Harold Vogelaar: "within the frame of friendship".

Harold Vogelaar describes Christian witness as an art of friendship. Engaging such issues as life and death, justice and peace, and diverging points of doctrine across religious boundaries requires the capacity to build the kind of relationships where honest talk about all kinds of things can occur: the kind of talk that changes the way we think, the way we act, the way we live. Of his work Harold has said, "I had come to accept that for me Christian witness was the key element.... Within the frame of friendship, we could talk on any subject, and did.... I found it to be a very fruitful ministry." (1)

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The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago was just the right place for a missionary pastor and seminary teacher to sojourn before launching his next adventure. In 1990, when Harold began a two-year appointment as Visiting Professor of World Religions, he thought he might return to the parish after the appointment ended. But the sojourn extended. As Harold put it, "We stayed on at LSTC for another year, and then another." (2)

Sixteen years later, what a difference that sojourn has made at LSTC! In so many ways, Harold Vogelaar stopped being a "visitor" long ago. His friendships with Muslim colleagues in Chicago led to many team-taught courses in Christianity and Islam and a cherished friendship with Dr. Ghulam-Haider Aasi of the American Islamic College, now an adjunct faculty member at LSTC. Although both friends had engaged in a multitude of conversations over the years in congregations and mosques, in the wake of September 11, 2001, they were constantly on the road together, encouraging open dialogue and mutual understanding amid a climate of rising fear and hostility.

Harold and his wife, Pisamai ("Mai"), may be found at many "tables" at LSTC. Committed to honest dialogue and passionate about justice, they embody the commitment to see people as people and problems as problems, even as they act on behalf of the less powerful partners. While it is not easy to encounter deep differences, especially when the differences we encounter challenge long-held ways of viewing the world and cherished convictions, they spend themselves on practices of friendship and hospitality, embodying the hope that the human community may find other paths through disagreement than trying to annihilate the opposition. Their many practices of friendship are leavening influences in a seminary community that wrestles with many kinds of differences.

While Harold is not, in one sense, a visitor any longer, in another sense he has shown us that the "visiting life" is a very fruitful life. Viewing ourselves as sojourners is an antidote to the pressure to build towers and an encouragement to sow seeds. For as long as we have known Harold, his sense of himself as being a sojourner has contributed to his steady reassurance that he is ready to let go and entrust the work to the hands and voices that will come after. In this sense, he has shown us that we are all sojourners; our citizenship is located in the call and promise of God, not in the edifices we create.

Paradoxically, it is this visitor, or sojourner, among us whose legacy will be remembered through the newly endowed Harold S. Vogelaar Chair of Christian-Muslim Studies and Interfaith Relations and LSTC's new Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice. Both are made possible through significant gifts and pledges by Gerald A. and Karen A. Kolschowsky and the Gerald A. and Karen A. Kolschowsky Foundation, Inc., and will be inaugurated and celebrated in September 2006. As a result, LSTC will remain a leading seminary in preparing students for ministry in an interfaith context and in providing educational and cultural opportunities that will bring Christians and Muslims together in a common commitment to mutual understanding and respect that promotes peace and justice in the world. We are delighted that Harold has agreed to serve as the Center's first director.

Thus it is that sojourners do leave unforgettable traces of their work in the world: their efforts, their hopes, and their friendship with God, creation, and their brothers and sisters. Thank you, Harold, for being such a friend.

Kathleen D. Billman and James Kenneth Echols

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

1. Jan Boden, "Following Jesus: Harold Vogelaar's Faithful Journey," LSTC Epistle 36:1 (Winter 2006), 10. The article profiles Harold Vogelaar's ministry from his boyhood in Iowa to his long ministry in the Middle East and teaching at LSTC.

2. Boden, "Following Jesus," 11.