The Seminarian Who Moved Into the Slums

On Christmas Day, 1909, twenty-one-year-old Toyohiko Kagawa walked out of his comfortable seminary dormitory in Kobe, Japan, and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums. His professors thought he had lost his mind. His classmates called it reckless. But Kagawa believed that if God truly became flesh, then following Christ meant entering the suffering of others — not observing it from a distance.

In Shinkawa, open sewage ran through narrow alleys. Tuberculosis was rampant. Kagawa shared his tiny room with anyone who needed shelter, once giving his own shirt and blankets to a beggar who arrived shivering at his door. He contracted trachoma from a man he nursed back to health, and the infection nearly cost him his sight.

Yet Kagawa stayed. For fifteen years he lived among the poorest people in Japan, organizing labor unions, building schools, and preaching the gospel in a dialect his neighbors could understand. He did not send aid from a distance. He moved in.

John tells us that the Word — the very thought and expression of the Almighty — "became flesh and dwelt among us." The Greek word for "dwelt" literally means "pitched His tent." God did not shout instructions from heaven. He moved into the neighborhood. He took on our frailty, our hunger, our tears. Like Kagawa stepping into Shinkawa, the Son of God stepped into our broken world — not to observe our suffering, but to share it, and ultimately to redeem it.