





































Ecclesial Futures
2023 – Volume 4 – Issue 1

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Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef15514

B O O K  R E V I E W S

DOI: 10.54195/ef15514

Aldous, Benjamin. 2022. The God Who Walks 
Slowly: Reflections on Mission with Kosuke 
Koyama

London: SCM Press.
ISBN: 9780334061113

Reviewed by Simon Woodman

Many Western Christians are unaware of the work of Kosuke Koyama, the twenti-
eth-century Japanese theologian. Ben Aldous, in this book, provides an introduction 
to Koyama through the medium of autobiographical theology. Aldous encounters 
Koyama as a fellow pilgrim, and shares how Koyama’s words of wisdom have helped 
shape reflection on Aldous’ own life and ministry. So, in a sense, this book gives us 
two-for-the-price-of-one: we get to know not only Koyama, but also Aldous.

Aldous positions Koyama as a contextual theologian, one who brings their experi-
ence of the past (through the scriptures and church history) into intentional dialogue 
with their experience of the present (through culture), with both being honoured as 
the context of God’s revelation. Each chapter of the book takes a particular theme 
from Koyama’s writing that speaks to the current climate of mission in the UK, inviting 
the reader in each case to ‘slow down’, to attend to what is important.

In “Walking: The Importance of Slowing Down”, Aldous introduces Koyama’s theo-
logical perspective of ‘timefullness’, noting that for most of his life Jesus only ever 
travelled at walking pace. Koyama defines this as the God who walked slowly, the 
“three-mile-an-hour God”, and invites us to do the same, to take the time to feel the 
wind, rain and sunshine. When this idea of timefullness is brought into dialogue with 
the Western obsession with clock-watching productivity, a timely challenge emerges: 
we have idolized time, and time has taken that power and used it to oppress us in 
return. Against this, God calls people to divine time, to a perspective much longer 
than our own minutes and days. The implications this has for mission, for missional 
“productivity”, and for ecclesial decision-making are explored helpfully by Aldous.



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Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef15514

In “Seeing: Notes in the Margins”, we encounter the God who “sees”, who moves slowly 
enough to see the excluded, the marginalized and the isolated. The challenge here is 
for each of us to see those whom we often ignore, and Aldous frames this in terms of 
the church’s colonial legacy of exclusionary and imperialistic violence. Koyama calls 
people to “neighbourology”, to hospitality toward strangers, to embracing those 
often unseen because they have been pushed to the margins of society. He says 
that “extending hospitality” is the beginning of mission: inviting others to the table, 
both literally and metaphorically. This is a direct challenge to the post-colonial legacy 
of English exceptionalism, and the populist rise in the “othering” of those who have 
migrated to British shores. Aldous proposes that the future of the UK church needs 
to be more diverse, as people learn to live together with difference in a way that 
reflects the shalom of the coming Kingdom of God.

The next chapter, “Talking: Shut Up and Listen, Will You!”, is grounded in the aural 
attentiveness that the three-mile-an-hour God paid to those he encountered. 
Aldous considers how evangelism in the UK might learn from Koyama’s challenge 
that “Christianity suffers from teacher complex”: we are too quick to speak, and too 
slow to listen, too quick to teach, and too slow to learn. Contrary to the way Christi-
anity often positions itself at the centre of society to proclaim and declaim, Koyama 
says that it is the broken Christ who heals the world broken by idolatry, and that 
the church needs to recover the brokenness of its saviour if it is to be relevant to 
those who live with weakness and pain. The call here is to evaluate evangelism less 
by numbers and statistics, and more by pilgrimage, soul friendship, deep learning, 
and reciprocity. Aldous proposes “apophatic evangelism”, which is grounded not 
in knowledge, but in recognition of ignorance, not in strength, but in recognition 
of weakness. This is evangelism in mysticism, in silence, in expectant quiet, where 
listening is prioritized over speaking, and where those who have been ignored find 
their true place of belonging.

In “Surrendering: Nailed Down!”, Aldous reflects with Koyama on the powerlessness 
of the crucified God. Koyama’s early years were marked by his experience of being in 
Japan at the time of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so his theology 
is marked by a profound sense of the fragility of human beings and culture. In the 
face of this, he advocated a ‘bodily thisness’, an embrace of the material and the local 
as the site at which Christian living and discipleship take place. Against those strands 
of Christianity that over-emphasize an otherworldly experience or destination as the 
goal of mission, Koyama points to the fragile humanity of Jesus, noting that God 
chooses to work slowly and inefficiently, to the point where God in Christ comes to 
a full stop on the cross: the “nailed down” God. Aldous hears this call to “stop” in the 
context of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, and asks what mission in human frailty 



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and vulnerability might authentically look like. Listening to those who have worked 
in disability theology, Aldous points to the disabling vulnerability of God nailed to 
the cross, and brings this into dialogue with the technological utopianism of transhu-
manism: for all of the benefits of technology, God is still an embodied God, revealed 
in the vulnerable and broken body of Christ Jesus.

This is a book that calls its readers to profundity, to hold the context of their lives 
in dialogue with their scriptures and their faith. As such, it is also a profoundly rele-
vant book, engaging with some of the key questions and challenges of the twen-
ty-first-century Western world. Koyama’s insights enable fresh reflection on the real 
world of our lives, and Aldous brings his own story to bear in ways that generate 
new insight. For those longing to discover an alternative to the fast-paced, perfor-
mance-driven, task-focussed, high-energy, hyperactive functionalism of so much of 
contemporary church culture, this book is the perfect antidote.

About the author
The Revd Dr Simon Woodman, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury 
Avenue, London, WC2H 8EP
simon@bloomsbury.org.uk

mailto:simon@bloomsbury.org.uk

