This illustrates somewhat humorously the situation of modern society in which we are called to serve our Lord. It is a complex and rapidly changing world. Like a busy street corner, our world is constantly moving. There are many illuminations, advertisements, the sounds of machines. And above all there are many people of differing languages, traditions, races and economic classes. They are all interrelated one to another, yet there are many conflicts and divjsions among the groups and nations and loneliness and hunger, frustration and uncertainty are seen among the faces of the busy crowds. All of them are looking for a sign to cross the street and a light with which to direct their journey.

In this Assembly we acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Light of the World. We have been learning together here that Jesus Christ is the Light not only in the world of yesterday but he is the Light in today’s world. This means the churches on the busy street must open their eyes and ears to find out what Christ is doing in the midst of the changing world for the restoration of true humanity. Our task is not, then, to add another human light, however colourful it maybe, to the lights already existing in the changing world, but to discover how the true light shines in today’s dark and divided world, and to point out the light of the world as the whole Body of Jesus Christ in all realms in our life today.

The present outlook of the changing world

The world today is so complex and so changing that it is difficult for any individual to grasp its problems clearly within such a limited time.

What I will do here is to depict some of the characteristics of the present world shaping and affecting the human personality in relation to the service of the Church, as a spring-board for your further discussion.

First of all, it is rather clear that in today’s world, mankind is sharing increasingly one human destiny. Through the development of technology, the so-called annihilation of distance has brought the different nations together, all coming into one world history. Although our world has become much smaller in terms of distance, nevertheless we are still far away in our inner understanding of one another. A terrifying example of this one, yet divided, world is the fact that mankind today is sharing one great fear, namely the fear of total destruction by the absolute weapon.

Secondly, we are living in a world which is not only an interrelated one, but also a rapidly changing world. At Evanston we used the words "The Problem of the Underdeveloped Areas". It tended to give an impression not only of seeing the problem of the underdeveloped areas in isolation, but also of regarding the issue in a static form. After the Evanston Assembly, the Study Department on Church and Society launched a new study programme called, "The Common Christian Responsibility Toward Areas of Rapid Social Change." This meant that between Evanston and New Delhi in our ecumenical concern for social problems, we had a remarkable development of worldwide study on rapid social change, grasping the problem not in a static way but in a dynamic way, that is to say, taking the process of change seriously and positively and seeking to fulfil our common and mutual Christian responsibility in the one interrelated dynamic society. Particularly today in Africa and in Asia and in Latin America there are rapid, sometimes almost revolutionary, changes occurring in every aspect of society: such as political independence, rapid development of industrialisation and urbanisation, demand for equality and freedom among races, and a drive to construct a new pattern of family life apart from the old oppressing feudalistic way of life and arousing conflict and frustration among the people who belong to different political, economic and ethnic groups. We must see here what is the meaning of Christ as the Light in this changing and dynamic society. I believe no movement, including the Christian movement, which is not a willing to participate in the process of social change can make a vital contribution in today’s world.

Thirdly, in our understanding of the present world, we recognise a change in so-called religious life. Here again it is difficult to generalise, but as a sociologist of religion! may dare to make this bold observation for your consideration. There are two sides, as I see it, in the religious world today. One is a widespread trend towards secularism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated this as Die mundige Welt (The World come of Age). This is what he writes so frankly in his letter from prison: "The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity and indeed what is Christ, for us today? The time when men could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or simply pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience, which is to say the time of religion as such. We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be ‘religious’ they evidently mean something quite different" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p.122). This means we are moving increasingly toward a secularised society. The age of children, in which religion was accepted as something pious and precious, is over. Today, ordinary people take religion as a social custom unrelated to one’s inward and ultimate decision and commitment. The intellectual regards religion as superstition, and the Marxist will condemn religion as an opiate.

This means that there is a tendency for religion to remain a social observance touching only the surface of the life of society just as infant baptism is often regarded as another kind of vaccination. This not only applies in the situation of the so-called decline of Christendom and de-Christianisation of the West, but also in some of the situations in the East, where the traditional religions in the past so strongly dominated the life of the people that there is a drive now to obtain freedom from religious bondage and to seek the genuine development of social life in the secular sphere. There is a new kind of secularism in Asia which is challenging us to think deeply about the secular understanding of the Gospel today.

