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As the reader may have perceived already, this study is as much about the present as it is about the past. I want to account for the present, for the world we are living in as I type these words. I want to understand it. This present first started to take shape in the past so that understanding the present means understanding the past. The past does not so easily divide itself into neat fragments such as, say, 1867 to 1920, the boundaries of this study. It moves on, accepting each days events, and weaving them into the larger fabric of historical patterns and themes.

Conversely, in a case such as this one where the subject studied is one in the "near past," the past is observable in the present. Not only is it a part of the present, but also the present serves to a certain extent as evidence for what the past was. Only 64 years separate this study from the end of the period under discussion, a period which in-and-of-itself showed amazing continuity from the 1870s down to 1920. Does the pattern of events in northern Thai church history described in this study make sense in light of those 64 years? What, in other words, is the underlying continuity between 1920 and 1984?

These questions have special importance for me. First of all, I believe that the condition and situation of the churches in northern Thailand has not changed in any fundamental sense since 1920. Secondly, I am convinced after my research into this subject that those who argue that the church here is the way it is because of Thai culture ("The Thai' are like 'that') have no historical grounds on which to base their assertions. The northern churches have the shape they now have because of the interaction of the Laos Mission with northern Thai culture, an interaction initiated and dominated by the mission. A different approach and attitude on its part would have resulted in a much different kind of church in the North.

In order to sustain these two points, I need to draw out, at least to some extent, the actual relationship of the life of the church under the Laos Mission

In November 1910, Arthur J. Brown wrote to the two missions in Siam suggesting that they consider joining one another in a "federative" relationship. He named a number of benefits, but the one that surely caught the eye of those in Siam indicated that the two missions would have a stronger voice in New York if they spoke with a joint voice. Within a year, members of both missions took up Brown's "suggestion" and proposed that the missions at least set up a joint council. As a first step, Campbell and Gillies met with two representatives of the Siam Mission in Bangkok in September 1912. They recommended that the joint conference become a Joint Council. That recommendation passed both missions, and the Joint Council met for the first time in July 1913 to consider plans for closer cooperation between the two missions; at its second meeting in 1913 the Joint Council recommended that each mission change its name to, respectively, the "North Siam Mission" and the "South Siam Mission." One reason for this change was that Prince Damrong, the Minister of the Interior and one of the most influential figures in the government, complained about the northern mission clinging to the word "Laos," which did not refer to any geographical or political division in the now fully united nation. The missions duly made these changes, and from December 1913 the Laos Mission became the North Siam Mission. (1)

Impetus for further change came from the visit of the high-powered official delegation of the Board led by Dr. Robert Speer in 1915. Speer urged the two missions to join together in full organic union. In his benchmark critical evaluation of the work of the mission (see Chapters 4 and 6, above), Speer raised an issue that at first seemed unrelated to mission union but soon became intimately related: the issue of administrative reform for the North Siam (Laos) Mission. He demonstrated the need for some far-reaching changes. A number of members of the mission had long felt that the mission desperately needed a better organizational structure, among them Dr. Briggs. Briggs expressed his delight in Speer's critique of the mission even as he continued to criticize it himself for its lack of cohesiveness, direction, and constancy in policy. He particularly agreed with Speer's highly revealing comment that the mission was twenty years behind the times. (2) [<154]

It took another three years for the issues of mission union and North Siam Mission administrative reform to become fully entangled. In 1918, a dejected and anxious Dr. Charles Crooks, a member of the mission's Executive Committee and a former Mission Secretary, wrote, "The method of conducting our work and business in the Mission has come to such a condition that we are going to precipitate an irremediable calamity upon ourselves." (3) Freeman and Taylor, veterans of the mission, joined Crooks in decrying the massively chaotic, inefficient, and divisive administrative "structure" of the mission, and these men now proposed a startling departure towards reform. As they saw it, the whole issue of full union with the South Siam Mission had become intertwined with the issue of reform, whereby the smaller northern stations, especially Lampang Station, favored union as a means to achieve mission reform. The majority in the Chiang Mat Station, on the other hand, opposed union and reform because the present semi-chaotic situation worked to the favor of the bigger, more influential Chiang Mai Station. It had more pull in the struggle for power, personnel, and money in the mission. The "unionists" proposed that if Chiang Mai continued to obstruct union each of the smaller stations should vote to leave the North Siam Mission and join the South Siam Mission, thus leaving Chiang Mai to herself! Things had become that tense, divided, and chaotic. (4)

