Dr. Joyce Hardin served as a missionary in South Korea from 1958 to 1974 and continued her work as a missions educator until her retirement in 2000 and well beyond. She learned to call Korea her spiritual home. Her mission experience there expanded her capacity to live with compassion and dedication to the Kingdom of God. Her gradual discovery of her gifts of leadership and friendship make her an important example of how cultural changes opened new doors for women (and men, for that matter).
Joyce Hardin (née Smith) was born in 1936 in Holland, Texas, a small town near Temple. Though her family were not churchgoers in her early childhood, she was baptized in the eighth grade. Her mother’s family had a long history in the Stone-Campbell movement, dating back to the first generation. One maternal uncle was a preacher. Her father’s family, however, were not affiliated with a religious community.1
After graduating from high school in Artesia, New Mexico, she studied elementary education at Abilene Christian College, graduating in 1957. There she met and married Dan Hardin, a relationship that changed her life. As she wrote ironically forty-five years later,
Since I thought I would be an old maid school teacher, my plans were to teach for a few years in the States and then go overseas to some hardship area such as London or Paris or Switzerland. My first date with Dan changed that. We had hardly gone a block from my house when Dan told me that he planned to be a missionary in Seoul, Korea …. That date resulted in a more than a [sic] 40-year involvement in missions, 17 of them in Korea.2
The two of them as expectant parents moved to South Korea. With the exception of two furloughs in the United States to further her education, she remained in Seoul for seventeen years before leaving for a career in higher education in west Texas. In the past two-thirds of a century, she has remained a firm advocate of missions and women’s ministry in Churches of Christ. Her story deserves a wide hearing.
The study of the Churches of Christ’s work outside the United States has understandably focused on the missionaries, especially male missionaries, but the women who worked alongside them deserve much more attention. There were single men and women missionaries all over the world, as well as married couples. Although the rhetoric of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century intentionally or unintentionally erased the contributions of women, telling the truth about their lives is important on both historical and moral grounds. Moreover, as Loretta Hunnicutt has observed, “there is another dimension that must be understood as well: the impact on, and by, the converts.”3 I cannot fill that entire gap here, but any accounting of Joyce Hardin’s life must understand her work in relation to those of other women, both American and Korean. Her life story also includes men, most notably her husband Dan. The story of this amazing woman speaks both to her own dedication to the work of the Kingdom of God and to prominent features of her times as Churches of Christ found new ways for women to serve and lead in ministry.
Joyce Hardin’s life falls naturally into several overlapping phases: the partner in missions and the educator and advocate for missions. The intersection of mission, education, and personal life has been a consistent feature in her life. In each role she made a mark. I concentrate here on the first phase, when Joyce primarily lived in Korea, but the second phase flowed naturally out of the first, as Joyce attempted to help others learn what she had learned so that they could do better work in their chosen fields. Her work over many years, though it has taken different forms, has shown an inner consistency: a strong commitment to Christian witness, a desire to understand and function in multiple cultural environments, and appropriate self-discipline and single-minded effort. Her story deserves to be told, not only on its own merits, but for the ways it illuminates changing gender roles in Churches of Christ and beyond over the past seven decades.
The Partner in Missions
Joyce and Dan Hardin arrived in Korea in 1958 with little preparation for what they would find. Dan, with Joyce’s consent, had chosen Korea as their destination because of his talks with a roommate at David Lipscomb College and veteran of the Korean War, Donald P. Garner (who was also a close friend of Haskell Chesshir).4 The country still experienced poverty, hunger, and disease that were the legacy of the Korean War (1950-1953) under the corrupt and incompetent government of Rhee Syngman. On arriving in Korea, Joyce and Dan joined a team of American church planters already present, Haskell and Enid Chesshir and A. R. and Verbena Holton. The team later added the families of Bill and Peggy Richardson, Malcolm and Shirley Parsley, Bill and Nancy Ramsay, O. P. and Geraldine Baird, and Sid and Jenetta Allen (the daughter of Haskell and Enid Chesshir),5 Donald and Melba Dietrick, Ron and Marcia Nelson, and others. There were also single workers such as Melba Carlon, Elisabeth Burton, David Goolsby, Marilyn McDermott, Coy Conner, and Elizabeth Burton, all of whom came to serve where they were needed, usually remaining for a few years. All these people worked alongside a much larger group of Koreans, whose stories also deserve to be told.
