About Face

Rethinking Face for 21st Century Mission

Christopher L. Flanders

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781608995233
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275323
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

"For Thais, face is a fact, " writes Flanders. However, "whether in theology, evangelism, or issues involving sin, salvation, or atonement, Thai Christians and missionaries alike seem either uninterested in or possibly incapable of addressing issues related to face. This glaring incongruity between the value of face for Thais and the lack of intentional engagement within the Thai Christian community is deeply troubling."Surely, such a lack of careful attention to face is a dangerous posture. Uncritical views of face, furtively attaching to the theology of the Thai church, are potentially detrimental for its life and mission. Such seems to be an unavoidable situation without proper attention to face. Additionally, to ignore face is to run the risk of missing valuable cultural resources, implicit in the Thai experience of face, for the critical task of authentic Thai theological reflection."This lack of engagement with face raises critical issues with which we must wrestle. How is it that such a central sociocultural issue has not been a more significant part of the Thai Christian vocabulary or experience? How pervasive are these negative attitudes regarding face? What lies behind them? Might this lack of self-conscious engagement with face have any relationship to the persistent Thai perception of Christianity as a foreign, Western religion? How should Christians understand this notion of face and how it relates to the ways we understand and proclaim the gospel?"

Part 1

The Loss of Face

1

Cultural Disconnect and the Foreignness of Thai Christianity

A marked foreign shape has defined Christianity throughout its short history in Thailand. This story is unquestionably a complex one, involving a great number of factors. Though not every cause is evident, commentators from various disciplines have observed this persistent feature of Thai Christianity. Many have offered thorough and eloquent treatments.1 Indeed, this disconnect between Christian expressions and the Thai culture has been so deep that for many Thais, the notions of Christian and Thai stand as mutually exclusive, antipodal points.

I recount this story of cultural disconnect between the gospel and Thai culture through the dual lenses of soteriology and face. That is, I will illustrate this disconnect from the vantage point of the theology of salvation of the Thai church and also how missionaries interacted with Thai culture in the area of face. In doing so, I will offer only a short account establishing this foreign shape since a fuller discussion would extend far beyond the more modest scope of this project. I will then probe the sources of this disconnect and illustrate how we can see such through soteriology and face.

An anecdote from a prominent historian of the Thai church illustrates well the tension and disconnect between Christian and Thai identity.

I have often told the story of a young boy I met 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 this young boy, I asked him, “And what about you, youngster? Are you a Christian?” He replied, “No, I’m a Thai.” (Swanson 1984:164)

The personal anecdote Swanson offers points to this basic polarity that exists for many between being Christian and being Thai.

Throughout the history of Thai Protestantism,2 missionaries have continued to create and cultivate a continuing dependency on foreign religious expressions, in particular, those of a Western conservative evangelical kind (Swanson 1999:xix). Early missionaries demonstrated a stark rejection of Thai culture, questioned the validity and depth of Thai conversions, and generally distrusted the ability of Thai Christians to control the affairs of their own churches. Because of this disconnect, missionaries could “not surrender the reins” (Acocella 2001:xvi). This pervasive foreignness was not a problem about which most were aware until the 1930s (Maen 1979:386). Therefore, for more than one hundred years, there was no substantive attempt to counteract or reduce this foreignness of Thai Christianity (1979:387). Even when there were efforts to work against this foreignness, it was frequently a surface-level solution. The occasional appeal for acculturation actually was often “merely a modification of the institutional Church regulations by which Thai Christians could participate in Thai cultural activities” (1979:387–88).

The Zimmerman Report

A 1928 conference initiated by John R. Mott and held in Bangkok was a pivotal event for the eventual formation of the Siamese National Christian Council. One outcome of this conference was the recruiting of Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman to produce a national survey of the church in Thailand. Although his major task was a comprehensive national agricultural survey, which the Thai government commissioned, Zimmerman’s report on the status of the Thai church offers an important window into Thai Protestant Christianity, one hundred years after its inception.

This 1931 document, the “Zimmerman Report,”3 noted two specific concerns. First, it lamented the fact that the Christian church in Thailand was not growing as it should numerically. Second, in sometimes cutting language, the report highlighted the serious disjuncture that existed between the Thai Christian communities and the surrounding culture, this some one hundred years after missionary activity had first begun.

The report noted how Christianity had come as essentially a Western cultural enterprise. Western expansion went hand in hand with church growth as the missionaries “did not create a Siamese Christian church but made the converts members of a Western church” (Zimmerman and McFarland 1931:19). That there were likely “thousands of fine spirits” who accepted the doctrines of Christianity and even followed Christian ethics to some degree but could not join such a “foreign” religion was an indictment of the profoundly Western shape of the Thai church. This meant that becoming a Christian essentially required local Thais to become “almost completely de-nationalized and de-culturalized from (the convert’s) own social system” (1931:14). As the report noted, “the man who joins the church must inevitably ‘lose face’” (1931:16).