This maneuver proved unnecessary. The sequence of events in late 1919 and early 1920 is unclear, but what is certain is that the Board voted that as of 1 April 1920 the two missions were to be united as one Siam Mission. (5) It took the rest of 1920 to effect the merger, but as of 1920 the Laos Mission came to an end and with it the history of the northern Thai church as a distinct thread in the history of the Church. [ See Author's Note ]

In his announcement to the Siam missions of the Board's decision to unite them, Brown ended with the following words:

With these words, Brown quietly aligned himself with those who sought union as a means of reform. How did things work out?

The report began by observing that the mission itself "just growed" without any plan or scheme behind it. It then went on to discuss the mission's "evangelistic" work by which the report meant the state of the Church of Christ in Siam. As in the days of the Laos Mission, this report continued the tradition that confused the tasks of pastoring and strengthening the church with evangelism. That did not change. The report observed that the Church of Christ in Siam,

Nothing had changed. The Church of Christ in Siam still lacked the leadership it needed to sustain its own life, to be self-reliant. And the mission still held to the paternalistic notion that the church could become self-reliant only through the initiative and leadership of the mission itself.

The survey then proceeded to a district-by-district survey of the Church of Christ in Siam. The three northern districts together comprised 75% of the total membership of the church. Of District One (Chiang Mai), the report said that the district had an important financial role to play in the larger church because the mission paid one-fourth of all of its salaries in Chiang Mai and that mission salaries comprised an important source of income for the church. The trend is clear: once again the old pre-1920 form held in which the church still depended on the mission for its sustenance: Patron... client.

Of District Two (Chiang Rai-Lampang), the report observed that, "In both places, but far more in Chieng Rai than Lampang, the policy of giving special

In its discussion of theological education, the report struggled with the issue of pastoral leadership for the churches. A few years previously, the churches engaged in yet another round of chapel building, mostly brick chapels. One would have expected, according to the report, that the churches should then turn to hiring pastors for themselves. They could afford pastors. In fact, the churches showed no interest in having pastoral leadership. They wanted village church schools for their children. In short, the local church leadership situation had not changed in the fourteen years since the end of the Laos Mission. Furthermore, the Survey Committee proposed to deal with the lack of local church pastoral leadership by training young men in the seminary to be both teachers and pastors. The report noted that few of the seminary's graduates lasted very long in pastorates.

With regards to institutional work, the report acknowledged that that work threatened to overwhelm "evangelistic" work because it presented more immediate needs. The report made the following crucial observation about the relationship of educational and medical mission work to "evangelistic" work: The government was forcing higher standards for both schools and hospitals while competing with them by its own system of education and medicine.

The missionary aim of leading men into the presence of God was hard to do, the report stated, in the face of the missionaries' daily routine.

Just as in the "old days" of the Laos Mission, the mission invested so much concern in maintaining its institutional establishment that the churches languished spiritually and administratively. While maintaining that the church could achieve self-reliance only through the leadership of the mission, the report also pointed here to the factor making such leadership ineffective: the mission retained its predisposition to put its institutions ahead of the church.

Nowhere were the mission's priorities more clearly described than in the 73 recommendations the Survey Committee presented to deal with the multitude of problems facing the church and mission. Of those, exactly ten had to do with strengthening the church, five had to do specifically with evangelism, and 56, that is 78%, dealt with institutional needs and development.

