asked Taylor to convince the Christians to pay immediately as an example to others. He also asked Taylor to have the Christians inform him immediately if they discovered instances in which the Chao Muang tried to obstruct the new taxation system by continuing to demand corvee labor. A delegation from Chae Hom, led by a Christian, did later report to Taylor that the Chao Muang unfairly demanded rice from them. Taylor reported the case to the Commissioner who corrected the situation.

This example gives us an interesting insight into how the Christians stood in the northern Thai legal system. While in tension with traditional political structures, the Christians had an advantage in the evolving situation

Nevertheless, the Christians remained a legal anomaly. They faced a particular problem when called upon to give evidence in courts-of-law as the oaths taken normally had to be sworn before a Buddha image. In 1907 the mission appointed a committee to lobby the northern authorities for modification of those oaths. There is no evidence that the committee was successful, but there are cases recorded in which Christians did not have to take the Buddhist oaths. (34)

Thus, the legal situation of the Christian community was a mixed affair in which the community suffered in some ways for being a minority religion while deriving certain benefits in other ways through their association with an influential patron.

Medical Care and the Church. Because "native" medicine included the uses of charms and spirit propitiation, the mission as a matter of course forbid its converts from accepting traditional medical aid. As long as the Christians had missionary medicine within reach medical assistance posed no particular problem. However, many Christians lived at a distance from mission centers and could not avail themselves of mission medical services. These people faced a serious temptation to seek traditional cures when they became ill. Thus, for example, the Chiang Dao Church lost a number of families in 1903 because someone in each family fell ill and the families called in traditional doctors. Chiang Dao seldom received missionary or medical evangelist visits. The Phrae Church faced the same problem in 1906 when the Phrae Station closed. Individuals immediately went back to using the traditional cures because there was no missionary present to help them. And the Christian community in Fang, a great distance from the nearest mission station, experienced precisely the same problem. (35)

Mission doctors and/or their medical assistants constantly traveled into the country-side to treat ailing Christians, and one of the motivations for

Summary. In each of the above issues, the heart of the social issue facing the northern Thai church was that it stood apart from the rest of society. To what extent the Christian community believed, as the missionaries believed, that the larger society was evil and satanic is difficult to ascertain. I have suggested earlier (see Chapter 5) that their beliefs were likely to have actually been closer to those of the surrounding society than to the missionaries. Nevertheless, practically they felt themselves to be different, to have an identity distinct from the rest of their society. The structures of society around them, familial, legal, and medical frequently did not recognize the validity of that identity and almost never honored it. It did not sympathize with the Christian community's "peculiarities" of religious expression.

The social issues related to being a Christian kept coming up in presbytery meetings and in the station conventions. For the Christians, the key issue of the day referred not to expansionism nor institutional development but how to maintain their Christian identity in that unsympathetic environment.

1900 to 1909 was in many ways a dull decade for the church. The great fiery debates of the decade, over Kengtung, happened far away from the church. The creative growth of the decade, in the institutions, also took place at a distance from the church. The only experiment in serious change, the Phrae experiment, came to nothing. It was profoundly a decade of stagnation. No new ministers. Only two (not counting Kengtung) new churches. Potential changes such as station conventions or the revived presbytery had little long-term results.

It was the "wait-and-see", "slow-but-sure" decade. And, as we look back across the years to this decade, it has a special relevance all of its own. This decade was an eloquent reply to the ferment for change fomented in the years 1894-1895. By delaying theological education for another decade while cementing into place the ineffective regional church-regional ministry system and confirming all meaningful power in mission hands, this decade

And, yet, the shards of the shattered vase of necessary and needed change still littered the landscape. In presbytery and in the station conventions, the church experimented with a voice of its own, testing issues and concerns of its own. That had not happened in the 1890s except, momentarily, in the cataclysm of the Pastors' Revolt. The churches established and party financed their own educational institutions for the first time, institutions that emerged from their own perceived needs. Christian communities coalesced and built up their own infrastructure of property and buildings. And, almost offstage from the great events of the decade, came the muted call (from the Siam Presbytery) for discussions towards the formations of a national church. The call somehow was lost in the shuffle. But there it was...the first faint glimmer of an alternative to another fifty or one hundred years of mission rule.