Informal Northern Thai Group Bulletin 18 April, 2016 1. MINUTES OF THE 402ND INTG MEETING: Tuesday, 8 March, 2016, “History of the Lahu and Wa Baptist Missions”. A Talk by David Lawitts 2. NEXT MEETING (403RD): Tuesday, 19 April, 2016, “Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan”. A Talk by Tony Waters. 3. NEXT MEETING (404TH): Tuesday, 10 May, 2016, “Citizenship among Ethnic Minorities in Northern Thailand”. A Talk by Mukdawan Sakboon & Prasit Leepreecha 4. NEXT MEETING (405TH): Tuesday, 14 June, 2016, “Women Studies to Die or to Grow: Women and Gender Studies at Chiang Mai University”. A Talk by Ariya Svetamra. 5. INTG CONTACTS: CONVENOR - SECRETARY - WEBSITE 1. MINUTES OF THE 402ND INTG MEETING: Tuesday, 8 March, 2016 “History of the Lahu and Wa Baptist Missions” A Talk by David Lawitts 1.1. PRESENT : Frank Albert, Mathé Albert, Hans Bänziger, Sängdao Bänziger, Paul Chambers, Bernard Davis, Doug Fraiser, Meg Fraiser, Steve Haight, Reinhard Hohler, JoJo, Ralph Kramer, Manfred Liebig, Joe Manickam, Wanda Manickam, John Melton, Patrick Morel, Angelie Sitsch, Horst Sitsch, Dagmar Waters, Tony Waters, Jerrick Young. 22 signed out of 31 attending. 1.2. “History of the Lahu and Wa Baptist Missions” INTRODUCTION The Wa and Lahu Baptist missions were pioneered by William Marcus Young in the late-1800s and continued by his two sons Harold and Vincent after their father’s death in 1936. Various mission stations opened by William Marcus Young were developed by subsequent missionaries such as James and Gertrude Telford at Kengtung, the twin brothers Raymond and Richard Buker at Mong Mong, and Paul and Elaine Lewis at Kengtung and then Pang Wai after the Second World War. After Ne Win’s 1962 coup d’état, westerners were expelled from Burma, including all missionaries of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. Today, for the last 50 years, churches in Burma have been largely self-sufficient without foreign economic support, and ministries have been furthered mostly by local missionaries comprised of the country’s various ethnicities. None of these Lahu and Wa churches along the China-Burma border, however, would exist without William Young, and so the first half of this paper will focus on his mission work in detail. PIONEER MISSIONARY (1861-1891) William Marcus Young was born on August 20th 1861 in St. Augustine, Knox County, Illinois. His mother, Elizabeth, was a local farmer’s daughter, and his father, Heinrich Jung, emigrated from Germany and anglicized his name at Ellis Island to Henry Young. William worked on the family wheat farm with his siblings, Mary, John, Jacob, Josephine and George until age 23 when he enrolled in Doane College, earning a Doctor of Divinity degree. In 1887 William began preaching for the First Baptist Church in Wymore, Nebraska, amassing a flock of about 60 members and building one church. Nineteenth-century American church theology taught that the Second Coming of Christ was contingent upon a worldwide acceptance of the gospel, a millenarian view responsible for the rapid expansion of mission stations in Asia during the late-1800s, and perhaps also for the vision William received on the night of his father’s death as Christ appeared at his bedside and commanded him to leave his home and spread the gospel to the farthest corners of the earth. While his brothers John and George headed west to seek their fortune in California, William and his wife Nell headed east to Boston, Massachusetts, to enroll in the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. William requested to be sent to Africa, but the Board sent him and Nell to British Burma in 1891. The British had recently colonized the area known as “Upper Burma” in 1885, encompassing the Chin, Kachin, and Shan States. The northern limits of Upper Burma were referred to as the Frontier Areas or Unadministered Territories, because of their remoteness from central government, their inaccessible mountainous terrain, and their ethnically diverse populations resistant to British rule. The British therefore welcomed American missionaries into these outlying territories, hoping they would act as civilizing agents and help reign control over recalcitrant areas. The American Protestant, Adoniram Judson, was the first missionary to complete a Burmese translation of the bible in 1834. Most of his conversions were amongst the Karen people, whose ancient traditions spoke of a “White Man” carrying a “Golden Book” who would one day arrive to bring salvation. This legend perfectly prepared the Karen to receive the gospel and as subsequent American missionaries arrived in Burma, the Karen assisted them as interpreters, navigators, emissaries, and preachers. SHAN STATE, BURMA (1892 – 1919) William and Nell arrived in Rangoon in 1892 and headed north with a team of four Karen assistants through hill stations at Toungoo, Moné, and