Finally, the set of maps appended to the report showed that the basic physical-geographical structure of the church did not change between 1920 and 1934. The mission established few new churches. By-and-large, the church remained a "regional church" composed of clusters of small communities dependent on distant centers for program and leadership.

Every other report of the era (8) substantiated this picture of the church as given in the 1934 Survey Committee report. The report made by George Trull to the Board in 1930 indicated that the now united mission displayed all of the weaknesses of misadministration, disunity, and squabbling that had so hindered the work of the old Laos Mission. (9) In the deepest, most profound sense, nothing had changed since 1920.

1970s. The history of the church in Siam/Thailand moved a long ways in the 45 years between 1934 and 1979. Depression. War. Post-War mission restoration. The dissolution of the American Presbyterian Mission into the Church of Christ in Thailand. The 1970s appeared to be a much different world.

The appearance, however, was deceiving. In 1979, the Rev. Brian Morgan in a report on his observations as a missionary described the state of the northern Thai churches he had visited over several years. He found those churches suffering in a state of spiritual malaise... few had pastors...few wanted them. Church leaders, lay and ordained, showed little understanding of the nature of the pastoral ministry... preaching tended

The most revealing "document," the most descriptive "statement" of the way in which the Laos Mission established and maintained the northern Thai church up until 1920 is the northern Thai church of today.

When I studied the history of modernization in Nan, I "discovered" the Rev. Hugh Taylor, a bluff, opinionated, but very competent almost grandfatherly figure. Then, when I studied the history of the Chiang Mat Mission Press and its role in northern Thai modernization, I "discovered" the Rev. David G. Collins, a quieter man than Taylor and harder to get to know through the records. Yet, he was obviously a talented man and a competent administrator. Both of these men loved and cared for the church. Both gave of themselves sacrificially on the field. In as much as I know them, I like them.

Yet...yet...yet, in the year that I have devoted to preparing this study, my opinion about their work with the church has changed considerably; and not just them, but to one degree or another, all of the members of the Laos Mission. Like most, I suppose, I really did assume that some flaw in the Thai personality was at the heart of the weak little churches I became involved with in the Church of Christ in Thailand. Up front I tried not to say that, but I think that at heart I really did believe it. But, then, I started this study. And the more I read the more my whole outlook shifted. Something went very wrong here, something that did not happen in many other fields to the same degree as it happened here. It was almost as if all of the folly of the international missionary movement was distilled and then decanted in one mission field, the Laos Mission. Maybe, after all, there was something to Briggs' charge that the Board sent its least likely candidates to Siam. (11).

The summary of everything that I read is this: the Laos Mission persisted in demeaning, decapitating, dismembering, and ignoring the church it was supposed to train up, to raise up.

In Acts 10: 1-11,18, Peter is brought to a very fundamental encounter with the weight of his Jewish heritage, his past. In a vision, God places before Peter all manner of "unclean" animals and orders Peter to eat them. No! Responds Peter. No! Unclean! Heathen! As a practicing Jew, Peter could not eat those things, which were legally and ritualistically impure. Three times God put these unclean animals in front of Peter and three times ordered him to eat. Peter refused. And each time God enjoined Peter not to call unclean what God declared to be clean. Immediately after the vision Peter is called off to the home of Cornelius, a heathen Roman Gentile, and there a most astounding thing takes place: the Holy Spirit indwells in a group of impure Gentiles just as if they were clean, pure! The lesson is clear: these Gentiles did not have to go through circumcision, did not have to place themselves under the Mosaic Law in order to be saved. They did not have to remove themselves from the Roman community and enter the Jewish community in order to be saved.

One of the great debates in the New Testament church was over the issue of who could be admitted to the church and under what circumstances. The "Judaizers" upheld the principle that in order to become a Christian one must become a Jew first: be circumcised, accept the Law, and worship with the Jewish community according to its measure. The New Testament finally rejects this view and put trust in God's saving Grace in its place.

