In Fond Memory of Luther Copeland

His obituary begins, “Dr. Edwin Luther Copeland, missionary, educator, scholar, beloved husband and father, died on November 19, 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina.” Today on the tenth anniversary of his passing, I am posting this blog article in fond memory of Dr. Copeland, who was my much-respected colleague, good personal friend, and meritorious mentor. 

Getting to Know Luther Copeland

Even though I don’t remember any details, I probably first heard about Dr. Copeland when I was a graduate student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was a professor of Christian Missions and World Religions at Southeastern Seminary in North Carolina at that time.

It is also quite likely that I read his small “study course” book Christianity and World Religions not long after it was published in 1963. But I first saw Dr. Copeland at the 1965 Baptist World Congress, which met in Miami Beach. I was impressed with his ideas articulated in opposition to those of Dr. Cal Guy, the Missions professor at Southwestern Seminary in Texas.

I first met Dr. Copeland in person early in 1976 when he became Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the school system in Japan where I had been teaching since 1968. Because of our missionary “furlough” in 1976-77, it was mainly from the summer of 1977 to the spring of 1980 that I really got to know him—and to become very fond of him.

Early in 1979, he nominated me to be Dean of Religious Activities at Seinan Gakuin University, so we had extensive contact during the academic year that began on April 1. During that busy year, I came to admire him greatly and profited much from his wisdom and mature expression of the Christian faith.

Learning More about Luther Copeland

By the time he and his talented wife Louise left Japan in 1980, I had learned much about Dr. Copeland. I learned much more about him over 20 years later after he published his memoirs.

Early on, I learned that Dr. Copeland was born in 1916 in West Virginia, and I knew that he worked in the logging business with his father before starting to college. In 1944 at the age of 28, he graduated from Furman University. Two years later he graduated from Southern Seminary and then earned his Ph.D. degree at Yale University in 1949.

In 1946, Luther and Louise Tadlock were married, and they became the parents of five children. They were appointed Southern Baptist missionaries to Japan in 1948. In November 1952, he became the fifth chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the school system that was established in the year of his birth.

The Copelands returned to the U.S. in 1956 when Luther was employed to teach at Southeastern Seminary. But then he was elected as the 12^th Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin in 1975, succeeding his (and my) friend Max Garrott for the second time.**

After completing that term of service, Luther moved out of the Chancellor’s office on March 31, 1980. Sixteen years and one day later, I had the great privilege and challenge of moving into that office.

In 2001, Dr. Copeland self-published a book titled Memoirs of a Geezer: From the Timber Woods and Back. It is 375 pages long and contains 48 “illustrations.” I found it noteworthy that on the last page of that book, published just before his 85^th birthday, Luther wrote,

I am convinced that for most of us, our God is too small. If God has created everything that is, surely God is interested in all the creation. I often pray that God will make my interests as broad as God’s interests.

Holding Fond Memories of Luther Copeland

Though there is so much more I could write here, I will briefly mention just three reasons I was and remain fond of Luther Copeland.

* He was a man with both intellectual curiosity and intellectual honesty.

* He was a man who never “put on airs” but related to everyone as a human being of equal worth.

* He was a committed Christian who embraced the breadth of God’s love over the narrowness often seen in historical Christianity.

Knowing Luther Copeland helped me to strive for those same characteristics.

_____

** On June 20, 2020, the 110^th anniversary of his birth, I posted a blog article titled “In Fond Memory of Max Garrott.” 

TTT #14 The Goal of Missions is the Kingdom of God

The article I posted on May 20 summarized some legitimate reasons why Christians still engage in, and support, global evangelistic missionary activity. (I encourage you to check out the comments made, here, about that article.) It is now fitting to consider what the ultimate goal of missions is.

Three Problematic Goals

In the history of Christianity there have been various goals for mission work, and while not equally problematic three such goals can be negatively stated as follows:

(1) The goal of missions is not primarily the expansion of Christianity.

It cannot be doubted that from the time of its beginning as a small Jewish “sect,” for centuries Christianity expanded greatly. Much of that expansion was clearly due to missionary activity.

That does not mean, however, that expansion was, or should have been, the primary goal of missions. Nor, certainly, does it mean that that expansion through the centuries was always done by legitimate or admirable means, even by missionaries.

Much of the expansion of Christianity in the seven hundred years between 300 and 1000, for example, was due to the military and political activities of powerful kings and emperors.

The expansion of Christianity, especially for political reasons, should in no way be considered the primary goal of missions.

(2) The goal of missions is not primarily the spreading of Western civilization.

To some Christians in the past few centuries, missionary activity was linked to the spread of “civilization” to the “benighted” lands of the world.

European civilization was considered superior to that of the indigenous cultures of the other parts of the world, so spreading that civilization, seen largely as the fruit of the Christian faith, was considered a legitimate and praiseworthy activity for many Christians, especially in Great Britain and then in the United States.

There were, of course, important contributions made by missionaries, along with others, who took “civilization” into “primitive” societies. The introduction of Western medicine, for example, was a great benefit to multitudes of people.

But local cultures, societal structures, and religions were sometimes trampled underfoot in that process, and that type of missionary activity has, justifiably, come under intense criticism.

The spreading of Western civilization cannot legitimately be recognized as the major goal of Christian missions.

(3) The goal of missions is not primarily the planting of churches.

During the last decade of my missionary career, the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention began to place almost complete emphasis not only on planting new churches but on the “church planting movement,” which was said to be the “rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.”

While planting churches certainly is a commendable activity, still, that should be one means of reaching the proper goal of missions, not the goal itself.

The Proper Goal

As stated in the title, the goal of missions is the Kingdom of God, and as I emphasized in the article posted on Feb. 28, the main characteristic of the God’s Kingdom is shalom (peace and justice).

This matter was well presented by E. Luther Copeland, my former missionary colleague and good friend in Japan. His 1985 book is titled World Mission, World Survival: The Challenge and Urgency of Global Missions Today.

In his last chapter, “The Kingdom and the Mission,” Copeland (1916~2011) elucidates that the goal of mission(s) is the kingdom of God (p. 139). 

That often overlooked point was made more than 100 years by Christoph Blumhardt. He wrote to his missionary son-in-law, “[T]here is no other purpose in your mission work than to proclaim God’s kingdom.”

Yes; true then, true now.

[Christoph Blumhardt (1842~1919) was a German Lutheran pastor. His letters to Richard Wilhelm are presented in the 2015 book Everyone Belongs to God, compiled and edited by Charles E. Moore.]

[The 14^th chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), which includes much more than could be presented in this article, can be found by clicking on this link.]