James B. Hodges (1952)
By Tae Sun Park ‘56, President, Yonsei University, Korea
MR HODGES was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 14, 1926. He spent his boyhood in Beaver and Zelienople, Pa., where he attended school from primary through the junior and senior high schools. While living in Beaver, his mother, who had a strong spiritual and moral influence on his life, died, leaving besides him, his father and two other children.
Upon graduation from high school, Mr. Hodges entered Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., where he was the only pre-ministerial Methodist student in the Presbyterian institution. After completing just one year of college work, his schooling was interrupted by a two-year term of service in the U. S. Army Air Corps. During his tour of military service, he served in the Pacific theatre, both in the Philippines and Japan, where he became convinced of the need for Christian missionary effort in the Far East. Thus, upon discharge, he returned to Westminster College and completed the pre-theological course for the A.B. degree with a major in history.
Following his graduation in 1949, he married Margaret Livingston and, soon afterward, they went to Boston, where he enrolled in BUST. While pursuing his theological studies, Mr. Hodges also served as a youth worker in the First Methodist Church of Melrose, Massachusetts, under the Rev. Dr. Lemuel K. Lord. Later he was appointed pastor of the Methodist Church in East Douglas of the Worcester District, where he served two and a half years. While living in East Douglas, a son, James Stephen, was born.
Following completion of studies for the S.T.B. degree at BUST, Mr. Hodges returned to his native Pittsburgh Conference in 1953 and was appointed to the Methodist Church at Boston, Pa., where he served for five years. During his ministry in this church, Mr. Hodges served as Missionary Secretary of the McKeesport District, and on the Pittsburgh Conference Board of Missions. The highlight of this ministry, however, was an opportunity to go on a preaching mission to Japan in the summer of 1956. Upon returning from Japan, Mr. Hodges itinerated in Western Pennsylvania, showing slides and talking about missionary work in Japan. As he did this, he became convinced of a call to devote his life to missionary service.
In 1958, Mr. Hodges and his wife volunteered and were accepted by the Board of Missions of The Methodist Church as regular-term missionaries in Korea. Mr. Hodges was assigned to serve as the district missionary to the Taejon District of the South Conference of the Korean Methodist Church. Later this area was sub-divided into four districts: Taejon, Kongju, Nonsan, and Kang Kyung, with 130 churches. In cooperation with Korean pastors and laymen, he worked to establish new churches and to help strengthen existing ones. Upon invitation from the pastors, he would travel to the district churches to preach, teach, baptize and conduct Holy Communion. Often he would serve on district committees, particularly aiding the district superintendents in advising and assisting growing church congregations. On occasions he would go with a team of resource leaders from the Korean church to conduct preaching-teaching-visitation missions in weak or pioneering church situations, usually in rural areas. In this way, Mr. Hodges became increasingly convinced that the role of the ordained missionary doing evangelistic work was changing, especially in a nation where the church was rapidly expanding, was training more of its own leaders, and was developing a growing awareness of its selfhood. He saw that if there was a need for the ordained “foreign” missionary to serve in an overseas nation, it was to be found in the need for starting specific types of evangelistic ministries, which the existing church was not as yet ready, or able to undertake.
As a result, when Mr. Hodges returned to the United States for his first furlough in 1964-65, he was determined to prepare himself to engage in a more specific type of evangelistic ministry during his second five-year term in Korea. While on furlough, he completed the requirements for the Master of Theology degree at Duke Divinity School, with a major in World Christianity and a minor in theological interpretation of the Bible.
Following his return to Korea in 1965, Mr. Hodges decided to become involved in the functional ministry of special rural evangelism within the South Conference of the Korean Methodist Church. Motivated by the conviction that Christ is the Lord of all life, and that the Christian community within the human community must not be served, but must serve, and must have a dynamic, creative, and redemptive ministry to and in the midst of that human community, Mr. Hodges has decided to work intensively for a year at a time in five specially selected rural churches in the Chung Nam Province of South Korea.
Along with the Rev. Yun-Hi Noh, a Korean pastor, who was chosen as a co-worker due to his agricultural training and rural evangelistic experience, Mr. Hodges plans to undertake an evangelistic ministry in these five churches, which will be adapted to the needs and interests of the rural community in which the churches exist, and which will have the three-fold emphasis of direct evangelism, Christian nurture, and Christian community service. Each of the five rural churches will be visited at least four times a year, sometimes for a short period, and at least once for a long period. Additional resource leaders from the Korean church, as well as from the government and society, will be invited to share in rural evangelism institutes. At the end of the year, five other churches will be selected for a similar program of intensive rural evangelism, but contact will be maintained with the original five churches through occasional visits and correspondence. It is hoped that the churches so selected, which already are self-governing, will also become fully self-supporting and self-propagating, and provide resource leaders who, in their turn, can assist other rural churches in a similar way for achieving similar goals. Thus, rural churches which are the fruits of the Christian mission, will become responsible partners in expanding this mission further.