So what? Its like this: trapped in a Presbyterian-ish legalism, the members of the Laos Mission failed to understand the biblical freedom of expression of faith that allowed a Roman to be a Roman and a Christian and that might, just might, allow a northern Thai convert to begin his journey of faith with comparisons of Phra Intra and Gabriel. The Laos Mission appointed itself the protector of the purity of the church in a way strikingly similar to the Judaizers, those who insisted on preserving the Jewish purity of the Christian sect. They failed to understand that their own faith profoundly reflected their culture and not some mysterious, extracultural absolute dogmatic

Peter, Paul, and the early church accepted God's call to freedom. In spite of their own deeply ingrained prejudice against dirty, unclean Gentiles, they allowed divine grace to transform their definition of who could belong to the church. That is precisely what did not happen in northern Siam. The Laos Mission preached and lived a religion of Law... do this! ... don't do that!

Legalism led the members of the Laos Mission down a tortured path of indirection and misdirection. It led them to define northern Siam as heathenish, the realm of Satan. It led them to mistrust the converts because of their former association with Satan. It led them to assume that they had to "Christianize" and "Americanize" the culture to free it from Satan which meant they had to establish schools and hospitals and a printing press. It led them to scamper across the countryside in a futile attempt to be everywhere at once saving everyone last week.

So like the Judaizers. They were so like the Judaizers, the ones who said that in order to be a Christian you must first be a Jew. The Laos Mission said by its actions and attitudes that in order to be a Christian you must sing like us, sit like us, preach like us, build like us, learn like us, believe like us, and, ultimately, be like us.

The Judaizers lived by the Jewish Law and in that Law saw their salvation. They believed that if they lived in certain ways, subscribed to certain beliefs they could by their own effort create for themselves a "right relationship" with God. By keeping the Law, they thought that they could maintain themselves as ritually pure individuals, which meant that they kept themselves pure and acceptable to God. The New Testament rejected this theological strand in the early church as failing to understand the ministry of Christ and the meaning of the Good News. The New Testament affirms that we cannot do anything to attain a state of purity in God's eyes. Indeed, the only thing we can do is to accept divine grace and trust in it... and we will be transformed (slowly, painfully, screaming and kicking, resisting) by it. Letting go of our desire to save ourselves and our constant concern for ourselves will free us from the conditions that make our "salvation" impossible.

The ultimate sadness one experiences in spending a year with the records of the Laos Mission is this: the realization that for all of their admirable qualities and intense dedication, the missionaries in the North from 1867 to 1920 were

It is ironic...having condemned northern Thai animism as satanic...the Laos Mission simply preached its own form of spirit propitiation in which it tried to convince God that by its purity of doctrine and behavior it deserved to be in his Church. Anyone who has worked with rural church people knows that the seeds of the Law have been planted very deeply in the church here. To sit...in a circle of church members... discussing Galatians. To say that nothing we can do will save us...to say that God gives us His grace freely...and to hear the response: "Oh, Acharn, you know that is not true. You Know That We Must Live Right Or We Will Go To Hell." In a church that is dominated by Law, Grace is considered a heresy!

While it may not be the place of the historian to offer advice about the future, I do feel that the historian must share his or her thoughts on the meaning of the past for the present.

My first point is that the history of the northern Thai church during the period of the Laos Mission leaves one feeling more hopeful than hopeless concerning the possibility of the church here. Robert Irwin demonstrated that the church here could be alive, faithful, and self-reliant. In four situations—the Training School, the Lamphun churches, the Nan Church, and the Phrae Church—he created conditions, which allowed the northern Thai church to show that it did have the resources to do for itself what the mission could not do for it. The fact that, finally, nothing ever came of his ministry in the North was not the failure of the church but of the mission. Particularly in the case of Phrae, there is no question but what the majority in the mission considered him naïve and foolish. The whole fabric of northern Thai church history in that period shows that he was quite correct in his estimation of the ability of the church to run

