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.…