O'Banions @ Home & Abroad

Note: This article is the last of four about the historical background of diaspora ministry. It first appeared on the TLI website. (See the first, second, and third parts.)

In a series of short articles, I’ve been placing “diaspora ministry” into a broader historical context to emphasize that the church has always viewed it as a way of engaging the Great Commission. I’ve shown how pivotal moments in the history of missions led to a focus on ministering to sojourners who then carried the gospel message forward, often to unreached peoples. It turns out that the apostolic church naturally reacted to Christ’s promises and commands in Matthew 28:18–20 by doing diaspora ministry and that modern missions movement not infrequently developed—both at home and abroad—into ministry focused on diaspora communities, whether Koreans living in China or Japanese living in California.

This final article takes us to sixteenth-century Geneva, where pastoral training and diaspora ministry intersected. Centers of Protestantism like Geneva became launching pads from which the gospel, recovered during the Reformation, went forth to Europe and beyond. In large part, they did so by ministering to exiles and refugees, especially by training them for gospel ministry.

The French Exile

John Calvin knew well what it meant to be a refugee, having fled France in 1534 for political, legal, and religious reasons. He hoped for a life of bookish solitude. Instead, he found himself pressed into service as a reformer in Geneva, only to be dismissed and exiled when the city fathers decided they didn’t like how ille Gallus (“that Frenchman,” as council records dismissively identified him) planned to implement reform. There followed a sojourn in Strasburg, where a patient Martin Bucer molded the brilliant (if tightly wound) young theologian into a pastor.

Geneva soon asked Calvin to finish what he’d started, and he accepted. But until 1559, just a few years before his death, he wasn’t a citizen, merely a sojourner praying for a Protestant France. He had no formal political power and couldn’t even vote in civil elections.

Among the many legacies of this “buttoned-up French exile” was his ministry to refugees who arrived in Geneva. He advocated for the displaced, and his Geneva became a bustling hub of hospitality. This was the context within which Reformed Protestantism—in and around Geneva, across Europe, and even further afield—became the most dynamic Reformation movement of the age.

Theological Training for Outsiders

Beginning in the 1530s, waves of French exiles in Geneva mingled with English, Scots, Spaniards, Italians, Dutch, Hungarians, and Poles. Some stopped only briefly; others put down roots. In an age when urban planning and social welfare programs were mostly unknown, Geneva roughly doubled in size to accommodate the influx of huddled, traumatized masses. Some families could support themselves, but others carried only the clothes on their backs, the knowledge in their heads, and the skills in their hands.

Then as now, the arrival of immigrants sparked debate and tension, and Calvin’s support for the refugees cost him politically. But the creation of the French Purse, a privately endowed charitable fund, helped Geneva care for so many without undermining the town’s financial stability. So the refugees came, and they were welcomed.

Some stayed only briefly, like John Knox (c. 1514–72), the Scot who remembered Geneva as the “most perfect school of Christ since the disciples,” or Girolamo Zanchi (1516–90), who had fled Italy with the Inquisition on his heels. Others stayed put. Italian converts to Protestantism like the Diodatis, Turrettinis, Colandrinis, Burlamachis, and dozens of other families found a home in Geneva and joined its Italian-speaking congregation. They built businesses and produced some of the most celebrated pastors and theologians in the town’s history. Giovanni Diodati served both as a pastor and a professor at the Genevan Academy for nearly fifty years and made the first Italian translation of the Bible from the original languages. Benedetto Turrettini (1588–1631) and his son François (1623–87) became professors of theology and churchmen. The son, who’s better known to Anglophone audiences as Francis Turretin, wrote a richly influential theological textbook that remained the gold standard in Reformed circles for two centuries.

This points the way to a striking conclusion: Calvin (and Geneva) didn’t merely care for the refugees’ physical needs. They committed significant resources specifically and strategically to the pastoral and theological training of outsiders. To the Diodatis and Turrettinis add the examples of Thomas Bodley (the Marian exile who founded the renowned Library at Oxford) and Caspar Olevian (co-author of the Heidelberg Catechism) along with hundreds and hundreds of other non-citizens who studied at the Genevan Academy after its founding in 1559. Alumni from the refugee community supplied pastors not only for churches back in France—more than 220 between just 1555 and 1562—but also for those in and around Geneva. Parishes in Geneva’s hinterlands were staffed, to a man, by diaspora pastors until 1570, and, within the city itself, until 1594.

