Latest Memoir Notes Cultural Integration Key to Successful Missionary Work
Called by God, focused at Hope College, honed through Western Theological Seminary, and dispatched by the Reformed Church in America, Gordon (’56) and Evon (Southland, ’57) Laman served as missionaries to Japan for more than four decades.
After two years of language study, beginning as evangelists in the countryside, the Lamans ultimately served for two decades in a theological seminary. With Evon passing away in 2011, Gordon Laman has recounted their story in “A Clear Vision: The Motivation for Gordon D. and Evon Laman to Serve as Missionaries to Japan, 1959-2002,” released by the Van Raalte Press Missionary Memoir Series.
“This is a reflection on the maturing of the Christian community in post-WWII Japan, one in which RCA missionaries, like Gordon, became partners in the mission of reaching out to Japan’s non-Christian community and serving the indigenous Christian Church,” said Don Luidens, Missionary Memoir Series editor.
“I think the Hope College experience broadened the foundations of my faith and also helped me to grow beyond the narrowness of the church of the middle of the 20th century,” said Laman. “Very importantly, I was already focused on becoming a missionary when I went to Hope—that was my calling.”
A formative part of his Hope experience was meeting Han Ki Bum, a minister’s son from Korea. They were roommates for three and a half years. “Through him, I was attracted to Asia,” said Laman.
While at Hope and Western Seminary, he met annually with Beth Marcus, the RCA’s personnel secretary for missionary recruitment, who extended an invitation to the Lamans to become district evangelists for the Nihon Kirisuto Kyodan (United Church of Christ in Japan).
His long-held call coming to fruition, Laman was hit by a surprise upon their arrival in Japan: “How difficult the language was. The first six months were absolute torture. It involved very intense study, teaching done by the inductive method, which means from the very first day, not one word of English was spoken in class.”
Feeling the urgency of becoming fluent in the language, he found a Lutheran missionary study partner, and the pair had their own smaller class together. “It was a lot of hard work but by the end of that second year, I was pretty fluent, making jokes in Japanese,” said Laman, “though that was only the beginning of learning Japanese. To become truly fluent took about ten years.”
With increasing fluency came increasing interactions with the Japanese people, both Christians and non-Christians. “My commitment was to help all Christians be a part of the Christian mission,” said Laman. “I wanted them to sense that Christianity was not just a Western religion but was also Asian.”
The book shows how thoroughly Gordon and his family were integrated into Japanese society, despite their outsiders’ appearance, said Luidens. “They became proficient in Japanese and were aware of and sensitive to the culture of Japan, which helped to pave the way for their integration.”
“There’s great value in immersing yourself in another culture and in the lives of people different from yourself,” agreed Laman, noting that “in Japan, a foreigner remains a foreigner. The word for a foreigner is gaijin which means outsider, outside person.”
And yet, as the book recounts, the Lamans had a profound impact on the Japanese Christian Church. “I never thought much in terms of success,” said Laman. “I’m most satisfied with our level of integration into Japanese culture, but especially the Japanese Christian community. My perspective is that a missionary’s role today is to work himself into a job, to find a way (without offending people), to make a difference, to contribute, in some creative way.”
He hopes that in reading this book “people would reflect on their own lives and realize how God leads and how a sense of calling and focus for your life can make a difference.”
“A Clear Vision: The Motivation for Gordon D. and Evon Laman to Serve as Missionaries to Japan, 1959-2002” is the eighth book in the Missionary Memoir Series from Van Raalte Press. It’s available for purchase through the Hope College bookstore and Amazon.
More information on Van Raalte Press can be found at hope.edu/vri.