But this is one side of the picture. Especially if we consider the religious situation from an Asian perspective, it must be pointed out that there is a strong and widespread religious awakening going on in the various parts of Asia today. There is a considerable resurgence of the traditional religions and the rise of entirely new religions in Asia.

One of the challenging strengths of those new religions is that they take the concrete reality of this world seriously and relate their teaching to the actual life of the people. This indicates that there is an immense need in the minds of people to seek the source and purpose of their lives especially when the traditional religions have failed to provide vital service to the actual need of people.

Pressing call for the serving dimension of God’s people

From thisbrief analysis of the present situation of the world, we come to see the need of a new understanding of the life and mission of the Church. Professor Wendland wrote on the task of the Church in the modern society in the following way:

"In this new era of its encounter with the world, the Church should neither try to integrate the whole world in itself nor attempt to become the predominant institution and set the pattern. In the world which has come of age, the Church will renounce any claim to clerical domination and any attempt to ‘churchify’ the world, not because it is forced to do so, but because it has realised the true nature of its ministry to the world. The new attitude of the Church to the world will, then have to be one of service" (Dr. Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, Die Kirche in der modemen Gesellschaft, p.14).

There is a pressing call upon the Church to consider the serving ministry of God’s people to the world not because the Church follows after the world, but because she wants to be obedient to the ministry of Christ in and to the world. We here come to take the serving dimension of the Church seriously because we recognise that it is one of the indispensable marks of Christ’s Church. The intention of our service, therefore, is not to get credit from the world by our service, nor to be successful through our service, nor even to gain new members, but we engage in our service because we recognise that we are servants of the Servant-Lord. Our Christian service therefore is a sharing in the ministry of Jesus Christ to the world. In facing the problems of rapid social change we should rejoice rather that we are given by the Holy Spirit a unique opportunity to rediscover and to reenact the serving dimension of the Church to the world.

Jesus Christ: Servant-Lord

If our Christian service is a sign pointing to the fact of the redemptive act of God and a sign of the coming of the Kingdom of God, we must see how this was manifested in Jesus Christ. Throughout the Bible, both Old and New Testament, it is testified that God’s sovereignty over the world as creator and redeemer is uniquely and concretely manifested in the image of the Servant-Lord. The people of God, represented by men like Abraham, Moses and David, are called as the "servant of the Lord". And Second Isaiah made the famous prophecy of the coming Messiah in the image of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53). When Jesus Christ came into the world, throughout his life and ministry he took upon himself the form of a servant for the restoration of true humanity (Phil. 2,7). He has completely fulfilled the redemptive love of God for theworld through his suffering and victorious ministry, for us he said," the son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10,45). In this sense, there is a symbolic meaning in the act of Christ’s washing the feet of the disciples. It is a shocking event to those who can not understand the costly love of God. He has humbled himself, even taking the form of a slave, to redeem all people and to reconcile the world to himself. Here we find the irreducible uniqueness of the Christian message: the Lordship of Christ is manifested so concretely and so deeply through this servanthood in and to the world.

Servants of the Servant

Therefore it is clear that the starting point of our Christian service isto respond to his serving ministry to the world. "If I then your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet" (John 13,14). This means that we as members of his body are called to service both within the Church and to the people of the world through the Church. Inter-Church Aid in this sense has a double meaning, serving one another within the Church as an expression of the oneness of God’s people and serving the world as testimony to Christ’s ministry of the world.

We must go one step further to raise the question where and how this serving ministry of Christ is going on today. If Christ is the Servant-Lord and we are the servants of the Servant, how maywe share in his ministry in the world today?

First of all we must remove the definitely introverted attitude of the Church in relation to the world. This means to open ourselves and to be ready to offer ourselves for secular engagement and participation in worldly affairs in the light of the Christian faith.

Sometimes in facing the enormous and demonic forces of the world there is the danger of interpretingJohn 3, 16 something like this, "God so feared the world that he gave the Church in order that some might be saved out of the world" (WSCF, Federation News: The Life and Mission of the Church, p.14). On the contrary, the Scripture clearly states that it is the world which "God so loved and gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3,16). The first lesson we must learn when we seek to be Christ’s servant is this, namely this is God’s world and he is inviting us to take part in his suffering ministry in the midst of the changing world today.

