1st Annual JMR Research Report
One year has passed since we started as Japan Missions Research (JMR). We are thankful that we can now present our first annual research report.
JMR was founded with the objective of “exploring the best practices of the Christian church in today’s Japan through working in partnership with churches, organizations, and individuals engaged in missions in Japan; analyzing and researching the statistics of churches and missions in Japan; and providing radical and practical proposals regarding the imminent issues facing churches in Japan.” As a fledgling organization, we humbly present a report of our research on the following two topics during the first year.
- Statistics of Christian churches in Japan in 2013
- Statistics of missionaries from overseas to Japan
In regard to the second topic, we are greatly indebted to Japan Evangelical Missionary Association (JEMA). We thank JEMA for their extensive assistance in our research.
We sent surveys to each of the mission organizations listed in the 2014 JEMA Directory. We received responses from 32% of the organizations, which represent 37% of the total number of missionaries to whom we sent a survey request. As it is, we regret that our research was less than thorough, and that the data we gathered does not precisely represent the overall picture of missionaries in Japan. We hope, however, that this report is indicative to some extent of missionary statistics in Japan.
Yoichi Yamaguchi, Director
Hatsuo Shibata, Researcher
Yukio Hanazono, Researcher
A large number of mission organizations are recorded as working in Japan, with their member missionaries engaged in a wide range of ministries. In addition, a number of missionaries have been sent directly to Japan by overseas mission organizations, many of them from South Korea and Taiwan, and thus not systematically recorded as missionaries. No one seems to have exact figures regarding the total number of missionaries in Japan that include those directly sent by an overseas group.
Responses were from 37 mission organizations representing 672 missionaries.
See this PDF for a more detailed report from JMR.
Missionaries were asked to choose which of the following six main types of ministry they were mostly involved in:
- Church development and/or planting with a local church, a group of churches, or a denomination
- Ministry to a target group such as children, students, business people, and workplace; ministry at a specific venue such as camp sites, hospitals, welfare facilities, and prisons.
- Ministry through media such as newspaper, radio, TV, website, publishing, printing, music, and film; work related to production and sales of media content.
- Educational ministry at seminaries, Christian Academy in Japan, Christian schools including kindergartens, English language schools, or missionary training facilities.
- Administrative work related to overseas missions or international aide.
- Other
Results overall and by gender are in the pie charts below.
