Connecting the Separated

For several years now I have been greatly blessed to be associated with a mission project in Japan tracing its origins to The Episcopal Church’s fundamental identity as the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.  It was founded by a missionary from Kentucky, Paul Rusch.  Rusch first went to Japan answering God’s call to help rebuild YMCAs following the great Yokohama Earthquake of 1923.  He stayed to teach at the Anglican University in Tokyo and eventually turned his attention to the needs of the rural poor in the Japanese highlands in 1938 when he founded the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project (KEEP).  Not long after he began that work, he was arrested, imprisoned, and deported at the beginning of the war, but he returned following it to take up his not only his work, but his life among the Japanese people. 

Today KEEP maintains Rusch’s vision and operates an experimental farm, an international conference center, and one of the most well-known environmental education programs in Japan in addition to a nursery school and an Anglican parish.  It has spread Rusch’s ideals to isolated parts of the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Tanzania, among other places.  It continues to do what Rusch started it to do, which is to “connect the separated.” 

A lot of good gets done by KEEP, but what continues to draw me to it and inspire me about it is Rusch’s vision of connecting the separated.  It was what Rusch devoted his life to, connecting the separated in a world where the chasm that separated Japanese and Americans at the time must have seemed insurmountable.  Yet, Rusch kept at it.  And he invested himself in it.  People in Kiyosato speak of him with obvious affection.  It is because, I think, Rusch did much more than do good.  He built relationships.  On my recent trip there to attend a board meeting of the American Committee for KEEP, I once again heard people speak personally about Rusch.  “He was my godfather.”  “He asked me to help rebuild KEEP after the war.”  “My father worked with him closely.”  “He introduced the church to my mother, and that’s why I’m a Christian.” 

He raised a lot of money for a lot of projects, too.  He was responsible for a lot of good, particularly in agricultural advances and healthcare.  He was a pioneer of what we know as sustainable community development.  He left behind a program that is completely operated by the Japanese.  But that, in the end, is not what really mattered, I believe, and it is certainly not how he is remembered by those who knew him best.  I never once heard anyone say, “Paul Rusch built this” or “Paul Rusch built that.”  The measure of Paul Rusch’s life is in the relationships he built, the fact that he lived out a life of connecting the separated.

The truth is, I believe, the world will not be permanently changed into God’s vision for it by any amount of doing good.  It will be changed only by building relationships in the process of doing good.  Transformation is accomplished relationally and, I am convinced, only relationally.  That is how unity overcomes estrangement, joy conquers despair, and the whole creation is ultimately reconciled with God.  It seems to me to be the essence of faith.  Faith, after all, is inherently relational, much more about relationships I engage than opinions I happen to have. 

That is why we Episcopalians, each one of us, also members of something the called the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, which is both our official corporate name and also a fundamental statement about our identity.  The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society exists to engage Episcopalians in mission, at home (wherever that may be in the 16 countries that are part of our Church) and abroad.  The staff of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society is entirely devoted to fulfilling that goal and helping our Church be what it was intended to be, fully missional and authentically apostolic (which means, of course, “sent”).  It is only in that that we are truly who we are, not only Episcopalians but disciples of Jesus. We are all about becoming, in the truest sense, a Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.