Seto found his calling in the
mission field, devoting his life to crossing racial, political
and cultural barriers to create community where there was none.
He was sympathetic to to people of other faiths and facilitated
Christian-Muslim dialogue without compromising his own faith.
A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Saturday, April
17, at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, NM, which he attended
after moving to Santa Fe in retirement and joining the Presbyterian
community at Plaza del Monte.
The Rev. Aurelia Fule, a fellow retiree in Santa Fe who worked
for the PC(USA)’s department of theology and worship, said
of Seto: “I knew Paul for 25 years. He was caring, truly
loving ... in the deep sense of the word. He was the most remarkable
person, and he shared something of what God’s love must
be like for human beings.”
Seto earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of California
and graduated from Garrett in 1944. He later studied theology
at Princeton and Hartford seminaries. He was ordained by New Brunswick
Presbytery and in 1946 was assigned to Kermanshah, Iran, by the
United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.
He and his wife, Genevieve Reynolds Seto, worked in missions
until 1963, serving in Aleppo, Syria, and Beirut, Lebanon. Seto
taught at Aleppo College and the Near East School of Theology
and worked in a campus ministry in Beirut.
Seto’s son, Ted, noting that his parents’ 1944 marriage
was interracial and therefore illegal in the United States, said
mission service was an attractive alternative at a time when there
was little demand for Presbyterian ministers of Japanese descent.
“The decision was clearly the right one,” Ted Seto
said. “In the field, he was no longer Japanese; he was Christian.
That, of course, posed its own difficulties in the countries to
which he was posted, but they were difficulties common to all
missionaries. His extraordinary facility with languages and great
interpersonal skills made him unusually effective. Race no longer
mattered. …
“For him, creation of a world in which all could feel
included and cared for was what the church was about, and his
life and ministry reflected that.”
In 1963, after his wife died, Seto married her sister, Selma,
and they returned together to Iran, where they served until 1980.
They were among six Presbyterian missionaries expelled from the
country after the overthrow of the Shah.
Seto later worked as director of the Patterns of Ecumenical
Sharing program at the Stony Point Conference Center in upstate
New York. Before his 1991 retirement, he was a coordinator of
mission programs for the PC(USA), serving in Louisville and New
York.
The Rev. Peggy Thomas, who with her husband, Kenneth, served
alongside the Setos in Tehran, said: “Paul Seto understood
Jesus’ words about love of the enemy to be at the heart
of the gospel. There was nothing beyond which God could not reach
in love — a tough love that has consequences that God bears
and that we bear, but a love that brings us into relationships
without fear or boundaries.”
Selma Seto died in Santa Fe last September.
Seto is survived by five children — Ted, of Los Angeles;
Thelma Genevieve Seto of Albany, OH; Linda Seto of Taos, NM; Sharon
Seto of Mussoorie, India, director of development at the Woodstock
School there; and Peter Seto, also of Mussoorie, a volunteer at
the Christian boarding school — and 11 grandchildren.
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