Calvin (and Geneva) didn’t merely care for the refugees’ physical needs. They committed significant resources specifically and strategically to the pastoral and theological training of outsiders.

Mentoring Diaspora Ministers

The work of discipleship and teaching didn’t end once sojourners departed. Calvin and other professors and pastors continued to correspond with those who left to serve abroad, offering encouragement, admonition, and advice. Calvin’s letters to Girolamo Zanchi, for example, helped the Italian navigate a protracted controversy into which he stumbled while teaching at Strasburg.

Face-to-face mentoring and letter writing were supplemented by the printed word. His formal writings often incorporated the goal of serving those who had sojourned in Geneva before returning home or moving on to minister elsewhere. Take the case of the young Frenchman François Daniel. He came to Geneva to attend the Academy against his parents’ wishes. Daniel’s father wanted him to study law, but the son was drawn toward the pastorate. Calvin mediated and, eventually, the boy returned home, but the reformer continued to advocate for and correspond with him. In 1561, Daniel wrote from Orleans asking for resources to continue his theological education, and Calvin obliged by sending a copy of his Institutes of the Christian Religion—virtually a one-volume seminary education. The young man went on to serve the French Reformed congregation of La Rochelle as a pastor for decades.

Calvin’s Geneva was hardly unique. Reformation cities like Strasburg, London, Emden, Neuchâtel, Antwerp, Zurich, Basel, Lausanne, and others, similarly and regularly extended hospitality to refugees. Reformed centers for the training of gospel ministers shaped diaspora pastors from all over Europe, and often it was diaspora professors who did the training—the Spanish Cypriano de Valera (at Cambridge), the Italian Peter Martyr Vermigli (at Oxford and Zurich), the German Martin Bucer (at Strasburg and Cambridge), and the French Franciscus Junius (at Heidelberg and Leiden), among many others.

Global Immigration and Gospel Opportunities

Diaspora ministry, or the training of refugee pastors, wasn’t done perfectly in Geneva (or, for that matter, anywhere else). Especially in the early years, alumni of the Academy found that there were significant gaps in their education. Hospitality could be restricted to those who saw eye-to-eye with Calvin. Some, like the Spanish Casiodora de Reina, finding that he couldn’t toe the reformer’s line, soon moved onto more accommodating environs. Others, like the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus, who was burned at the stake, stuck around too long.

Yet we should be encouraged to discover that, despite many imperfections, Reformation Europe owned the responsibility to sacrificially commit resources over the long term for the love of neighbors in need. But there’s another important takeaway here. Calvin and others saw the influx of outsiders as an opportunity for advancing the gospel through the training of future ministers. The goal was to spread the gospel in Europe and beyond; the members of refugee communities who sheltered in Geneva, studied at the Academy, corresponded with Calvin, and drew from his writings put their shoulders to the plow and did much of that work.

This series of articles began by noting that, as of 2017, more than a quarter of a billion people worldwide were living outside their country of origin. The same responsibility that the Genevan church bore—to love neighbors in need for Christ’s sake—confronts Christ’s Church today. Many exiles and refugees live abroad, not willingly, but on account of their confession that Christ is Lord. Our responsibility toward those who “are of the household of faith” is clear (Galatians 6:10). But describing this as an obligation to fulfill or a responsibility to bear doesn’t actually capture its weightiness. The pregnant reality is that diaspora ministry has been a mainstay in the faithful declaration of God’s name among the nations. 

Diaspora ministry has been a mainstay in the faithful declaration of God’s name among the nations.

By ministering to diaspora communities in our midst, we minister to those abroad as well. As Earnest Sturge put it, “The work is one.” That work, especially raising up gospel ministers to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ (Ephesians 3:8) to their communities at home and abroad, is Great Commission work. It will bear fruit, for Christ will always be with his church, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).

Note: This article is the third in a four-part series that I wrote exploring the historic roots of ministry to and among diaspora communities. This one appeared first on the Gospel Coalition. (See also part one and part two.)

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The traditional narrative explaining the rise of Asian Christianity in the modern age is a story of Western goers sent by Western senders, and there’s some truth to that. The Opium Wars of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s served as a catalyst for opening China. Waves of missionaries followed, most famously J. Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), whose China Inland Mission made significant inroads.

