The Theologian Who Moved Into the Slums

In 1909, twenty-one-year-old Toyohiko Kagawa walked out of his seminary dormitory in Kobe, Japan, and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums — the most desperate neighborhood in the city. He had been studying theology, reading scripture, praying earnestly. But Isaiah's words haunted him: "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice?"

Kagawa gave away his clothes, his blankets, even his shoes. He took in beggars and addicts, sometimes sleeping with fifteen people crammed into that tiny room. He contracted trachoma from a man he sheltered, nearly losing his sight. Neighbors thought he was mad.

But something began to happen. Where Kagawa shared bread, communities formed. Where he organized workers for fair wages, dignity took root. Where he opened his door to the homeless, light — as Isaiah promised — broke forth like the dawn.

Kagawa went on to organize Japan's first labor unions, establish credit cooperatives, and build schools in neighborhoods the rest of society had forgotten. He never retreated to comfortable religion.

Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line between the fast God rejects — pious gestures performed for show — and the fast the Almighty honors — hands that break real chains, doors thrown open to the poor. Kagawa understood that true worship is not what we withhold from ourselves but what we freely give to others.