Secondly, we recognise that Christian service should not be confined only to the narrow limits of the spiritual life. The words of the Magnificat show that we have not merely to do with spiritual attitudes but also with the total personality in its real objective situation. "He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty" (Lk. 1,52-53). What Christ was passionately concerned about was not merely the spiritual aspect of manbut taking man as a whole (eine ganzlic/ze Menschlichkeit) to restore true humanity to its right relationship with God. In this connection it is appropriate to quote a sentence from a report on "The Lordship of Christ over the World and the Church". It says, "The Church manifests the Lordship of Christ over the world also by its humble service to the world. The Church’s service is the making real in human life of Christ’s own love for the world for the salvation of which he died, and thus it effects the restoration of man’s true humanity as it was intended by God in the creation, according to the pattern of Christ who is himself the new Adam, the first-fruits of the new order. This is the true basis of Christian humanism. (Ecumenical Review, July 1959, p.4’V3)

Thirdly, if Christian service is a sign to point out the coming of the Kingdom, Zeugendienst, as Karl Barth says, a symbolical sign pointing to the event of Jesus Christ, for the restoration of real humanity, Christian service must take place in the concrete situations in society. Service as a symbolical sign (Zeugendienst) must be manifested in the concrete reality of our society, as Sendungsdienst, to be sent out to the concrete social reality of the world for service to all people (Kirchliche Dogmatik, IV/3,2. Halfte, p.953 f.).

Reinhold Niebuhr in his book on "The Contribution of Religion to Social Work" has described how historically the Church was the mother of social work. This is true both in the history of social service in the West and in the so- called mission field. A few years ago the Government of France asked the Ministry of Social Welfare of the Japanese Government to recommend the most outstanding social workers in Japan in order to list them in a French textbook. After a careful investigation, the Japanese Government recommended the following four people, Jyuji Ishii, who opened the first orphanage in Okayama; Kosuke Tomeoka, who is the founder of an institution for juvenile delinquents; Gunpei Yamamuro, who established various social settlements through the Salvation Army, and Takeo Iwahashi, a blind man who dedicated his life to the welfare of the blind. All of them without a single exception are Christian. It is a glorious heritage of Christian missions that a small number of leading Christians have made a creative and pioneering contribution in practically every field of social service, such as the development of modern medicine and philanthropy, the establishment of educational institutions, with an especially remarkable contribution in women’s higher education, and the release from poverty. To these and others we must be grateful for their contributions and especially for the courage and commitment with which they devoted themselves in such hard pioneering fields of social service.

Towards new forms of Service in a changing world

But we must not stop here. Reinhold Niebuhr, in the same book, very critically pointed out that the Church tended to provide naive individualistic charity rather than social development of social work. In the study of rapid social change, it is widely recognised that in the contemporary world the state is increasingly taking responsibility in the field of social welfare. We must not be discouraged, but we should rejoice and welcome this new development and be ready to find new forms of Christian service in order to fulfil the serving task of the Church in the present world. In this sense, there is an immense significance in the recent ecumenical movement; there were several c nferences and consultations on new forms of Christian service in different parts of the world. In many cases these consultations were jointly sponsored by the committees on Inter-Church Aid and on Church and Society, calling for the participation of three different groups of people, namely social scientists who have been studying the concrete problems of rapid social change, and secondly those who have been engaging in various kinds of Christian social service and Inter-Church Aid, and still another group, the theologians and pastors, to provide Christian orientation and perspective on service. In Asia within the past year, the EACC has sponsored three such consultations, one in Nasrapur, October 1960, which considered new forms of Christian service and participation in the countries of Burma, Ceylon, India and Pakistan. A similar consultation was held in Japan in March 1961, and another in the Philippines in April 1961. (The reports of these consultations were published by the Committees on Inter-Church Aid and on Church and Society of the East Asia Christian Conference). Let me here indicate some of the crucial issues about whichwe have been learning in this ecumenical study and which should be seriously considered in this Assembly.

First of all, there is an increasing need of the churches to develop social diakonia. This means we must not only express charitable diakonia, that is to say action directed towards the result of social disease or injustice, but we must also develop action directed towards the cause of social disease and injustice. The former is a service to meet the immediate needs of people as charity, while the latter is a service which consists in taking part in the formation of social policy and of structures which will provide the basis for the healthy development of hurnan personality. Let me quote a sentence from the Nasrapur Report which stated:

"The Church can no longer think of service as something entirely divorced from state activity, and must be continually aware of the meaning and importance of political action, of dangers inherent in it, of the advantages that can accrue, if it is properly directed. It has to recognise that in our present situation, state action is essential to create the conditions for the increase of productivity and for removing poverty and for bringing about changes in the structure of society necessary to secure material welfare and social justice to the underprivileged and the backward"
(Nasrapur Report, p.6).