But the story turns out to be more complicated.

Beginnings of Korean Christianity

Admittedly, the Protestant West viewed China as the ripe plum of East Asia, but it wasn’t the only missionary target. Take Korea, for example. Nicknamed the “Hermit Kingdom” by one Western observer in 1882, Korea closed its doors to foreigners and showed hostility toward Christianity. But from the 1860s, instability and oppression at home spurred a diaspora movement that drove individuals out of the peninsula. Some found their way across the Chinese border to Manchuria, where they fell in with Chinese Christians and Western missionaries unable to cross into Korea.

One such figure who entered Manchuria at this time was the businessman and merchant Seo Sang-ryun (1848–1926), who had been running ginseng from Korea. On one trip across the border he fell deathly ill. Two Scottish Presbyterians—brothers-in-law John Ross and John MacIntyre—nursed him back to health. He became a Christian and was baptized. Seo’s return to Korea a few years later proved a pivotal event in church history and should upend how we in the West remember the role of missions in the globalization of the faith.

The Modern Missions Movement and Korea

To understand why, we have to go back nearly a century to the publication of William Carey’s An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792), which substantially shaped how Western Christians thought and still think about missions. By “means” Carey meant forming missions societies, what Paul Pierson calls “a structured committed community of men (and eventually women) who knew that their call was to take the Gospel to other areas of the world.” This innovation allowed resources to be coordinated cross-confessionally—not only the human resources of those who went abroad to take the gospel to the ends of the earth but also of those who stayed home and supported the mission financially, relationally, and prayerfully.

The response was striking. Networks and societies of stayers and goers formed, propelling Christianity—admittedly, Christianity sung in a Western key—around the globe. The financial capacity, geographical extension, and political weight of the British Empire were pressed into service. Other Western nations followed suit, often marrying political expediency with religious fervor as the gospel advanced in colonial holdings.

This story, or something like it, undergirds how we remember the substantial progress of Christian globalization over the last two centuries. But this model of (Western) senders and (Western) goers doesn’t account for its own success. Then, as now, the evangelization of unreached peoples often hinges on the presence of a diaspora community in a context where the church already exists rather than on the insertion of foreign missionaries into an unreached culture. We can see this in the story of Seo Sang-ryun and the origins of Korean Protestantism.

The evangelization of unreached peoples often hinges on the presence of a diaspora community in a context where the church already exists rather than on the insertion of foreign missionaries into an unreached culture.

The Bible in Korea

It turns out that John Ross, one of the Presbyterians who baptized Seo, had been seeking opportunities to reach Korea for Christ since the early 1870s, but he couldn’t get in. The Korean government prohibited even teaching the language to foreigners. Nevertheless, from his base in Mukden (now Shenyang), Ross found a tutor. He focused on learning Korean, translating texts into, and ministering to the diaspora in Manchuria. His labors began to bear fruit.

Converts began to worship alongside Chinese Christians and smuggled contraband literature across the border. From the late 1870s, a small group of Koreans that included Seo partnered with Ross and MacIntyre to translate the Bible. In 1882 they completed the Gospel of Luke, the other three Gospels in 1884, and the entire New Testament in 1887. Significantly, they didn’t translate into the language of the educated elite but into the Hangul vernacular.

When he returned to Mukden, the peddler who first carried the copies of the Gospels (along with his own testimony of faith in Christ) to the Korean diaspora of eastern Manchuria reported that many now wanted baptism. In winter of 1884, Ross traveled there, baptized 75, and put other names on a list for his next visit.

Seo Sang-ryun’s Ministry and Work

Seo returned to Korea in that same year. He labored as an evangelist and organized prayer meetings, initially at Ŭiju (his ancestral home), just over the Manchurian border on the Yalu River. But after taking heat for his foreign contacts, he established a more permanent ministry at Sorae, a remote fishing village over the mountains from Changyon in Hwanghae Province, where his extended family lived. It was in Sorae where Seo Sang-ryun and his brother Seo Sang-u established what is now regarded as “the best supported claimant to be the first Korean church.” They met secretly for worship behind locked doors.

But was it really a church? Reformed theologians often describe a true church as characterized by the preaching of God’s Word, the administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline. By all accounts, the first of these was present. But as an unordained evangelist, Seo never asserted authority to baptize or administer the Lord’s Supper. Nor did he formalize church membership. He was apparently content to wait until his flock could be formally incorporated into the visible church of Christ.