Reflecting on this group, Joyce said, “I am truly grateful for the example of these Christians who shared our ministry and our love of Korea.”6 She also noted in an interview, however, that the group did not function as a missions team in the contemporary sense of that phrase, but more as individuals with separate spheres of work that sometimes overlapped.7 This way of functioning and its accompanying inadequacies persisted throughout their time in Korea.8 Most members engaged in church planting, with other ministries including a correspondence course school, a dairy farm, and an organization for distributing clothing, among others. Each missionary had his or her own sponsoring congregation and worked under the supervision of the eldership of that congregation. Their work in Korea built on earlier work done by Koreans such as Dong Sook Kee, who had worked in northern Korea when the peninsula was under Japanese rule.9
Joyce later recalled her initial misgivings about the move to Korea:
I still was not too thrilled about being called a “missionary.” I was heavily influenced by books and movies and was not all sure I wanted to become the typical missionary who was described so vividly in Pearl Buck’s novels as a martyr, misfit, or a hypocrite. My mental picture of a missionary was at best that of a weak little man in shorts and pith helmet, standing in a pot of boiling water surrounded by cannibals while his wife dressed in relief barrel clothing and with her hair in a bun, wrings her hands piously nearby. At worst it was Katherine Hepburn in the African Queen who became a real woman only after she shucked her petticoats and her religion and floated down the Nile with Humphrey Bogart.10
This grim view of her chosen field was not helped by discussions with veterans of the Korean War, who informed her that her chosen land lacked trees, color, and the most basic amenities of life. Joyce rejoiced when the first sight out the window of her airplane as it landed at Kimpo Airport was a tree.
The young couple arrived three weeks before their first anniversary, when Joyce was three months pregnant with their first child. They lacked any real training in missions, Korean language, or skills at learning a new culture. According to Alan Henderson, institutions affiliated with Churches of Christ did very little to prepare persons for cross-cultural ministry prior to the mid-1960s.11 Most of the educational programs that did emerge then were led by returning missionaries who felt keenly the inadequacy of their preparation and the need to help the next generation avoid their mistakes. Joyce and Dan had no clear plan, just a desire to serve as well as a mental toughness evident now but surely already present in germ form then.
Reflecting on her marriage many years later, Joyce wrote, “I have been blessed with a husband whom I not only love but who loves me enough to die for me. He has always encouraged me to be all I could be….”12 Her marriage was one of mutual support that allowed both Joyce and Dan to navigate a changing ecclesiastical and social environment.
Part of the challenge lay in finding the balance between a traditional understanding of her role as a homemaker and mother and her drive to teach. Dan argued in a lecture at the Abilene Christian College Lectureship in 1962 that the “missionary wife” should “appreciate and respect the role of homemaking,” and insisted that, since Joyce did, “Our home is a happy one and my work is 100% more effective and rewarding.”13 He recommended that such a woman could teach after her children had grown up.
This statement fit the dominant views of Churches of Christ and other conservative Christians of the era, but the experiences of Dan and Joyce were more complicated. Joyce recalls discussing the question of her teaching with Mrs. Holton, who urged her to use her gifts of teaching. This urging from such an accomplished and dedicated woman created a sense of guilt in Joyce, which only resolved itself after she, Dan, and Mrs. Holton held a clarifying conversation that helped Joyce recognize the need to balance her obligations and wait for the right time.14 The lecture at ACC must have marked a moment in Joyce’s and Dan’s life as they continued to wrestle with the tensions between the values of American church culture and their own experiences.
Joyce did later in the 1960s spend much time teaching at KCI/KCC after her children had begun school. After she and Dan returned from their second furlough, they asked their American sponsoring church to increase his funding so that she could be compensated for some of that work and so that as a family they could counteract the steep inflation South Korea was then experiencing. The elders refused, however, compelling her to find employment with the Department of Defense School in Seoul. Although the struggle led to opportunity, she wrote three decades later that, “It still hurts to think that my contribution was not worth $250!”15 The church structures that still perceived women as a breed apart had not yet learned to see married women as missionaries, though they were happy for them to carry out the culturally validated role of school teacher..
From KCI to KCU. Although their work had not been pre-arranged before their arrival in Korea, Dan Hardin immediately became dean of the fledgling Korea Christian Institute (sometimes advertised in the United States as Korea Christian College), which later became, in turn, Korea Christian College (1966), Korea Christian University (1973), and currently Gangseo University (named for its ward in Seoul).16 KCI was one of about a dozen similar schools begun by Church of Christ missionaries in the 1950s.17
In 1954, the first missionaries, Dale Richeson and his family, arrived in Korea. Haskell Chesshir and his family joined the Richesons later the same year. Although Bible classes had been taught prior to the organization of the Institute/College, formal instruction did not begin until the spring of 1958. Saturday, April 19, 1958 has traditionally been considered the founding date of KCI/KCC, though A. R. Holton, the school’s first president, announced the opening date as Monday, April 21, 1958.18 Holton, who had arrived in Korea in 1957, served alongside Choong Mo Dong as dean, Haskell Chesshir as vice president, and Kyu Hyun Park as business manager. Twenty-five students enrolled for instruction in the Bible and related ministry topics.