For this purpose, we need strong organs of thinking and action in our churches on the local, national and world level. There is a provocative meaning in the statement of Bishop Wickham, who has been passionatelyconcerned with Industrial Mission, when he said, "If there is any truth in the claim that the Church should seek to express at least something of the conscience of the nation, and if there is any truth in the thesis that men are conditioned by the principalities and powers of this world, by social, political and economic systems and industrial institutions - if any of this is true, it lays upon the Church of this age an intellectual task before which that of any earlier age pales... A Church away from the main stream of society’s life can avoid this hard discipline, but not so a Church deliberately and deeply immersed by its own planned mission" (E.R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City, p.257).

Secondly, this does not mean that we all just develop as so-called "Christian Social Action" programme and close the former Christian social work. To be sure we need a radical re-examination of change in our present Christian social work. But this does not mean that Christian social agencies will lose their job. On the contrary, we recognise that there are vast areas in which the activities of voluntar agencies are called to serve. What we need is, not the static continuation of the old established patterns, but to find out where and how the new forms of voluntary service are urgently needed. What we need today is not necessarily to abandon any form of Christian Service, but to be ready to serve flexibly, going out anywhere he invites us to serve, as mobile tent-dwellers rather than as rigid keepers of buildings.

Thirdly, we recognise precisely here the immense meaning and vital role of the laity as the ambassadors of the Church to perform the service of the Church through their secular life in the world. One of the most strikingand gratifying developments incur ecumenical movement between Evanston and New Delhi is that there is a growing reaffirmation of the ministry of the laity, simultaneously and spontaneously, everywhere throughout the world. We may regard this as a dynamic movement of the Holy Spirit calling the churches to rediscover the Charismata, the gifts of grace placed within God’s people to equip them and to cause them to flourish for the sake of the world. Let us hear the voices of Asian churches which gave positive recognition to the role of Lhe laity when they gathered for the Inaugural Assembly of the East Asia Christian Conference in Kuala Lumpur, 1959. The message of the conference, after indicating the need for the Church’s participation in the ministry of Christ in the Asian situation, stated:

"This means that Christian people must go into every part of the life of our people, into politics, into social and national service, into the world of art and culture, to work in real partnership with non-Christians. It means that every Christian must recognise that his primary service to God is the daily work he does in the secular world. It means that we must give our minds to the task of understanding what God is doing in this world, so that Christians engaged in those secular tasks may have guidance and help in the decisions they have to make, and so that the churches may be ready, when necessary, to speak a prophetic word of warning or encouragement to those in authority and the peoples"(Witnesses Together, Kuala Lumpur report, p.vi, also Ecumenical Review, July1959, p.451).

When we seek to fulfil the service of the Church, it is not enough to confine ourselves to professional Christian social action or Christian service programmes. The service of the Church must be taken as a whole, namely, the service of all the members of God’s people in daily life, as "mothers, farmers, trade union leaders, journalists, politicians, etc., who know Christ and his costly love for the world and follow in their daily work his way of the cross" (Hans-Ruedi Weber, "The Ecumenical Movement, the Laity and the Third Assembly", Ecumenical Review, January1961, p.213).

The Relation of Service to Witness

Now I would like to touch briefly on the relation of service to the other two callings of the Church, namelywitness and unity. No one can claim a monopoly for his task over the other callings of the Church. We cannot take an attitude of choosing either service or witness. God’s proclamation of his word became flesh in the serving ministry of Christ. It was spoken and at the same time it was enacted in history. We cannot do our service as a means to expand Christian institutions. We need a "pantomime of salvation", to use Professor Hoekendijk’s term. In this sense we can say, service in itself is a signpost pointing to the redemptive act of Jesus Christ without any accompanying spoken word. This leads to the idea of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who defined the meaning of service in terms of preparation for the way of salvation. He writes:

"The hungry man needs bread and the homeless man needs a roof: the dispossessed need justice and the lonely need fellowship. To allow the hungry man to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and one’s neighbours, for what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbours... If the hungry man does not attain to faith, then the fault falls on those who refuse him bread. To provide the hungry man with bread is to prepare the way for the coming of grace" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p.95).

