North Carolina Presbyterian online

The last posting on a 1904 article in the Boston Evening Transcript (here) concerning the state of Christianity in Siam noted the importance of the religious and secular press as a source for the study of the church in Siam up to the 1920s.  That thought inspired me to see if the North Carolina Presbyterian is available online, and it turns out that it is. The North Carolina Presbyterian was a nineteenth-century publication that is a key source for the study of the Laos Mission from it inception in 1867 into the 1890s.  The Rev. Dr. Daniel McGilvary was from North Carolina and sent numerous letters and quite a few articles back to the publication over the years, which thus contains data available nowhere else about the mission, its churches, and its personnel.  The paper is also an important source for the study of northern Thai history generally.

It turns out that almost all of the issues of the North Carolina Presbyterian are available online at the Internet Archive.  They are not listed there in order, however, and I have taken the liberty of listing them chronologically beginning with the first available year 1861 until the paper ceased publication in 1898.  Linked to An English-Language Bibliography of Materials Related to Christianity in Thailand, you can access the list (here).

Boston Evening Transcript Article

In its Last Edition for Saturday, 21 May 1904, page 28, the Boston Evening Transcript published an article entitled, "Christianity in Siam," which provides commentary based on a "report to the American Bible Society from its agency in Siam."  In the summary sub-headings the contents of the article are described as including: "The Present King Favorable to Missionaries—Bible Circulation Helped by Railroad—New Protestant Church to Be Built at Bangkok."  This article appeared on the second page of a Google search, "siam protestant."

A few random thoughts:

• For those trolling the Web for sources relevant to Christianity in Thailand, it is important to use as many different combinations of search terms as one can think of.  I've spent many hours in the last couple of years doing just that and continue to come up with new sources nearly every time.  Obviously, there is still a large amount of primary material unavailable online and most more recent publications are unavailable, but even so the Web is a rich source of data—if one can find it.
• This article appeared in a "secular" newspaper,  Boston Evening Transcript, at the turn of the 20th century at a time when the press, secular and religious, was still an important source of missionary and foreign church news.  For the nineteenth century, that press provides an immense amount of crucial data for mission and church work in Siam.
• Much of the focus of this particular article is on "the Laos people," meaning the people of Bangkok's northern dependencies, which in 1904 were being increasingly integrated into the Siamese state.  It documents on the ongoing need, as seen by the ABS, for translating the whole Bible in northern Thai, a task that in fact was never completed.

I should note, finally, that I won't include this source in this website's "English-Language Bibliography of Materials Related to Christianity in Thailand," because it is not significant enough for inclusion.  It is too brief, and it is a secondary source.  Including all of the article on Christianity in Siam is simply not an option for the bibliography, but I did want to mention it here as an example of what is "out there" on the Web.

Statistics of Church Growth in Thailand

Last month, June, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, release a report entitled, "Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020."  The report presents a statistical picture of the changing nature of global religiosity, which among other things finds atheism and agnosticism on the decline worldwide even as they grow in Europe and North America.  For our purposes here, the report presents a snapshot of the growth of the Christian religion in Southeast Asia generally and Thailand in particular, which puts Thai church growth in both historical and global context.

According to the report (p. 40), Christianity in Southeast Asia has grown from 50.4 million adherents in 1970 to an estimated 153.2 million by 2020, a three-fold increase in fifty years.  As a percentage of the total population of Southeast Asia, Christianity will have increased from 17.7% in 1970 to an estimated 23.4% in 2020.  The figures for Thailand show 240,000 Christians in 1970 and 946,000 estimated for 2020.  As a percentage of the total Thailand population, Christianity will have increased from 0.7% of the population in 1970 to an estimated 1.3% in 2020.  That is an average annual growth rate of 2.78%, which ranks 7th of the 11 nations of Southeast Asia.  Cambodia had the highest annual growth rate (5.87%) and Vietnam the lowest (2.03%).  It should be noted that Thailand has by far-and-away the smallest percentage of Christians (1.3%) of any nation in Southeast Asia.  Laos (3.3%) and Cambodia (3.6%) are the next lowest in total numbers of Christians as a percentage of the total population.

No one familiar with the church in Thailand will be surprised by these figures.  If they could be adjusted to include ethnic Thais alone, factoring out the tribal churches, the difference between Thailand and the other nations of its region would be even greater.  It remains true today as it has for centuries that Thai culture is quietly and impressively resistant to Christianity.  For as long as Christianity in Thailand remains essentially alien to Thai society (that is infected with Western dualist and exclusivist ideologies) there is not likely to be any change in the level or effectiveness of Thai resistance to it.

McGilvary in America and Siam

I am currently working through David Bebbington's, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and plan to eventually do a book review on it. It is an excellent study in revivalism, and anyone interested in the history of revivals in Europe, North America, and Australia would do well to get a copy. The book contains a series of case studies arranged chronologically beginning in Texas in 1841 and ending in Nova Scotia in 1880. The fourth study is of a revival led by Daniel McGilvary in the Union Church, Moore County, North Carolina, in 1857, not long before he sailed to Bangkok to take up his life's work in Siam and "Laos" (today's northern Siam). Bebbington's chapter on this revival is, thus, an important addition to the literature on the history of Presbyterian missions and Protestantism in Thailand.

