Abstract
In this month that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of thirty-nine-year-old Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., American Baptist preacher and civil rights leader, I want to recall a prophetic message he delivered at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was killed. Coming out against the Vietnam War, King warned, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” 1
When racial and economic divisions in our society remain unhealed, and those on the Right and the Left silently capitulate to militarism as a viable solution to international tensions, King’s words on “persons and things” still haunt us today. He echoes a question Jesus puts to all would-be followers, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36 NIV).
In my office at the Overseas Ministries Study Center is a framed photograph of Booker T. Washington, celebrated African American leader and educator. Under the faded photo is a copy of a signed letter from him, dated May 1, 1911, to “Mrs. W. H. Doane” (née Frances Mary Treat), wife of William Howard Doane and mother of Ida and Marguerite Doane, the American Baptist family who founded the Houses of Fellowship, which later became OMSC. To avoid closing his Tuskegee Institute’s academic year in debt, Washington was asking Mrs. Doane for additional help. It gives me great joy to know that our founders were supporters of one of our nation’s great African American leaders. The letter also reminds us that folks like the Doanes were not only committed to those serving in the “foreign fields,” but they also supported the mission of Americans, like Washington, who were laboring on behalf of persons victimized by brutal, “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws.
For twenty years as a mission coworker in Japan, I had the privilege of helping train pastors and teachers who are now serving in congregations, church-related schools, and social welfare agencies all around that beautiful, ancient country. But having grown up in America of the 1950s and 1960s, when traumatic memories of World War II were on full display in our TV shows and movies that stereotyped and demonized Japanese people, I found that it took me some time to acknowledge, confess, and overcome my own unconscious fears and feelings of superiority. On that journey, the biblical text to which I continually returned was Ephesians 2:11–22. We know that Christ’s cross reconciles human beings to God, but here Paul proclaims that the cross also reconciles us to each other. The barrier dividing Jews and Gentiles was destroyed by God in Jesus Christ, and deep-seated prejudices and feelings of superiority were replaced with a new sense of fellowship. But the achievement of this “one new humanity in place of the two” (Eph. 2:15b) was and is not a product of skilled diplomacy or good-willed internationalism. It is the free, self-giving act of God that reverses the situation for Gentiles and Jews and, proleptically, all humanity. The cross is God’s singular moment, opening a new way to God and each other. Now I could honestly confess my sins to my Japanese students and share the Good News that “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Rom. 12:5).
To those who were questioning his opposition to the war in Vietnam, King pointed to his calling as a minister of the Gospel, asking, “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?” 2
Soichi Watanabe, Through the Cross, 2015, mixed media on paper, 19 x 14.2 cm. Reprinted with permission of the artist. 3
It seems fitting that we have devoted this issue of the IBMR to the Korean Peninsula, the site of one of the most intractable divisions in our world today, and to efforts at finding unity. I express our sincere thanks to the Lausanne Committee and to David Ro, Jamie Kim, Julia Cameron, Sarah Son, and the authors who contributed papers from the Second North Korea Lausanne Consultation, held in Seoul in October 2017 (see Son’s introductory remarks below). Thanks also to Andrea Kwon of Santa Clara University and Steve Sang-Cheol Moon of the Korea Research Institute for Mission for their important contributions to this issue.