Also we must recognise the immense need of the spoken word if the opportunity arises in the natural confrontation with the world through our service.

Will you permit me to refer to a personal experience which I have had? When I was in the United States one summer, I took part in a Ministers-in- Industry Project with a group of ministers. The job I got was as a crane operator. It was in a plant outside of Pittsburgh. It was not an easy job to operate a high electric crane in a hot, smoky and dusty steel mill during the wearisome summer months. But I enjoyed being one with the workers, sharing common joys and burdens as a team-mate. At the end of four months’ work together we had come to know one another rather well. When the fall came, I said to my fellow workers that I must quit the job. A worker said, "Where are you going?" I said, "I am going to university." They said, "Which university are you going to?", so I said, "Yale University." They approved my choice and asked, "What are you going to study there?". I said, "Theology". Then some said, "Oh you are stupid. It takes a long time to study and ministers cannot make good money." Then, one of the workers turned to me and asked this simple question: "Masao, why have you never got mad? We always found a smile on your face." I did not know what to answer, so after a while I said something like this: "We are all human beings, and we must forgive each other."

When I returned to the seminar, I reported this conversation to the group. Dean Marshall Scott, the leader of the seminar, in listening to my report said, "Masao, you have missed a big chance. You have made deep contact with your fellow workers by your presence to the point that they asked the reason of the hope in you. But you did not give a spoken witness." I should have said plainly, "I come from Japan. But I am a Christian who tries to love others as Christ loved me."

Dr. Visser’t Hooft, in his Taylor Lectures in Yale Divinity School, which I consider as one of the most profound theological text books on the sub-themes of this Assembly, puts the matter in the following way:

"We must, of course, never seek to hide the reasons why we are engaged in the work of diakonia and always be ready to give an account of our faith when we are asked to do so. We should have a bad conscience if we do not seize any clear opportunity, when it is given to us, to announce the Gospel. But we should not have a bad conscience if we have to wait a long time for such an opportunity, or even if it never comes" (W.A. Visser’t Hooft, The Pressure of Our Common Calling p.57).

The relation of Service to Unity

On the relation of service to unity, I would like to make just two vital points. First of all, it has been an actual experience in the ecumenical movement that the churches have come together through common service. Dr. Leslie E. Cooke, Director of Inter-Church Aid, writes the following historical record:

"As long ago as 1922, when the Federation of the Churches of the United States of Americajoined with the Federation of Swiss Churches to establish the Central European Bureau for Inter-Church Aid, they found themselves establishing a relationship through Service with the bruised, battered and exiled Orthodox communities. Much of the mutual enrichment which has been derived from Protestant Orthodox relationship stems from the early contacts which were made in this work"

(Leslie E. Cooke, Preliminary Reflections on the Third Assembly Document on "Service", Ecumenical Review, January1961, p.241).

Thus beyond confessional, regional and national divisions service can provide all Christians with a common calling to serve the needs of people.

Secondly, we must raise a critical question in this regard. There is some sense of complacency or even an indifferent attitude towards the question of unity among those who have attained a united front in service. From the ground of service we must raise an urgent and searching question regarding the unity of the Church. Especially in Asia where by and large Christian churches exist as tiny minority groups in vast non-Christian population this question is urgent. The world is very critical of the disunity of the churches, not only in the process of service, but also in our actual church life. How can divided churches speak convincingly of the unity of the world? How can we stop our search for the unity of God’s people at the stage of common service rather than enter into further conversation and fuller unity in Jesus Christ?

Our Service in Christ

Finally, let us turn again to the word "change" with which we started this discussion. I like to look at the deeper meaning of "change" in the light of Jesus Christ. It is not a relative change in surface events. It is a decisive change (metanoia) which happened in the event of Jesus Christ who has turned the world upside-down, from darkness to light, from death to life and from despair to hope. Christ performed the decisive diakonia to restore true humanity by overcoming the power of sin and death.

What we need today is to accept this decisive service of Christ and to make the decisive change within ourselves. We need a revolutionary renewal both in ourselves and in the structure of our churches to respond to the transforming and redemptive power of God which is going on in our changing world today. In this sense, Christian service has an eschatological note as expressed in the preparatory document on "Service" for this Assembly:

"Our service as individuals, no matter how good it may be, is always inadequate, always limited by our sins and errors. And only in so far as the churches accept Christ’s service in repentance and renewal are they able to continue their service in the world until His coming."