In practice, this meant waiting for a Western missionary, and from before 1885, the congregation in Sorae repeatedly asked Ross to come. After signing a series of “unequal treaties” with foreign nations, Korea slowly opened its doors, but missionary work remained prohibited, and Ross was not free to come. Instead, he introduced Seo by letter to the American Horace G. Underwood (1859–1916), another Presbyterian, who had recently arrived in Seoul and was quietly engaged in medical missions, education, and orphan-care as he learned the language. Seo met Underwood in late 1886. 

Although evangelism of Koreans was illegal and conversion a capital crime, Underwood received a small delegation of Christians from Sorae the following spring. He recorded, “They were examined before the whole Mission, and finding they had been believers for some years, and were able to state intelligently the ground of their faith, the Mission unanimously decided three of them should be admitted to the Church by baptism.” (Some, perhaps all, of the remaining members of the delegation had already been baptized.)

In the fall of 1887, Underwood’s mission felt bold enough to attempt an itinerant preaching tour—from Seoul to Sorae, Pyongyang, and Ŭiju. Another seven were baptized in Sorae, where believers continued to meet regularly for worship under Seo’s pastoral care.

In September of that same year, perhaps just before Underwood itinerated, Ross finally visited Korea. He met with Underwood in Seoul, where he witnessed the founding of the Saemoonan Presbyterian Church, the first church in Korea pastored by an ordained minister. Its membership was comprised of 14 Koreans—13 were from Sorae. A week later, two Korean elders were ordained, and the following year the first four Korean women were baptized. Within a decade, Saemoonan had planted several daughter churches, and the growth continued.

John Ross wanted to take the gospel to Korea himself but wasn’t given the privilege. Instead, he spent a decade among the members of the Korean diaspora in Manchuria. God, in his providence, used Seo Sang-ryun and other members of the diaspora community to lay the foundation for ongoing gospel ministry in their homeland (Romans 15:20; 1 Corinthians 3:10).

Fruitfulness of Diaspora Ministry

In Kenneth Scott Latourette’s magisterial History of the Expansion of Christianity (1937), he committed three of seven volumes to the century that followed the publication of Carey’s Enquiry. It was principally a story of Western missionaries bearing the gospel to the nations.

But that’s not exactly how it happened. Instead, missionaries were often received in new lands by native believers who had met Christ or grown in their faith while living elsewhere. During that “great century,” as Latourette dubbed the 19th, ministering to diaspora communities turns out to have been a fruitful way of fulfilling the Great Commission. It still is.

The village of Sorae is now part of North Korea, where Christians once again gather in secret and behind locked doors. But that’s hardly the last word. The Korean church has become one of the most active forces for cross-cultural evangelization in the world, with around 30,000 missionaries in the field. Ironically, when Western missionaries were expelled from China in the 1940s and 1950s, Korean believers became witnesses to their much larger neighbor. What seemed to be a footnote on the expansion of Protestantism in Asia turned out to be a major plotline in the story of global Christianity.

Note: This article first appeared on the TLI website as the second in a four-part series about diaspora ministry. (Here is the first article in the series.)

The Presbyterian Church founded the Japanese Presbyterian Mission in San Francisco in the 1880s. Their immediate goal was to reach the issei—Japanese immigrants to North America—who had recently begun to appear in large numbers along the California coast.

Their arrival was an unintended consequence of international politics and global commerce. American Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet forced Japan to “open” itself to the Western world in 1853. The opening went both ways, and thousands ended up coming to the United States via the West Coast. Most imagined themselves as temporary transplants. They planned to find work, make money, save up, and go home.

Called to Stay 

In July 1886, the Presbyterian Board called Dr. Ernest Sturge to serve as missionary to the Japanese in California. The Sturge family, formerly medical missionaries to Thailand and China, were on home-leave in San Francisco recovering from cholera. They thought they might continue their medical ministry among the Chinese in the Bay Area, but that work was already overstaffed with doctors.

Instead, they were shuffled toward the Japanese mission. Sturge worked tirelessly against anti-Japanese discrimination in the U.S., made multiple visits to Japan, and learned the language. He respected not only the people to whom he was called but their culture as well, even publishing a collection of sermons for “samurai for Jesus.” On the occasion of his fifteenth anniversary of work at the mission, friends published a volume of his poems and addresses. A recurring theme is he appreciated all things Japanese. This attitude earned the admiration and affection of the issei.