Thibaw. Every five days, as per local tradition, villages would assemble into a huge bazaar and the missionaries knew this was the best place to reach a wide range of people from the surrounding areas. William and his Karen assistants preached to the Shan people, but found them unreceptive to new religious ideas, sticking adamantly to their Buddhist beliefs. During his first seven-year term of service, William’s only converts were from the Thibaw jail. In 1899 Nell Young fell ill with tuberculosis, so William brought her and their newborn daughter, Ester, back to America to seek medical treatment. Nell spent her last days in a sanatorium in Colorado Springs and died on June 18, 1899. William left their daughter in the care of her maternal grandmother and returned to Burma for another seven-year term of service, this time convincing the Mission Board to let him open a new station in Kengtung, Shan State, in northwest Burma. William reckoned that he would have better luck in Kengtung since it was a cosmopolitan town with a diverse array of people congregating at the five-day bazaar, ranging from Burmese, Chinese and Shan, as well as many different tribal groups like the Wa, Lahu, Akha, Yao, Pa-O, Lisu, Palaung and others. On the boat to Rangoon, William met Della Mason, a Presbyterian missionary assigned to India. The six-month journey allowed time for courting, and by the end of the trip William had persuaded Della to marry him, to switch her designation from India to Burma, and to abandon the Presbyterians and become a Baptist. (Perhaps Della could be considered William’s first successful convert.) They married on Christmas Day 1901 and spent an arduous two-month “honeymoon” trek from Rangoon to Kengtung. Preaching at the five-day bazaar, William again had very little success proselytizing the Shan of Kengtung, but his luck changed when some ethnic Lahu traders from across the Chinese border saw this 2 Western man holding his bible and preaching in the town square. The Lahu held the same “White Man, Golden Book” tradition as the Karen, and quickly returned to China to spread the news of the arrival of their prophet. Another neighboring ethnic group, the Wa, also shared this belief, and had a spiritual leader who had been preaching for the last decade that the White Man and Book were soon to arrive. All of these fortuitous elements came together at once, and within a few years, thousands of Lahu and Wa began begging William for baptism. During this momentous period, Della gave birth to three sons at the Kengtung hill station: Harold Mason Young in 1901, Vincent Marcus Young in 1904, and Clarence Young in 1907 (who died before his second birthday). Harold and Vincent grew up speaking Shan, Lahu, and Wa—frustrating their parents by refusing to speak English for years. As more Lahu and Wa came across from China to receive baptism, William realized that the biggest populations lay across the border, and received approval from the Baptist Mission Board to open a new station in Yunnan, China. But the British government in Burma considered the trip too dangerous, and refused to let him cross the border for two reasons: First, in order to cross into Yunnan, the Youngs would have to pass through the dark territory of the “Wild” Wa, feared for their traditions of headhunting. The Wa would ambush unsuspecting victims on a jungle trail, lop their heads with a silver dah sword, and put the heads in wicker baskets atop a long bamboo pike. The blood would leak from the severed head and flow down through the bamboo pike into a basket of unmilled rice. Once the rice was soaked with blood, the Wa scattered it across the fields as a fertility rite for the soil. When the head was fully drained of blood and began to shrink and petrify, the skull was fixed to one of many wooden posts in front of the main village gate, creating a “skull avenue” as a foreboding entrance to a Wa village. The second reason the British considered the trip too dangerous: once the Youngs got to China, they would be entering a realm of warlords and bandits. Between the death of the last dynastic ruler of China, Yuan Shi-kai, in 1916 and the rise of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, there was an eleven-year vacuum of power, giving rise to a number of powerful military cliques. This period of Chinese history, now referred to as the Warlord Era, was a time of violence and xenophobia toward foreigners. The British therefore denied the overland passage through Burma to China, so the Youngs instead had to travel by sea through French territory, dock at Haiphong (in what is now Vietnam), then take a railroad to Yunnan (known at the time as the “Death Railway” due to the number of robberies and bandit attacks), and finally march by mule caravan through Yunnan, China, where they established a mission station in the village of Banna in 1920.