Church Growth in Thailand - Why So Slow?
One of the perennial questions about Christianity in Thailand is why the church has traditionally grown so slowly compared to other countries where Protestant missionaries arrived around the same time. Ultimately, we don’t know for sure why the church grows more slowly or more quickly in a given place. The Holy Spirit blows where He wills and we don’t know where He will move or when (John 3:8). However, God does use people and methods in his work. So, from a human perspective, it is worth considering some of the factors why church growth has been slow in Thailand.
A primary reason for slow church growth has been a strong association of Buddhism with national identity. This has been true for hundreds of years but received a great boost in the early 20th century when Buddhism began to be strongly promoted as a mark of national pride. Thai leaders were eager to modernize their country in the areas of education, medicine, communication, transportation, etc. but becoming more modern did not mean becoming more secular. Buddhism has always been retained as a force for unifying the people of Thailand. As the Thai say, “To be Thai is to be Buddhist.” In China and Korea, which have both seen strong church growth, no single religion has been tied to being a loyal citizen. The strongest church growth in Thailand has been in the North where minority tribal groups with their own cultural identity have been historically influenced more by local animistic beliefs than Buddhism.
How Two World Wars and Secularism Have Benefitted the Western Missionary Movement
World War I and II were greatly disruptive to missionary work worldwide but they were also a blessing in disguise to the missionary cause. For years, Western missionaries had claimed that the superiority of Western civilization was due to Christianity. They thought this was a great apologetic for why non-Christian people in other parts of the world should believe in Christianity.
See what fruit Christianity has borne in Christian nations?
You too can have that if you believe in Christ!
Well, the rest of the world certainly did see as the countries of Europe, the supposed pinnacle of human civilization, tore each other apart. So that apologetic was not very useful anymore if it ever was.
When the rug was pulled out from under the feet of this missionary apologetic, missionaries were humbled and forced to ask themselves “What IS the fruit of the gospel?” and “What ARE the real benefits of believing in Christ that we can tell non-Christian people?” The two world wars forced missionaries to draw a sharper dividing line between Christian faith and Western civilization; And that was a helpful thing because missionaries should be preaching the glories of Christ and not the glories of their home countries as supposed proof of the glories of Christ.
Bats, Cats, Rats and COVID-19 ~ a Missionary’s Perspective
Guest post by Larry Dinkins
Despite being the most scrutinized pandemic in history, the Corona Virus leaves numerous questions unanswered. Many of these questions will no doubt remain unanswered, but there is one that topped the list with SARS as well as Ebola and remains the key question with this present virus: Precisely how did Covid-19 originate? The answer to this $64,000 question could go a long way in helping remove the source of the next potentially devastating global pandemic. Helping scientists in this task has been the work done by Chinese researchers in 2017 who traced the last Corona type pandemic (SARS) “ … through the intermediary of civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.”[1] In the case of Covid-19 most research points to the wet-markets of Wuhan province that sell live animals like bats and pangolins. The mention of people eating such exotic animals is actually addressed in the Old Testament and has caused me to look afresh at what the Bible has to say about Old Testament dietary laws.
Book Review - The Unfinished Mission in Thailand by Samuel Kim
Kim, Samuel I., The Unfinished Mission in Thailand: The Uncertain Christian Impact on the Buddhist Heartland, Seoul: East-West Center for Missions Research and Development, 1980
There are not too many books on the history of the church in Thailand and my most common go-to books are S.G. McFarland’s Historical Sketch of Protestant Missions 1828-1928 and Alex Smith’s Siamese Gold, which brings the story of the Thai church up to 1982. Both books, however, do a better job with chronicling earlier Thai church history (pre-WWII) than post-war. Truth be told, Smith’s book does cover the post-war period, though he provides more information on evangelical missions working apart from the Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT) than he does the CCT itself. Kenneth Wells’ History of Protestant Work in Thailand, 1828-1958 is somewhat useful if you want an official sanitized version of the American Presbyterian Mission and CCT in the post-war period but if you compare Wells’ book with Samuel Kim’s The Unfinished Mission in Thailand: The Uncertain Christian Impact on the Buddhist Heartland, it becomes immediately obvious that there is a lot of dirty laundry that Wells left out.
Samuel Kim begins his book with a couple of general chapters discussing Thailand, Buddhism, and the history of Christian missions in Thailand up through WWII, most of which you can easily find in the other books I’ve just mentioned. However, beginning with chapter 3, he begins discussing tensions between the American Presbyterian missionaries and Thai Christians leaders after World War II up through the late 1970s. It is this second part of the book that is the most valuable and forms Kim’s unique contribution to understanding the history of Christianity in Thailand.
"Siam, Land of the White Elephant" - Video of American Presbyterian Mission & Thai churches, schools in 1932
In January 1932, the Publication Department of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church (USA) sent Rev. Henri R. Rabb, a missionary in India, to visit Thailand to gather footage to make a short film about Presbyterian missions there. Arriving on Feb 2nd with his wife and 8-year-old son, Rabb visited Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Paul Eakin, the executive secretary of the Siam Mission, assigned Rev. Paul Fuller to assist Rabb in Bangkok, and Dr. D.R. Collier to assist him in Chiang Mai.
My Ph.D Thesis... in One Image
When people hear that I am working on a Ph.D, they inevitably want to know what it is about. Doctoral theses, by nature, are very specific and are often challenging to explain succinctly to people in a way that is both clear and understandable.
But recently I was presented with the challenge of summing up my Ph.D research in a poster. Is that even possible?
Every year, the city of Edinburgh holds a “Doors Open Day” where historic buildings that are not normally open to the public open their doors and let people in to have a look. New College, the home of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh decided to participate this year, and the director of postgraduate studies put out the call for volunteers to produce posters of their Ph.D research to be hung up inside the New College building for visitors to look at on Doors Open Day. There weren’t too many rules for how to do the poster, except that it needed to interesting and attractive for the general public wandering through the building who might not know anything about the field we are studying.
It enjoyed looking at the various posters from other students and faculty. I was fairly happy with how my own poster turned out too so I thought I would share it here on my blog for those who are curious to know what I am spending my time working on here in Edinburgh and how it relates to my missionary work in Thailand.
I appreciate that few people actually read Ph.D theses but over time I hope to produce various articles, blogs, etc. that will give little nuggets of useful info and insight into the things that I have discovered with the hope that the fruit of my research will benefit others. This poster doesn’t include everything that will appear in my finished thesis but I hope that it serves as a taster of some of the major themes that I am looking at.
Click here to view the full-size image