Though there have been changes in recent practice (e.g., a more prominent role granted to Thai leaders in the church), the philosophical and theological assumptions of the missionaries from this early period continue to circumscribe the organizational structures, practices, and theology of Thai churches. Even recent well-intentioned attempts to contextualize the gospel have often been unconscious efforts to adapt a Western missionary religion to Thai social and cultural realities (Swanson 2002a:40).

Anthropologist Charles F. Keyes, for example, notes that until quite recently Christianity “has never been able to shed its mantle of ‘foreignness.’” So much is this the case that “even those Thai who have faced profound crises of power have not found in Christianity a vision of a moral community that could be Thai” (Keyes 1993:277). Another anthropologist, who has focused upon missionary interaction with Thai culture, argues that until very recently the difference between the worldviews of Thai and missionary constitutes “an unbridgeable chasm” (Cohen 1990:341). Though perhaps overstated, such illustrates a fundamental truth. Even in northern Thailand, where early missionaries met with the greatest numerical success, Christianity continued to be decidedly foreign at many levels (Swanson 2003:177). Maen notes that “not a single missionary has really been criticized of having ‘Siamized’ or Buddhistized’ Christianity as the early Church apologists were of having ‘Hellenized’ it” (Maen 1979:163).

Contemporary missiologists also concur, lamenting the essentially Western structure of Thai Christianity. The Thai church continues as a struggling religious minority marked by a continual wrestling with its “westernity” (Wisely 1984:163; Gustafson 1987). As recently as 1997, research showed that because of strongly anti-syncretistic perspectives, attitudes among missionaries in Thailand toward appropriating Thai culture in Christian witness often bordered on antipathy (Nantachai 1997:314). Many continue to believe that Thai culture, as a Buddhist culture, is essentially satanic, evil, and corrupted (1997:314–15).

Admittedly, there does seem to be some moderation in recent years. There have been “subtle accommodations,” yet these fall short of constituting any fundamental change (Cohen 1990:343, 347). It is also increasingly clear that there exists a tacit Thai “folk” theology at work among Thai churches in spite of much foreignness and continuing missionary influence.4 Yet, in many ways, present-day missionaries still display many of the ideas and attitudes of those of earlier generations. Despite some encouraging modulations, Thai Christianity has yet to lose this pervasive foreign face.

This disconnect has yielded serious consequences. Clearly, such has been at the heart of the general lack in the contemporary Thai church of authentic Thai theology. Thai churches, to this day, have developed no self-conscious Thai theological tradition. Rather, Thai Christians seem content simply to repeat the theology of their missionary founders. “The conservative missionary mentality absolutely forbids dialogue with the culture, therefore the church has never gained the ability to reflect on what it wants to take, wants to eschew, wants to put aside for further reflection” (Swanson 2002b). Foreign missionaries continue to hold almost complete control over theological development and efforts of indigenization (Kim 1980:209). Christian bookstores in Thailand carry the latest translated versions of the works of contemporary evangelical authors such as Peter Wagner, James Dobson, and Max Lucado, yet there continues to be a dearth of Thai-produced theological material.

This disconnect also appears to have had a material effect upon church growth. That is, such foreignness continues to be, at least in part, an obstacle that keeps Thais from following Jesus. Based upon a limited survey sample, Philip J. Hughes discovered that among those who had formerly been Buddhist, the greatest obstacle to becoming a Christian was that Christianity was “not Thai” (Hughes 1996:6).

Missionary Theories of Culture

In 1887, pioneer missionary Daniel McGilvary was speaking with a group of northern Thai people. Another missionary who was also present, W. Clifton Dodd, recounted in a letter how the missionary teacher McGilvary engaged these unknowing, “heathen” students in discussion. Talk in generalities eventually turned to the topic of religion. As McGilvary began to converse more pointedly about the Christian faith, a profound shift in communication dynamics occurred. “Soon,” Dodd remarked in approving tone, “the conversation became a monologue” (Dodd 1888:493). This observation by Dodd encapsulates perfectly the missionary approach characteristic not only of the early period of missionaries, as Dodd and McGilvary represent, but also of many who would follow. Underlying this missionary “monologue” were notions of culture, the gospel, and missionary practice that would ultimately lead to quite unintended consequences. Dodd’s remark was both lamentably prescient and tragically ironic. The missionary “monologue” of which he spoke signaled a deep disconnect with Thai culture, the effects of which the Christian church in Thailand would continue to struggle against, even to this present day.

This change of dynamic from a conversation to monologue was ironic precisely because the mono-directional transfer of an “eternal” and “unchanging” gospel was, in Dodd’s mind, a good thing. For Dodd, McGilvary, and other missionaries of th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part One: The Loss of Face
• Part Two: Recovering Face
• Part Three: Preserving Face
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Appendix G
• Appendix H
• Appendix I
• Bibliography