Sturge also knew that his skin tone and bushy mustache counted against him in this work. He was and would always be something of an outsider, both physically and culturally. To be sure, he sacrificed selflessly—the epitaph erected by Japanese friends noted his willingness even to give his own home over to their use. But he recognized that Christian leadership had to arise from within the Japanese diaspora community for the mission to grow and flourish.

To believe in Christ, they needed to hear him preached, preferably by issei preachers who could seamlessly communicate and apply gospel truths in their heart language as cultural insiders. So Sturge devoted part of his energies to training some of the first ordained Japanese clergy at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, which also served as the headquarters of the mission. Sturge sent these co-laborers out to plant a series of fourteen missions up and down the West Coast.

One of them in Wintersburg Village (now Huntington Beach) was founded in 1904. It constituted the first effort to reach the Japanese population of Southern California. The neighboring Presbyterian Church in Westminster threw its support behind the effort. Rev. Hisakichi Terasawa, a Japanese Episcopalian minister formerly of Osaka but laboring as part of Sturge’s mission in San Francisco, was dispatched to organize the early work. The community of Japanese chili pepper and celery farm workers, mostly bachelors with nowhere else to go and not much else to do, began meeting in a barn on Sundays for worship and fellowship.

In late 1910, a manse and sanctuary with space for twenty-five was dedicated as the Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Mission, and Rev. Joseph Kenichi Inazawa, a former student of Sturge’s at the San Francisco seminary, was called as founding pastor.

The church sat on a half-acre of property owned by Charles Mitsuri Furuta, the first Japanese baptized in Orange County. It had been funded by the combined efforts of the congregants themselves and the members of nearby Presbyterian and Methodist congregations, who recognized the importance of reaching their neighbors for Christ. They wanted to see conversions and discipleship among the issei but also hoped that reaching them might promote kingdom growth in Japan.

When Sturge tried to communicate his vision for what these little missions among California’s Japanese diaspora community might become, he challenged his readers to expand their horizons beyond the West Coast of the United States. In order to see the significance and potential of diaspora ministry, they needed to look “beyond the Pacific.” So do we.

In order to see the significance and potential of diaspora ministry, they needed to look “beyond the Pacific.” So do we.

The Work Is One

Sturge explained: “The work at home and abroad is one. Whatever we may do to make our own land more Christian will influence other countries.” And sure enough, Sturge reported in 1895, some who converted and matured as believers in Orange County saved their money and returned to their homeland, “to exert a helpful influence in the cause of the Master” as ministers, leaders, and members of the church there. But many more ended up staying. They put down roots and built a community.

The Wintersburg Mission continues today, more than a century after its founding. Its members weathered racial prejudice, discriminatory legislation, and the internment of more than eighty members—including pastors and elders—during World War II. But the Lord sustained them, and they emerged stronger than ever. In 1930, they dropped the word “mission” and particularized as an independent Presbyterian congregation. In 1965, they relocated to Santa Ana to accommodate a growing congregation. Nowadays, Wintersburg Presbyterian Church is the largest Japanese-American congregation in the United States and a force for missions at home (especially among Orange County’s Asian-American populations) and abroad, supporting kingdom work in Japan and around the world.

There’s a two-part lesson worth learning here about diaspora ministry. First, as Sturge said, this work requires broad vision. A few enclaves of poor celery farmers may not have seemed likely to yield much of a harvest, but by “looking beyond the Pacific” Sturge and others imagined what the Japanese Presbyterian Mission might become. Our vision for the nations among us calls for an equally expansive horizon as we look toward that day when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14).

But second, if the goal and value of diaspora ministry are clear, we must remember that our return on investment may not match expectations—and that’s not a bad thing. The Japanese Presbyterian Mission’s vision was to reach the people of the Japanese mainland through the diaspora farmers and thereby win that nation for Christ. This hasn’t happened.

We don’t know what God has planned for Japan, but so far, we haven’t seen the spectacular growth of Christianity there that has occurred elsewhere over the last century. Perhaps we’ll never see it. That doesn’t mean there’s been no fruit, of course. Along with many others, Wintersburg continues to labor in Japan. But the principal harvest of that church’s ministry has been closer to home, and it’s been abundant.