The present state of the church in northern Thailand has very little to do with northern Thai culture. There is nothing in the culture that mitigates the growth of a vital Christian church in the North. Time-and-again, I have heard both foreigners working with the Church of Christ in Thailand and members of the C.C.T. themselves conclude that some weakness in the church reveals a Thai cultural trait. Thus, they argue that it is simply "the Thai way" to not have capable local pastors... Rubbish! The church today does not have such a system because of specific events and actions in the years from 1895 onwards that had only to do with the unwarranted prejudices of the Laos Mission. The fact that few northern Thai churches have had regular pastoral care is not indicative of the nature of Thai culture. It is a heritage of the missionary past. And so on... The church today is legalistic, some argue, because it is still trapped in Buddhist culture. Nonsense! The early church was far more trapped in an aggressive legalistic culture and was still discovered by Grace. The legalism of the church in the North is part of its missionary heritage. Others will say that the church has failed to be a vitally growing, evangelistic force because "the Thais" are not aggressive enough, they lack fire. Ridiculous! Look to the missionary past and the manner in which the Laos Mission failed to cultivate a vital church that could carry on its own evangelism.

The fact, in the end, is that the human cultures found in every nation and people do limit us and hamper us in our journey towards trust in divine grace. There is nothing magical or strange in that. Eventually, the whole Thai church must come to grips with the particular limitations that its real culture actually imposes upon it. My point is this: virtually all of those things, which people now believe are limitations on the church imposed by its culture, are nothing of the sort. In nearly every case, they represent only excuses people make to explain things out of their ignorance of the church's past.

The question that remains to be explored is the question of why the church in Thailand, in this case the Church of Christ in Thailand, has not yet discovered a strong, creative, faithful life, particularly at the local level. The second point I want to make here is that in spite of the hope I alluded to above the church still faces serious historical limitations on its witness within Thai society.

One. The churches continue to be alienated from their culture, walled off in their own ghettoes, their own institutions, their own vocabularies and rituals. Whether individual Christians believe it or not, the church continues to act as if Thai culture is incompatible with Christian faith. It has not yet found a way to communicate the Gospel to Thai society that is both meaningful and liberating for that society. It immediately rejects for use in Christian circles any form or item that it identifies as "Buddhist," thus cutting itself off from the hearts of other people. I have often told the story of a young boy I met in Bangkok while on a search for a particular home: he said to me, "A lot of Christians live around here." Just to make a little conversation with the boy, I asked him, "And what about you? Are you a Christian?" He replied, "No, I'm a Thai." Until the church faces the fact that it is still a foreigner's religion in the eyes of the people, it cannot witness to the Cross in this society. Until the day comes when the church ceases to act as if its Buddhists neighbors are "heathen," the church will not be able to tell them of Christ's love in a meaningful and redemptive fashion.

Two. The stories one continues to hear today indicate that the contemporary convert to Christianity still experiences alienation from family and friends in many instances. Those stories suggest that many families still live in tension. Many nominal Christians find it easier to just melt back into the general crowd of nominal Buddhists.

Three. One continues to note in the church and its institutions a ready willingness to use foreign money for things that it cannot do for itself. At a deeper level, it is quite noticeable that Thai Christians frequently assume

Four. The old Laos Mission stressed Law. Grace has not yet become operative in the life of the Thai church. Just as the Laos Mission, being less than pure, tried to protect the purity of the church, so now the church itself is still trying to attain its own purity by holding to legalistic patterns (at least, outwardly).

Five. The northern Thai church today, as Morgan observed above, continues to preach and conduct itself in an evangelistic manner. Its ideal is rapid growth though it has had no experience of rapid growth except in isolated instances since before 1920. One of its main activities remains the annual evangelistic services of the institutions and some churches. There is no pastoral ideal...it has been driven out by the incessant need to talk/shout/yell about Christ. At weddings, funerals, or wherever a group of dedicated Christians has "a shot" at a bunch of Buddhists one is likely to hear verbal witnessing for Christ. The church still does not know how to think of itself in any terms but those of a missionary society. And for just as long as it does not understand itself as a church with a full life to live, just so long will its evangelism fail—along with the rest of its life.