The missionaries’ experience in the United States had taught them the multiplying effect of such schools engaged in ministry and missions.
Dan’s work for a year at David Lipscomb College (now Lipscomb University) had apparently qualified him for the dean’s role. As the school’s only full-time administrator for most of his time there, Dan was responsible for turning a good idea into a reality. He organized the curriculum, managed teachers, supervised student recruiting, and supervised other aspects of a school’s life. His leadership in translating the ideas of A. R. Holton, Haskell Chesshir, and others into a living reality presented him both significant challenges and significant opportunities.
As part of his growth as an administrator and missionary, Dan completed a master’s degree in Korean language at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. He was also the only missionary in their team who preached in Korean. These achievements prepared him to be an effective administrator for KCI/KCC.
The first three years of KCI took place at the Hyo Chang Dong mission site in Seoul, but the school soon outgrew that area. In 1959, the Korean government sold fifty-three acres of land then on the outskirts of Seoul to the Church of Christ mission for $10,000. The Otter Creek Church of Christ and other congregations in the United States raised the money through the efforts of, among others, Haskell Chesshir. Dan Hardin and Bill Richardson negotiated the land purchase while Chesshir was on furlough in the United States, but a well-placed telephone call by the two men alerted Chesshir to the need. He, in turn, contacted the Vultee and Otter Creek Church of Christ congregations. They, along with the Charlotte Avenue and Una congregations and others, borrowed or donated the funds for purchasing the land and beginning its transformation into a college campus.19
All successful missionaries must create healthy transitions for their ministries as they pass them on to natives of the culture in which they have been working. This was true for the Americans working in Korea, including Joyce and Dan Hardin. The U.S. Churches of Christ had funded the effort in Korea, in large part because of the coordinating efforts of the elders at the Otter Creek Church of Christ in Nashville. According to a financial statement of October-November 1960, 104 churches and more than 700 individuals contributed $15,000 to purchase from the government 85 acres of land (including the 53 acres bought originally), which became the campus of what is now Gangseo University.20 Later, in 1965, to take another example, the Otter Creek elders coordinated the funds of over 100 congregations and several hundred individuals to fund an annual missionary budget in excess of $100,000 per year.21 For several years, these donors held quarterly meetings in the Nashville area to coordinate their fund-raising and prayers for Korea.22 The group appointed Thomas Rogers (an economist and professor at Lipscomb) and John Rucker, elders at Otter Creek, as the financial managers for the entire group.
During the late 1960s, however, the interests of the American churches had begun shifting to other parts of the world and other domestic issues. That shift of interests, coupled with the maturing of the Korean work, necessitated gradual changes in the work of KCC. Most of the funds for the work, and the workers themselves, needed to come from Korea.
The Americans did not leave altogether, however. One important part of the transition to Korean leadership involved the formation of the Korean Christian Education Fund in the winter of 1968-1969. A group of leaders at Otter Creek and other congregations formed a nonprofit corporation entrusted with raising money for KCC’s operations and related ministries. The group’s directors included John W. Holton, the son of the school’s first president A. R. Holton, and others.23 Its stated aims were “to encourage, promote, develop, and support Christian Education, Christian Services and related Christian Benevolent and Charitable activities in the Republic of Korea and elsewhere.” That overall aim remains KCEF’s mission. By this time, incidentally, the Hardins received their full support from the Otter Creek congregation.
Much later, beginning in 2010, Joyce herself served as Chair of KCEF after joining its Board at the invitation of John Rucker, a founding member and an elder at Otter Creek. As she wrote about that period, “Dr. Steve Sherman and I were elected to the KCU JP in 2013 as representatives of Otter Creek and KCEF…. A nursing program was added, some excellent and highly qualified faculty members were hired, and some additional land was purchased. The University also made some progress in the accreditation ratings.”24
In recent years, Korean Church of Christ leaders have been embroiled in a discussion about the history of Gangseo University under its successive names. One group insists that Haskell Chesshir alone was the founder of the school and that they are his natural successors. They reject the claim that the Otter Creek Church of Christ, other American congregations, or other individual missionaries can claim the title of “founder.” The intense conflict around this historical question masks a deeper set of conflicts around the direction Gangseo University should take (and even its name, the adoption of which was itself controversial).
In my 2019 interview with her, Joyce Harding insisted that no single person could be named “the” founder, though she agreed that Haskell Chesshir was “an” important founder, among others. It is necessary to rethink the entire historical question.
