Photojournalist’s Work Captured Mission

Edwin de Jong was in Beijing, China, in 1989 when he came upon a large group of students protesting against that country’s Communist government in Tiananmen Square.

De Jong, who was a photojournalist for what was then Christian Reformed World Missions (now Resonate Global Mission), was traveling with Rev. Ed Van Baak, who for many years was the Asia secretary for World Missions, on what had been planned as a sightseeing trip. The two had been visiting English teachers who had been sent by World Missions to teach at universities around China.

“We walked into Tiananmen Square expecting to be tourists and ended up turning into journalists and representatives of Western democracy,” said de Jong, who captured images depicting the work of the world mission agency as the organization’s media director between 1985 and 1996.

“All these Chinese people wanted to know whether we supported their cause—basically freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to speak,” de Jong recalled in front of the 36-year-old photographs, on display as part of his career retrospective this summer at Monroe Community Church in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The encounter came three weeks before the Chinese government cracked down on the protestors. De Jong and Van Baak left Beijing later that day on the second-to-last plane allowed to leave China before the government stopped all outbound foreign flights.

A year later, one of the images of the student protestors was featured on the cover of The Banner magazine.

Titled “Imago Dei: A Photojournalism Retrospective,” de Jong’s exhibit featured 57 of his photographs taken through the 1980s and ‘90s.

“As a believer in a loving and interested Creator, I see the beauty and complexity of Imago Dei, the image of God, reflected in human beings,” de Jong wrote in his artist’s statement as part of the exhibit.

The project was the brainchild of de Jong’s daughter, Amy Elise de Jong, a musician and visual artist based in New York City. The younger de Jong suggested the idea of a photo retrospective in connection with her father’s 65th birthday, which was earlier this year.

“How do you choose pictures from decades of travel and shooting all over the world?” said de Jong, who spent nine months going through more than 10,000 35mm slides of pictures taken during his time with World Missions. “That’s all we shot back then, color slides,” he said.

Once de Jong whittled the list of photos down to about 250, his daughter helped further curate the selections for the exhibit.

A native of Sarnia, Ont., who earned his degree in photojournalism at California State University Long Beach, de Jong took a media position at World Missions in 1985. Not long afterward, he proposed going overseas to different World Missions outposts around the world to take pictures of missionaries at work.

“We were getting pictures back from missionaries and occasional visitors, but … we couldn’t publish it,” de Jong said. The quality wasn’t worth it.

“Once they (the mission agency) understood the usefulness of really good photography and the potential that it had to touch people, they went in full hog,” he said.

De Jong would spend two months every year going to different missions, capturing images of missionaries and the people they were serving and writing stories to go with the photos he took. He documented mission and relief work in Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, The Philippines, Taiwan, and mainland China.

Monroe Community Church has been home to several art exhibits since its building was redesigned in 2020. It has been a popular venue for ArtPrize, the international art competition in Grand Rapids every September.

Related: Michigan Church Honored for Hosting Art Festival, Building Design (Oct. 28, 2022)

“It’s an art gallery with a worship space attached to it,” said de Jong, who was connected to the venue through Steven Fridsma, an architect and Monroe church member who helped design the church space.

While most of the images in the exhibit were in the church lobby, about a dozen images, mostly depicting worship and prayer, were displayed in the sanctuary.

The exhibit, which ran June through August, is now headed to the headquarters for World Renew, and will later be on display at two Grand Rapids churches.