Three Mile an Hour God

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In this beautiful, inspiring book, Mark shows us how the simple rhythm of walking can take us farther on the path of wholeness, joy, and God than we imagined possible. Poetic, poignant, and immensely practical, this book will change your life… one step at a time. The Revd Dr John Swinton is a former nurse, a minister in the Church of Scotland, and Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Dementia: Living in the memories of God, which won the 2016 Michael Ramsey Prize, and Becoming Friends of Time ( Reading Groups, 8 September 2017), both published by SCM Press.

There’s something else, obvious but rarely mentioned: When we walk, we carry ourselves. We notice when one person carries another person, especially if they’re both around the same size. An adult carrying a child is normal. But a child carrying another child, or an adult carrying another adult? Now we’re curious. We ask questions. Is the one being carried injured? Did he faint? Is she dying? Does the one who’s carrying have super-human strength? a b Cohn-Sherbok, Lavinia, ed. (2002). "Koyama, Kosuke". Who's Who in Christianity. London: Routledge. p.172. ISBN 978-1-134-50956-0. His last work was Theology and Violence: Towards A Theology of Nonviolent Love, published in Japanese in 2009 by Kyobunkwan, a publishing firm in Tokyo. The first was frustration. My faith seemed disembodied, not worked out in flesh and bone and breath, a thing mostly in my head, rendered as doctrinal tenets rather than a living and life-giving experience. And I noticed that many other Christians were struggling similarly with the gap between professed faith and lived faith. Virtually every major faith has a corresponding physical discipline—think of Hinduism and yoga. Later, the prophet Micah asks, What does God require of you? He considers a list of religious options: extravagant worship, costly sacrifice. But no. It’s simple and personal: God wants us to love mercy and to do justly. And then Micah throws in a third thing, or maybe it’s the one thing needed, the single activity that makes the other two possible: “to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:6-8).God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would move much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” and yet it is lord over all the other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depths of our life whether we notice it or not, whether we are currently hit by a storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks. We couldn’t help but think about how God matched our steps, and those of the many who walk around the world, as we were walking and talking along the road, re-introducing ourselves to our home—to our ‘fly-over states.’ Like the travelers on Emmaus, our hearts burned within us as we shared our dreams for the Church, for each other, for our beloved ‘fly-over states,’ and for those frontline communities forced to migrate to sanctuary from the effects of climate change. Christianity, when it is true to itself, proclaims the power, healing and transformation which is found in Jesus Christ. The moment that any Christian movement loses its focus on the person of Jesus Christ, it ceases to be fully, wholly Christian. It is the person of Jesus Christ which makes us the people of God. Think, for example, about the calling and vocation of Moses. He has a significant speech impediment. God says, “Listen, I’ve got a big job for you.” What does Moses respond? “I can’t do it because I’ve got this speech impediment. Could you not send somebody else?” God basically says to him “Do what you’re told!”

Make a point of slowing your pace down so you can be sensitive to the pain of those around you. You will find that great things can be accomplished at three miles per hour! The world is full of people who feel shut out from the presence of God. They feel they have no access to healing, hope or salvation. If we slow down enough to allow them to touch us, we will find that Christ will still extend his healing power and gracious salvation through us to those in need. When you begin to think about that, it challenges those who think that God is only interested in speed, productivity, and efficiency. Jesus, who created the universe, the God who throws the stars into the heavens, is a slow God — a God who takes time to love. When you begin to recognise God in this rather counter-cultural way, things begin to change. There may be no reason for this. But I have a couple of suggestions. First, Jesus walked with God. He was living into and working out of His own relationship with the three-mile-an-hour God and took all the time He could get. Three Mile An Hour God is broken up into four parts: personal spirituality, global reflections, national-level reflections, and call to social justice. Again, each centers around the slow God: how does the slow God meet us in our most present needs, concerns, and aliments?Quoted in Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism (New York: Penguin, 2008), 1. But when we see anyone carrying themselves—when we see them walk—it’s so ordinary, so pedestrian, none of us notices. So, what happens when a three-day journey turns into one hour? As the member of the Paoli community mentioned, at anywhere from 75 mph by car to 4500 mph by plane, their community is all too easily forgotten. At a walking pace, we were able to see their land, their homes, their crops, their streams & rivers, their storefronts, and each other. But it’s its own little miracle. Dr. JoAnn E. Manson of the Harvard Medical School says: “If there was a pill that people could take that would nearly cut in half the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, reduce the risk of cognitive decline, depression, reduce stress, improve emotional well-being—everyone would be clamoring to take it, it would be flying off the shelf. But that pill, that magic potion, really is available to everyone in the form of 30 minutes a day of brisk walking.” It’s possible that Micah is listing three separate things. But it’s more likely that he’s only listing two (to love mercy and to do justly) and that we only get these two things by walking humbly with God. Walking is the means to our transformation. Walking is the practice that makes us Christ-like.