Many people contributed to the founding of Gangseo University. A. R. Holton was the first president, in part because he was older than the other missionaries, and in part because he enjoyed many connections with prominent leaders in Churches of Christ in the United States. Haskell Chesshir provided early leadership and vision, as well as raising money for KCI in its earliest iterations. Since he was older than most of his teammates and was a good promoter and visionary, he often received the lion’s share of the credit, even when others made major contributions.25 Dan Hardin organized the curriculum, recruited and managed faculty, and otherwise got the school off the ground. Thomas Rogers and other elders at Otter Creek in Nashville coordinated extensive fundraising for more than a decade, ensuring that the school could buy its basic property, build key structures, and pay its teachers.26 Koreans such as Dong Chong Mo and Chun Whan played major roles. There were many founders, not least of whom was Joyce Hardin.
A Woman in Mission. Joyce, meanwhile, cared for her growing family and began teaching at KCI. Her first class taught the craft of teaching. She remembers the class as a disaster, in part because she was younger than many of her students, and in part because of the gap between American and Korean understandings of the nature of education.27 Undeterred, however, she began to develop her teaching skills as her role as mother and manager of the household would allow.
On their first furlough back to the United States, Dan completed a M.A. at the University of Eastern New Mexico in Portales, the location of the sponsoring congregation (1964), preparing him better to manage the transition KCI made to a college. On his second furlough, he completed a doctorate in education at Oklahoma State University, writing a dissertation on “An analysis of the relationship of institutional goal specificity and faculty morale in liberal arts colleges”.28 That further study prepared him to manage the transition KCC made to a full-blown university with him as its first president.
Joyce used those same periods to further her education, as well, completing a Master of Education degree at Eastern New Mexico in 1964, a Specialist in Education at Oklahoma State University in 1970, and after their final return from Korea as missionaries, an Ed.D. at Oklahoma State University with a dissertation on “A study of the relationship of moral development to school setting, comparing students in a church related school with students in a public school.”29
After returning from Korea following the second furlough, Dan took up the reins of the KCC presidency, and Joyce became chair of the religious education emphasis. A Korean, Lee Hyun Nam became registrar, a major administrative position in the university and the beginning of its rapid handover to full Korean leadership.30 Upon the Hardins’ final departure from Korea in 1974, Lee Ji Ho became the first Korean president of the college. He was the first Korean and the first graduate of KCC to lead the institution. As Dan remarked in his history of KCU, the school had lived into its motto taken from 2 Timothy 2:2, “Teaching faithful men to teach others.” He argued that “Dr. Lee’s acceptance of the KCC presidency was evidence that the motto was more than just words.”31
Living Arrangements. While living in Korea, Joyce and Dan moved into a succession of Korean houses rather than live in the mission compound. This deliberate strategy of engaging the culture led from one set of experiences and relationships to another. As part of her slowly evolving efforts to build relationships with Koreans, and to satisfy an artistic urge of her own, Joyce began to take flower arranging lessons at a local department store. The teacher was Im Wha Kong (1924-2018), who founded an eponymous Flower Arrangement Society training non-Koreans in the ikebana tradition of flower arrangement (a style originating in Japan). As her fame grew, Mrs. Im eventually owned the Wha Kong Weon Garden in a suburb of Seoul, where she grew flowers and made pottery to contain them. She eventually became internationally famous and probably the best known flower artist in South Korea. The state named her a Living National Treasure, a formal UNESCO designation.
Almost on a whim, Joyce began frequenting Mrs. Im’s classes in a major Seoul department store, often as the only American student. Those classes marked the beginning of a long relationship between the two women. As she progressed in the art, Joyce began to network with others practicing it. She was eventually called upon to help arrange flowers for the visiting of President Lyndon Johnson to Seoul in October-November 1966.
Her association with other Americans and Koreans involved in flower arranging brought Joyce into contact with the First Lady of Korea, Yuk Young Soo (1925-1974), the wife of President Park Chung Hee. On an impulse, at a flower show that the First Lady visited, Joyce presented Yuk Young Soo an antique soapstone vase Dan had bought for her, and this gift opened the door to a long-term relationship. Joyce first shared tea with the First Lady at the Blue House, the presidential mansion, about a month after their meeting. They met numerous times after that. Yuk Young Soo was well-known for her charitable activity, her interest in children’s welfare, and her commitment to education (including KCI), all interests she shared with Joyce.
This last interest became important at one point when the Korea Christian Institute ran into difficulties with a government official who sought a bribe for his help. Bribery was then and, unfortunately, is still today too common a way of ensuring that a project comes to fruition.