As one example of that importance, Bebbington notes that one of the marks of the revival at Union Church as a distinctively Presbyterian revival was the dominant role of McGilvary as pastor.  Bebbington writes, "To a large extent McGilvary personally shaped the revival.  Despite often involving able elders, Presbyterian life was dominated by ministers."  Bebbington goes on to note that Presbyterian revivals thus depended upon the character of the clergy involved and the quality of their pastoral leadership (p. 156).

In the opening chapters of Protestant church history in Siam, one of the most noticeable and significant characteristics of Presbyterian missions was the way in which its missionary clergy dominated local congregations.  Whereas the first generation of Baptist missionaries took a more collegial approach to church life, Presbyterian mission churches were wholly dependent on their missionary pastors for the quality of their congregational life.  It is one of the key themes of my research into the 19th and early 20th century history of the Thai churches that the overwhelming dominance Presbyterian missionaries exercised over Thai and northern Thai church life hampered the emergence of a truly indigenous Protestant movement in Siam and its northern principalities.  Indigenization of the gospel took place but mostly in subterranean ways and in spite of church (missionary) leadership.

If Bebbington is correct, the dominance of Presbyterian missionary clergy over the Thai church said far more about the cultural practices of American Presbyterianism than it did about the people of Siam and the northern states.  In both North Carolina and in the North of Siam, in sum, the personality, beliefs, attitudes, and values of the Rev. Daniel McGilvary were an important factor in the events that transpired in both of those places.  Bebbington's chapter on the revival at Union Church provides us with important details on the origins of McGilvary's approach to ministry and the baggage he brought with him to Siam.

McFarland Dictionaries

Still another story waiting to be written in Protestant missionary history in Thailand is the impact the earlier generations of missionaries had on the modernization of the central Thai (Siamese) language.  They produced the first dictionaries and were among the first Westerners to study the language.  In the 19th and 20th centuries, two of the key figures in this story were the Rev. S. G. McFarland, a Presbyterian missionary, and his son, George B. McFarland.  Some of the work that they produced can be found online.  These include:

• McFarland, George Bradley. English-Siamese Dictionary. Bangkok: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1903. Available online at the Internet Archive (here).
• McFarland, George Bradley. English-Siamese Dictionary. Bangkok: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1916. Available online at the Internet Archive (here).
• McFarland, George Bradley. English-Siamese Dictionary. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1944. Available online at the Google Books (here).
• McFarland, George Bradley. An English-Siamese Pronouncing Hand. 2nd ed. Bangkok: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1900. Available online at the Internet Archive (here).

McGilvary & Presbyterian Revivalism

Often seen as a hero of the international missionary movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Daniel McGilvary has remained largely unknown in scholarly circles generally.  That is a loss for those engaged in the study of Thai church history and the study of the missionary role in Westernization in Siam.  It means we are left to our own devices to piece together his background and its relationship to his long missionary career in Siam.  Thus, David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) comes as a very pleasant surprise. Bebbington devotes a whole chapter (Chapter Six, “Experience and Good Order: Presbyterian Revival in North Carolina”) to the 1857 revival that took place in Union Church, Moore County, North Carolina, which McGilvary was serving as pastor while waiting to be commissioned as a missionary to Siam.  He especially highlights the differences between Presbyterian revivalism and that of other more enthusiastic styles of frontier revivalism.  The Presbyterians were more restrained and put a strong emphasis on orderliness in their revivals.  The Union Church revival was certainly of that kind.

It is also good to see Bebbington making use of one of the key sources for 19th century Presbyterian missions in Siam's northern dependencies, The North Carolina Presbyterian.  McGilvary stayed in close touch with that publication even though it was published by the Southern Presbyterian Church, from which he had withdrawn at the beginning of the American Civil War.  As a result, it contains an invaluable record of northern Thai church history in the 19th century.

In sum, it is good to see the larger world of scholarship studying important figures in the history of the church in Thailand from other perspectives and in other contexts.  Their work can only enrich our understanding of the history of the church in Thailand.

The Vinton Book

One source of brief biographies for the first generation of Protestant missionaries in Siam is found in the "Vinton Book," a description of which is copied from the introduction to the book, below.   The biographical sketches cover only missionaries connected with the Siam Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and contain just dates and events.  These sketches, however, provide information for missionaries who served only briefly in Siam and for whom there is little biographical information.  I discovered this source by searching the Web for "congregational missionaries siam."

"Reverend John A. Vinton, then of South Boston, later of Winchester, Massachusetts, compiled in 1869 brief biographies of missionaries of the American Board from the beginning of the Board's history till 1869, writing them in longhand in a blank book.
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"Mr. Vinton died November 13, 1877
The biographies were brought down to 1878 by Dr. Alfred 0. Treat.
From 1878 to 1886 the notices were prepared by Miss A.M.Chapin.
In copying the Vinton Book, we have divided it into [four] volumes.
Volume 1 covers the Missions in:-
AFRICA
ASIA: Eastern, China, Japan
ASIA: Southern, India and Ceylon
PAPAL LANDS"