Presbyterian Missionaries Biographical Data Online

One of the most useful resources available to me as a researcher into Thai church history remains a set of biographical data sheets of Presbyterian missionaries prepared in the early 1950s by the Rev. Paul Eakin and contained in his papers at the Payap University Archives in Chiang Mai.  If I remember correctly, Eakin was in the process of writing a history of Presbyterian missions in Thailand and compiled these data sheets partly to that end.  There is no evidence that he ever actually wrote that history, unfortunately.  In any event, the Payap University Archives has entered Eakin's data into a data base, which is available online (here).  Only selected portions of the data has been entered, and it appears that the archives is still "in process" as not all of the entries in Eakin's files appear (as yet) in the data base.  Still, it is good that this information is available more generally, and the archives is to be commended for making the effort to put it online.

WELS History in Thailand

One of the great challenges that will face the historian who tackles Thai Protestant history after World War II is the proliferation of foreign mission agencies working in Thailand.  They come from around the world and their personnel speak a diversity of languages, represent a variety of cultures, and run the gamut of theological persuasions, though they tend to be theologically conservative, although not exclusively so.  Recently, I came across information on the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) mission in Thailand, a mission that I personally have been only vaguely aware of.  There is little historical information on this mission widely available, and I have taken the liberty of turning two relevant pages into a four-page pdf, which is available (here) and cited in the bibliography of materials related to Christianity in Thailand.  If you are interested in the links to the information, they are cited at the end of the pdf.

This is the first time, as far as I can remember, that I have actually created a somewhat artificial document and placed it in the bibliography. I don't plan to make a habit of it.  However, the goal here is always to facilitate access to information about the church's past in Thailand, and this "artificial" document from the WELS mission does that.

Slow and not even Steady

Being a full-time pastor seems to fill most days with the variety of duties associated with the office, which has meant that I have little time or energy for Thai church historical work at this point.  And that, in turn, means that my translation of A History of Pastoral Care in the Church of Christ in Thailand is proceeding at an almost tortuously slow pace.  Yet, the pace does continue, and this morning I reached page 95 (out of 130 total pages).  As histories go, it is rather sparse, no citations, no bibliography, and the translation is not the best English I've ever written, but I am convinced that it is an important "contribution" to the historiographical literature on Thai church history.  First, its focus is the churches rather than the missionaries, although they obviously figure prominently in the story it tells.  Second, it explores territory that was new for me when it was written nearly 20 years ago, namely the history of the churches outside of the North and of other denominations.  It thus has the virtue of including, however briefly, something of the history of the Karen Baptist churches in northern Thailand.

I only mention this here to remind the extremely modest readership of this blog that the translation of the History of Pastoral Care is proceeding and, since it is nearly three-fourths complete does already include a goodly portion of the history of Protestant pastoral care up to the year 1960. [Update: as of June 18th, I have reached page 108 of the 130 pages - still slow, but a little steadier than previously!]

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.