At the suggestion of a KCC faculty member, Joyce informed the First Lady of her problem, without, however, accusing the relevant official of seeking a bribe. One call from the presidential mansion, the Blue House, resolved an otherwise intractable difficulty within a week. Without Joyce’s friendly acquaintance with Yuk Young Soo, it is doubtful that the Korea Christian Institute would have survived to become what it is today, Gangseo University.32 Although Mrs. Park remained a Buddhist all her life, her relationship with Joyce paved the way for the Christian work that still continues. Joyce still remembers with pride the day the First Lady introduced her to another person as her friend.33
During this period, Joyce also wrote columns for two English-language Korean newspapers, the Korea Times and the Korea Herald, as well as a string of articles for several magazines. She also served as president of the International Women’s Association and the Seoul Garden Club. Her involvement in the community led her to emcee and participate in fashion shows and even appear in a television commercial for a fertilizer company.34
Mother and Children. Far more important than Joyce’s involvement with international and Korean women in flower arranging was Joyce’s role as a mother to her daughters Mara, Danna, and Terra, all born within the space of about two years. When they grew old enough to go to school, the problem of where to send them became acute. The private schools would have isolated them from Korean culture too much, while the public schools were often badly underfunded and pedagogically backward. The solution was to send them to the primary school on the campus of Ewha University, the oldest and most illustrious women’s university in Korea. By the 1960s, Ewha had grown into a full-fledged Korean university with strong Korean researchers and teachers.
Reflecting later, Joyce noted that “the dilemma of educating missionary children is a very real one and one that each family must solve for itself.”35 She and Dan opted for a Korean-language school in order to help her children understand the larger culture in which they lived, and because they shared an educational philosophy with the principal of the Ewha primary school. As she still later noted in an interview, her daughters received much attention from their fellow students and from the news media, with magazines and television shows all publicizing the American girls in a Korean school. The presence of Mara, Danna, and Terra at Ewha certified the quality of Korean education and gave hope to the parents of other children that Koreans could teach at a high level.
In 2016, Joyce and her three daughters returned to Ewha to visit their old school. They found that their pictures were posted on the wall of the school’s museum, and the teachers at the school recognized her daughters, though they had attended the school many years earlier.
Arguably, the choice to send her daughters to Ewha Primary School revealed more than one family’s decision-making. Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries had started the first schools for Korean girls in the 1880s, and by the 1930s over 20,000 Korean girls studied in missionary schools. Ewha itself began in 1886 as such a missionary school, though by the 1960s it also enrolled boys, as well as girls.36 While these schools attempted not to unfit these Korean girls and women for the lives their culture expected them to lead, inevitably they wrought sweeping cultural change, the impacts of which continue to this day. The work by women, with women, and for women had been part of the Christian missionary experience in Korea from the beginning.37 The decisions Joyce and Dan made with respect to their children’s education and connection to Korean culture continued a pattern pioneered several generations earlier by other missionary families, even if it did not reflect the practices of other Church of Christ missionaries, who usually sent their children to international foreign schools that taught in English.
Educator and Advocate for Missions
After returning to the United States in 1974, Joyce completed a doctorate, and she and Dan joined the faculty of Lubbock Christian College (now Lubbock Christian University) in 1976. She remained there as a professor and administrator for the next twenty-four years, serving 1990-2000 as Dean of the College of Education.
In addition to her work as educator of teachers and university administrator, she continued to encourage and educate church leaders and members both in the United States and abroad. She encouraged students to see their lives as a mission. She and Dan mentored missionaries to Kenya, Malawi, Thailand, and other places.38
Part of her work involved writing books, articles, and church curricula. The former included her volume Sojourners: Women with a Mission39 and her memoir Three Steps Behind. The first volume, published just prior to her return to the United States, allowed Joyce to address the nature of culture and culture shock, learning a language, building a stable and comfortable home, raising children, living as a single person, and finding one’s own personhood, among other topics. The volume is full of practical advice for American women of the early 1970s living outside their home culture. She wrote it in the belief that while male missionaries and ministers do similar work wherever they go, women face particular challenges and opportunities that vary from culture to culture.