Water Buffalo Theology is probably Koyama's best-known work. The book was partly inspired by Koyama's work as a missionary in Northern Thailand. [4] His works of Mount Sinai and Mount Fuji and Water Buffalo Theology are, in part, an examination of Christian theology within the context of Thai Buddhist society, growing out of Koyama's missionary experience in Thailand. Koyama was an editor of the South East Asia Journal of Theology, for which he himself wrote a considerable number of articles. Koyama published at least thirteen books, including "On Christian Life" (currently available only in Japanese) and over one hundred scholarly articles. Koyama's work has been described as helping to bridge the boundaries between East and West, between Christianity and Buddhist thought, between the rich and the poor. It has been pointed out that he has no overarching system in this theology, which shows commitment to serving a "broken Christ trying to heal a broken world" [ citation needed]. He was named as an important figure for the development of a world Christianity. [2]

The Church Times Archive

Koyama was born in Tokyo in 1929, of Christian parents. He later moved to New Jersey in the United States, where he completed his B.D. at Drew Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary, the latter on the interpretation of the Psalms of Martin Luther in 1959. [2] We walked over 200 miles in 15 days from the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Louisville, KY to the gathering of the 223rd General Assembly in St. Louis, MO, to ask the PC(USA) to divest from fossil fuels, learn more about climate change, and minimize our own carbon footprint. Each day went something like this: eat, worship, sunscreen, walk, sunscreen, talk, repeat, … and then we would collapse on our host church’s floor. Upon arrival at the end of each day, across Indiana and Illinois, we were welcomed to eat, fellowship, and worship with our host congregation. At a pace of about three miles each hour, we were walking every day from 7:30 in the morning to about 2:30 in the afternoon. Whimsical, witty, and down-right just good, Kosuke Koyama is truly a one-of-a-kind theologian. Koyama is, along with Jung Young Lee and C.S. Song, a trail-blazer and an inspiration to young, aspiring theologians like me -- an Asian American. Though Western trained (Princeton and Union Theological Seminary), Koyama is unapologetic of use of Buddhism, Japanese heritage and history, Southeastern folk wisdom, and more. This unique blend of sources makes him a creative theologian and always, always fun to read -- he even draws pictures! Norm once walked all the time but never much thought about it. He never contemplated the simple joy, the giddy freedom, the everyday magic of walking: to bound up or down a flight of stairs, to glide across a kitchen floor, to stroll a beach, to hike a trail. To move from here to there on nothing more than his own two legs, under his own locomotion. Now, Norm thinks about walking all the time. He watches others do it — Uprights, he calls them — bounding, gliding, strolling, hiking, and the dozens of other things most of us do with our legs with barely a thought about it. It stuns and saddens him. He would give almost anything to walk again, and if ever by some miracle of heaven or earth his capacity is restored, it’s almost all he will ever do. You can guess where Buchanan takes this. We hear a little bit on Gnosticism (“incarnation’s mortal enemy”), followed by the preposterous assertion that the “Christian faith” once had “a corresponding physical discipline” but “then lost it.” And this discipline, of course, was walking.

And for us—the fact that our new-found friendship has its foundation in a ‘three mile an hour’ world makes this relationship, no matter if it feels late in the game, all the more meaningful. Walking is, along with eating and sleeping, our most practiced human activity. But unlike eating and sleeping, we don’t need to do it to survive. And so walking, though our most practiced human activity, is maybe our most taken-for-granted one, and sometimes our most neglected. You can, after all, go only seconds without breathing, mere days without eating. But walking — you can pass an entire lifetime and still do little of that. Until recently, I had lost, if ever I possessed, sheer astonishment at the simple, humble miracle of carrying myself every day everywhere. These legs are more wondrous than a magic carpet, more regal than a king’s palanquin. But only now have I come to see it. The Speed of Our Souls Mark Buchanan: The phrase comes from a delightful, if somewhat quirky, little book titled Three Mile an Hour God, by the Japanese theologian and missiologist Kosuke Koyama. Three miles an hour is roughly the speed of walking. Koyama’s claim is that God moves at this speed, but we often miss him because we’re in too great a rush. Ironically, if we’re going to catch up with God, we need to slow down.Illumination is action-oriented. It leads to revised understanding and revised practices. Disability theologians use scripture and tradition to illuminate the human condition in ways that are sometimes dissonant and surprising. What happens when we literally walk out our Christian life? What does our physical being have to do with our spiritual life? What does the Bible actually mean when it exhorts us to walk in the light, or walk by faith, or walk in truth? How did Jesus model walking as spiritual formation? I love these four words from John 9:1: "As he passed by . . ."A great many events in the gospels happened, “as he passed by,” along the way. On the road. In the marketplace. Out in the countryside. By the city gate. On the shoreline, by the water. In a home, at the dinner table. Very little of Jesus' ministry took place "at church," in the temple. Jesus’ ministry happened while he walked, “as he passed by.” I love the way God Walk opens, with an epigraph from Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama’s wildly idiosyncratic, insightful, and sometimes maddening little book, Three Mile an Hour God. It’s worth quoting the full passage from which the epigraph is taken: He once could, with poise, with strength. He wasn’t Buster Keaton, but he strode the earth with vigor and ease and effortless balance. But in as much time as it takes you to read this sentence, he stopped walking. Not by choice. He lost the use of both legs, and most of the use of both arms, when his horse, his trusted horse, threw him sideways and gravity pulled him earthward and he hit the ground at an angle that broke things inside him. In a blink, he went from agility to paralysis, from mobility to confinement, from standing most days to sitting all of them. One moment, his legs went wherever he told them. The next, they refused.