Out of Here, to There
In a couple of hours, I will return to the office after having co-led a travel seminar for graduate theological students. As I begin to make the mental shift from educating “out there” to educating “in here,” I am taking stock of what the travel seminar meant, and how we might anchor students’ learning.
My colleague and I took a group of students to visit historic mission partners in Hawaiʻi. The school we serve, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, represents a new affiliation, where a freestanding seminary (Andover Newton) became embedded in a university divinity School (Yale) in 2017. Although the institutional affiliation is new, the two schools engaged in joint ventures previously, beginning in 1810, when missionaries from both schools ventured to sites in the Pacific under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
Yale’s then-President Timothy Dwight was among the founding members of the ABCFM, which sent missionaries first to China and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Dwight hosted “Henry” ʻŌpūkāʻhia in his New Haven home. An indigenous Hawaiʻian, ʻOpūkāʻhia fled civil war in Hawaiʻi aboard a merchant vessel that transported him to New England. Aboard the ship, he learned English, converted to Christianity, and inspired interest in the island from which he hailed. ʻŌpūkāhiʻia studied both at Yale and at Andover Seminary.
I attended meetings in our Newton, MA campus in a conference room named for ʻŌpūkāʻhia, with his portrait bearing witness to our proceedings, for 11 years before knowing anything about him. I now know that ʻŌpūkāʻhia founded a school in Cromwell, CT with the intention of returning to Hawaiʻi to share the Gospel. He died of typhus before having the chance to go home, but not before participating in the preparation for the first mission from Boston to Hawaiʻi in 1819. The journey included Andover graduate Hiram Bingham, Yale College and Andover Seminary graduate Asa Thurston, and four Hawaiʻians whose missionary journey was a trip home: Hopu, Kanui, Honoliʻi, and Humehume.
Partners from Hawaiʻi traveled to Cromwell, CT in the early 2000s to repatriate ʻŌpūkahaʻia’s remains in a group that included some of ʻŌpūkahaʻia’s relatives. One in that group — ʻŌpūkahaʻia’s cousin Debbie Lee — advised us on the design for our travel seminar. Partners came again in 2019 to commemorate the bicentennial of the first mission. It was with that group that we first imagined an exchange of some kind. We got started thinking about it… then Covid.
Why has the development of an exchange taken so long? Due to the vagaries of institutional turnover; and pressures from multiple directions on Christian organizations like churches, seminaries, and denominations; no one on this end of the partnership seemed able to sustain continuous contact with Hawaiʻi partners. Furthermore, and surely more importantly, harm caused by missionaries and their descendants, who might have had good intentions but set the stage for the US’s imperial ambitions, made for a challenging atmosphere for dialogue. How can we play our part in sustaining a relationship while acknowledging harm up-front? How can we counteract estrangement without minimizing that harm?
Still jet-lagged, fresh off the experience, I only have raw data to share about what I believe I and our students have learned, but I want to capture it now for future processing. Come along with me.
- History that we learn in-relationship, for the sake of relationship, comes to us in layers. Much of what I wrote above includes “information” I have possessed for a long time but couldn’t have recalled in real time. Three years of preparation for a travel seminar, about a dozen books and articles read and taught about the history of missions in Hawaiʻi, and it’s all just beginning to sink in for me. I suspect some students on our travel seminar felt like we “should have told them” about this history, and honestly, we did our best to do so. But there’s something about learning a living history that requires layering: not just repetition, but conversation and friendship and self-examination.
- Transparency teaches. I use the expression “transparency teaches” on a daily basis in my work as an educational administrator and teacher/writer on leadership. Students in our travel seminar expressed gratitude for the thought that went into our group’s schedule. We focused in on historic partners and places where new life is springing forth. We didn’t do that just because we wanted our students to have a good experience, but because we want them to be ready to act thoughtfully in their eventual ministries, caring for what is and has been, while watching out for what God is doing now and next.
- Christ Outside the Gate. Orlando Costas took the title of his seminal work (Orbis, 1982) on the future of Christian missions from Hebrews 13:12, which reads, “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood.” That Jesus didn’t minister inside the temple, but rather outside it, has to mean something, Costas wrote. Jesus sought to demonstrate that God is in everything, not in one place to be visited occasionally (i.e. the temple). Today’s missions focus on getting out into the community, learning what’s on the hearts of those living their lives, and serving the community’s needs. A student who hears “mission” and conflates it with “empire”? They’re not wrong, but they’re missing the most important take-away for their own ministry futures.
In our travel seminar, we visited the church Hiram Bingham founded and participated in worship leadership there. We spent time at the Punahou School, which Bingham founded alongside his wife Sybil with financial support from Ka‘ahumanu, queen regent of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Ka‘ahumanu was a prayer partner and friend to Sybil, her conversion to Christianity changed the course of Hawai‘ian history, for better and for worse.
We did a lot. We learned a lot. But out of all we did, perhaps the most important thing was getting out of here and to there, thus becoming active participants in the history we’re creating today.