Three Steps Behind takes its title from the traditional Korean custom (now mostly lost) of a wife walking three steps behind her husband as a sign of deference. Joyce understood the phrase as a metaphor for her own position as both a woman engaged in the male-dominated profession of missions and a foreigner in Korean culture. The phrase speaks to the psychological pressures her dual identity as “foreign woman” placed upon her and her daughters as “third culture kids.” She found herself “always three words behind” in a conversation in Korean and felt the gap between expectations and ambitions on the one hand, and reality on the other.40 As Dan Hardin put it in his foreword to his wife’s book, “Three Steps Behind is filled with experiences that reveal frustration, loneliness, fear, and a host of those emotions that attend living in a foreign culture but, amid it all, there is the joy that comes with service for the Master. Joyce touches us and challenges us with her ability to live life to its fullest even in the most trying circumstances.”41
In addition to these books and her unpublished dissertation, Joyce also wrote children’s Sunday School curricula for Sweet Publishing, Standard Publishing, 21st Century Publishing, and other companies.42 This work illustrates her desire to foster children’s religious education that would shape character and imagination in positive directions, and also inspire in them a consciousness of the importance of mission. She also wrote several chapters in books and articles in periodicals, primarily on the subjects of women in missions43 and family life.44 Often her voice stood alone alongside a range of male missionaries. Over the years, she gave many interviews to journals such as the Christian Chronicle and at university lectures at Abilene Christian University and Pepperdine University, among others. This body of work shows a profound concern for the well-being of the church at large, and especially women and children in the church.
Joyce and Dan chose to work at Lubbock Christian College because there they found many students interested in serving the church both in the United States and abroad. They could continue their own work as missionaries by educating future missionaries. During their time there, they also worked alongside missionaries in Kenya and American Samoa and trained teams in Central and South America, Asia, and Europe. Joyce has spent extended time in Korea, even as recently as 2017. Both as a couple and as individuals, they conducted workshops on missions for many churches.
In addition to writing, Joyce (along with Dan) taught for ten years in the annual Summer Missions Seminar at Abilene Christian University. The seminar brochures for 1983 and 1984, the last years in which Joyce and Dan taught, listed seventeen and fourteen courses respectively, ranging from missionary anthropology to sign language, and each taught by a professor of missions from Churches of Christ. Dan taught a course called “Introduction to Missionary Research,” while Joyce offered one named “The Missionary Woman.” She and Dan continued to serve as a team, and as she put it in our interview, “he always pushed me to be my best.”
The catalogue described the content of her course as “the missionary woman’s sphere of service on the foreign field with emphasis on her role as a teacher, personal worker, wife and mother, and how these roles will be modified by life and work within a different culture.”45 The course description, like Joyce’s ministry more generally, speaks to a time when women were discovering new ways of using their gifts in ministry while still operating within a male-dominated church structure. That structure was rapidly changing, in part because of its own internal contradictions, and in part because of the changing opportunities for women and men to live different lives than those previously prescribed for them.
In addition to teaching and writing about missions, Joyce had a day job during the three decades after she left Korea, first as professor of education and then as dean of education at Lubbock Christian. In that role, she served on numerous boards and as an officer of major organizations such as the Texas Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (Treasurer 1991-1995; President 1997-1998; Executive Secretary 1999-2009),the Consortium of State Organizations for Texas Teacher Education (Executive Secretary 1999-2005), the Association of Independent Liberal Arts Colleges of Teacher Education, and the Advisory Council of State Representatives (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education). Her roles in state-, region-, and nationwide undoubtedly helped her university’s programs gain important recognition and led indirectly to better placements for her students.
Joyce also during the 1990s and early 2000s served on the boards of the Korea Christian Education Fund (of which she is still a member) and Mission Resource Network (2000-2009), roles that allowed her experience in missions and missions education to benefit new generations of leaders.
Conclusions
The life of Joyce Hardin deserves attention on its own merits. A young woman crossed cultural boundaries without formal preparation but with determination and a strong sense of purpose. In partnership with her husband and children, and in other ways with other women and men, she built a meaningful life of service in Korea, the United States, and beyond. At the same time, her life offers a window onto major trends in the post-World War II era, including the rise of previously colonized countries, the expansion of opportunities for women, and changes in conceptions of the place of Christianity in the world.
Joyce once wrote in an article that the missionary woman must possess certain qualities:
- A commitment to evangelism,
- A commitment to service,
- A commitment to learning,
- A commitment to identification with other people,
- A commitment to spiritual growth, and
- A strong sense of personal identity.46
She concluded that missionary women must be liberated in the sense that they should find ways to contribute to the Kingdom of God in the ways best suited to their abilities and opportunities.
That list of commitments and that vision of liberation describe not just missionary women in general, but Joyce Hardin in particular. The young woman who went to Korea in the midst of pregnancy became a noble carrier of the gospel in that country, which has become her spiritual home. Her daughters and their families also grew up to work in mission fields in various ways. Her eleven grandchildren and seventeen great-grandchildren draw strength from that legacy. Now living in a retirement center, she has just completed a storybook for her great-grandchildren based on stories she told her grandchildren over the years. Her concern for the future continues.