Six. One of the most serious weaknesses of the Laos Mission throughout its history was that it failed to localize church leadership. Rather, it depended on a centralized urban leadership to go out to the churches—when they had time. In fact, the present-day rural churches still depend for program and leadership upon that urban leadership, which is located largely in the big city institutions. Local church leadership remains largely ineffective, without any clear idea what it should do or how it should do it. Many churches still depend on urban clergymen to perform the sacraments—when they can get around to it. The visit of the big city cleric to the rural church is treated as a big event. While the "Princes of the Church" may no longer be tall, thick, and white, they still do wear urban clerical garb and live far from the lives of the rural churches. One is constantly aware of how little effective voice the rural churches

They call it the "dead hand of the past", but it is more like a potent, living fist.

For as long as the churches fail to deal with this past, the serious limitations that the Laos Mission imposed upon the church—and which the church acceded to, usually without complaint—will continue to hamper its ministry, denude it of effective leadership, and leave it the ugly step-sister of the all-powerful institutions, educational and medical.

For the most part, I do not believe that history offers us "lessons" by which we profit. Rather, it tells us about ourselves. It is the honest back-looking search for understanding for the sake of looking forward. Yet, I do think that the history of the northern Thai church may well contain one lesson for the present. If so, it is this: the only place where one can effectively begin to assist the church in Northern Thailand to a life more faithful to its calling is by working in, with, and through local churches. For all of its weaknesses, the church remains the primary witness to the core of love at the center of reality that we Christians call "God" without much understanding of what we might mean by the word. Thus, the church here can be the church only as it rids itself of the influence of the so-called "Christian" institutions. It will be the church only when it raises up its own leadership that resides in the churches. It will be the church only as it ends its dependence on foreign money, foreign ideas, foreign theologies and expressions of faith.

In a sense, it is easy to give ringing calls for Reform! Change! And with some study, it is relatively easy to describe, as I have tried to do here, why the churches in the North are facing the problems they are now facing: The disconcerting thing is, however, that when one begins to consider specific ways by which the present situation can change one discovers that the patterns of the past make effective changes extremely difficult. The past is a living past that has insinuated itself into our present and created a portion of the present out of its own cloth. It has left to the present organizational and behavioral structures that have a great stake in-things-as-they-now-are. Thus, one necessity for the reformation of the northern church is that the whole role of the institutions be reevaluated and reduced. Yet, the very ones most likely to resist reducing the place of the institutions are the ones who now dominate the councils of

Thus, one cannot help but feel both hopeful and pessimistic about the future of the churches in northern Thailand (and the whole country). They can have a vital, liberating, servant-oriented ministry in their society. The only thing that prevents that witness from taking place is the heritage of the church in which it had to take second-place to many other concerns that seemed to strengthen it when, in fact, they only distracted church leadership from its tasks of pastoring and nurturing the community.

NEW DIRECTIONS... we have to think in terms of new directions. Not just in laying big plans, but in how church leaders use time. Begin with the local church. Always begin with the local church. What is it like? What are its needs? Let me say just one more time: start with the local church: teach it the Bible, teach it the meaning of ministry, and show it how to structure its own life and activities meaningfully. Seek new modes of worship. By holding to this starting point, those in positions of responsibility in the churches will already begin to change the deadening patterns of the past.

The thing I truly enjoy about the study of history is that once having done the research on a particular topic one realizes how many more topics there are to be studied, avenues to travel down from that original topic. Let me close this book by urging on you, my patient readers, the need for much, much more study of Thai church history. There are points at which this present study is so superficial and inadequate compared with our need to know that I despair at ever getting to the heart of things. If you want to know the truth, I did not write all of this so much to answer your questions as I did to open up the possibility of asking further questions and engaging in more debate. There is so much the church needs to know — but it does not yet know.