The Princeton Scholar Who Moved to the Slums

In 1909, a young Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa made a decision that baffled everyone who knew him. Though he had the intellect and connections to secure a comfortable pastorate — and would later study at Princeton Theological Seminary — Kagawa instead moved into a six-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums of Kobe, one of the most wretched neighborhoods in Japan.

He shared his tiny room with anyone who needed shelter. He gave away his clothes, his food, his blankets. When a beggar suffering from trachoma needed a place to sleep, Kagawa took him in and contracted the disease himself, nearly losing his sight.

For fifteen years, Kagawa lived among the destitute. He organized labor unions, built schools, and started credit cooperatives — not from a comfortable office, but from the same mud-floor hovels where his neighbors lived. He became one of the most celebrated reformers in Japanese history, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet he never left the posture of a servant.

This is the downward trajectory Paul describes in Philippians 2. Christ Jesus, who existed in the very form of God, did not cling to that glory. He emptied Himself. He descended — not to a six-foot shack, but to a feeding trough, a carpenter's bench, and finally a criminal's cross. And it was precisely through that willing descent that the Almighty exalted Him above every name. The path to true greatness, it turns out, always runs downhill.