When I visited her home for the 2019 interview, and at other times, I met a wise woman who has lived, and continues to live, her life well. Everywhere one looks in her beautiful home are furniture, pictures, ceramics, and other items that together tell the many stories of her life. These items come from Korea, Africa, and other places she has traveled. They speak of a woman who has blessed many lives and inspired many of us to pass on to the next generation what it means to be a servant on God’s mission. This study aims to do just that.
About the Author: Samjung Kang-Hamilton (Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University) teaches Christian Religious Education at Abilene Christian University. She ministered in Korea for several years as part of the Missions Research Team for Churches of Christ before moving to the United States. Here she has been actively involved in churches in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Texas, including in training churches in Christian education. She has made presentations in Korea, Singapore, and Croatia, as well. Along with her husband, Mark, she published in 2024 Story, Ritual, Prophecy, Wisdom: Reading and Teaching the Bible Today (Eerdmans), and she has published numerous articles and chapters in books on religious education and missions. She has also served for more than a decade as the book review editor of the journal Restoration Quarterly. The mother of two adult children, Nathan and Hannah, she resides in Abilene, Texas with her husband.
1 Joyce Hardin, “For Everything There is a Season,” in Trusting Women: The way of women in Churches of Christ, ed. Billie Silvey (New Leaf Books, 2002), 49-60.
2 Hardin, “For Everything There is a Season,” 53.
3 Loretta Hunnicutt, “How Women Shaped Japanese and Indian Churches,” Disciples History Magazine 72/1 (Spring 2013): 31 (9-13, 28-31).
4 Questionnaire information submitted by Dan Hardin in Charles R. Brewer, ed., Missionary Pictorial (World Vision, 1968), 98.
5 Dan Hardin and Joyce Hardin, “The Korean Team is Growing,” Korean Reporter (January 1964): 1-5.
6 Joyce Hardin, Three Steps Behind (ACU Press, 1987), 150.
7 Samjung Kang-Hamilton, “Interview of Joyce Hardin and Lynn Ashley,” August 23, 2019.
8 In February 1968, the missionaries of the Church of Christ Mission circulated an open letter to supporters proposing tighter organization of their work through the creation and empowerment of a single juridical person (board). Sid Allen et al. to Supporters. February 7, 1968. In Thomas Wesley Rogers papers, Center for Restoration Studies, Abilene Christian University.
9 Seo Jae Ryong, “Suk Kee Dong: Immigrant Laborer, Methodist Minister, and Restorationist,” trans. Samjung Kang-Hamilton, Missio Dei (May 2019) http://missiodeijournal.com/issues/md-10-1/authors/md-10-1-seo;
D. Newell Williams, Douglas A. Foster, and Paul M. Blowers, eds., The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History (Chalice, 2013), 270-75.
10 Hardin, Three Steps Behind, 2.
11 Alan Henderson, “A Historical Review of Missions and Missionary Training in the Churches of Christ,” Restoration Quarterly 35 (1993): 203-217.
12 Hardin, “For Everything There is a Season,” 54.
13 Daniel C. Hardin, “Overcoming Obstacles in Mission Fields,” in “The Restoration Principle”: Being the Abilene Christian College Annual Bible Lectures 1962, ed. J. D. Thomas (Abilene: Abilene Christian College, 1962), 276 (265-86).
14 Joyce Hardin, “Interview,” August 23, 2019.
15 Hardin, “For Everything There is a Season,” 56.
16 For the basic timeline, see Geori Seodo Dehaggyo 50 Nyŭnsa (KCU Press, 2008), plates 5-8.
17 The list included schools in Canada (2), Japan, Northern Rhodesia (3), Southern Rhodesia, Philippines (2), Mexico, Nigeria (2), Tanganyika, and Italy, as well as Korea. See Weldon Bennett and Lane Cubstead, Foreign Evangelism of the Churches of Christ: 1959-’60 Yearbook (Gospel Broadcast, 1960), 65.
18 A.R. Holton, “Korea Christian Institute Opens,” Gospel Advocate 100/24 (June 12, 1958): 379.
19 Daniel C. Hardin, “Mr. Chesshir Returns,” Korean Reporter (July 1964): 1-2.
20 “Korean Financial Statement,” in Thomas W. Rogers Papers, Abilene Christianity University.
21 “The Churches of Christ in the Nation of Korea,” in Thomas W. Rogers Papers, Abilene Christian University; “Korean Financial Statement Through September 1960,” in Thomas W. Rogers Papers, Abilene Christian University.
22 “Summary of Previous Workshop Meetings of Sponsoring Congregations,” in Thomas W. Rogers Papers, Abilene Christian University.
23 Flier, “Scholarship Fund Korea Christian College,” in Thomas W. Rogers Papers, Abilene Christian University.
24 Joyce Hardin, “Letter to Lee Hun Ahn,” undated, from the correspondence of Joyce Hardin.
25 For example, a movie about the Korean work, narrated by Batsell Barrett Baxter, described Chesshir in this way. “Mission to Korea,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgGbFlTBYFU, accessed September 1, 2024.
26 Rogers and Aaron Thomason visited Korea for a month in August-September 1966, surveying the mission work and helping formulate a plan for the future. See Korean Reporter (September-October 1966): 2.
27 “Interview,” August 23, 2019.
28 Daniel C. Hardin, “An Analysis of the Relationship of Institutional Goal Specificity and Faculty Morale in Liberal Arts Colleges” (Ed.D. diss., Oklahoma State University, 1970), accessed August 30, 2024, https://www.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/302582441/CEE06D8742184E1EPQ/2?accountid=7006&sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses.
29 Joyce Hardin, “A Study of the Relationship of Moral Development to School Setting, Comparing Students in a Church-Related School with Students in a Public School” (Ed.D. diss., Oklahoma State University, 1978), accessed August 30, 2024, https://www.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/302889512/A40FE999E714A1BPQ/1?accountid=7006&sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses.
30 Daniel C. Hardin, “A Brief History of [the] Church of Christ in Korea,” unpublished manuscript, 14. The manuscript comes from the files of Joyce Hardin.
31 Daniel C. Hardin, “Brief History,” 14.
32 Hardin, Three Steps Behind, 112.
33 Hardin, Three Steps Behind, 113.
34 “Interview,” August 23, 2019.
35 Joyce Hardin, “Women in Missions,” in Guidelines for World Evangelism, ed. George Gurganus (Biblical Research Press, 1976), 221 (210-26).
36 Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women – Old Ways, Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies 1 (University of California Press, 2009), 86-120.
37 See Donald N. Clark, “Mothers, Daughters, Biblewomen, and Sisters: An Account of ‘‘Women’s Work’’ in the Korea Mission Field,” in Christianity in Korea, eds. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. and Timothy S. Lee (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).
38 “Mission Changes Course,” Reflections: Lubbock Christian University 60/1 (Spring 2019): 31; “Dan and Joyce Hardin Influence Missions at LCU,” Reflections: Lubbock Christian University 60/1 (Spring 2019): 32.
39 Joyce Hardin, Sojourners: Women with a Mission (Korean Consolidated Corporation, 1973).
40 Hardin, Three Steps Behind, 3.
41 Dan Hardin, “Foreword,” in Joyce Hardin, Three Steps Behind (ACU Press, 1987), i.
42 E.g., Passport to Adventure (Sweet Publishing, 1988); Power Plus: God Pleasing Power (Standard Publishing, 1997); Growing Up with Jesus (Standard Publishing, 2001); Journeys Around the World (Sweet Publishing, 2002); As You are Going (21st Century Christian, 2006).
43 Joyce Hardin, “Women in Missions,” in Guidelines for World Evangelism, ed. George Gurganus (Biblical Research Press, 1976), 210-26; “Commitment: A Feminine Perspective,” Mission Strategy Bulletin 3/3 (1976): available at https://bterry.com/ovumissions/msb/misswomn.htm; accessed September 6, 2024.
44 Joyce Hardin, “Dare Your Children to be Different,” Christian Family 10/7 (December 1984): 13-14; “Successful Parenting: Part 1, Beginnings,” Christian Woman 2/1 (January-February 1986): 53-56; “Successful Parenting: Part 2, Let Children be Children,” Christian Woman 2/2 (March-April 1986): 49-51; “Successful Parenting: Part 3, Teaching Children Self-Discipline,” Christian Woman 2/3 (May-June 1986) 57-59; “Successful Parenting: Part 4, Helping Children Develop Their Own Faith,” Christian Woman 2/4 (July-August 1986); 53-55; “Successful Parenting: Part 5: Out on their Own,” Christian Woman 2/5 (September-October 1986): 39-41; “Successful Parenting: Part 6, Significant Others,” Christian Woman 2/6 (November-December 1986) 37-39; “Seen and Not Heard,” Christian Woman 9/1 (January-February 1993), 18-20; “For the Beauty of the Earth,” 21st Century Christian Magazine 57/2 (November 1994): 14-17; “I am a Child,” 21st Century Christian Magazine 59/6 (March-April 1997): 32-33; and “In the Image of God,” 21st Century Christian Magazine 59/6 (March-April 1997): 33-35.
45 Brochures: “Seminar in Missions 1983,” Abilene Christian University; and “Seminar in Missions 1984,” Abilene Christian University. I thank Professor Chris Flanders for making these materials available from his files.
46 Hardin, “Missionary Woman.”
