Beyond amen

I sat on a worn wooden board with a middle-aged woman to my right and a window-shaped hole in the cinder block wall to my left. Above, a corrugated steel roof shaded the front half of the sanctuary. It rattled when the morning breeze caught it at a certain angle. The floor was hard-packed dirt. Behind me, thirty to forty men, women, and children sat. The pastor’s easy smile contrasted with his earnest intensity, and every few sentences the congregation responded with hearty amens. “Amen” was the only word I understood, but changes in the pastor’s voice made it obvious he was alternating between two languages—Tagalog and the local dialect, Ilocano.

It was the fall of 1988, and I was a Marine deployed to the Philippines for a six-week exercise. I was also a new Christian, baptized only a few months earlier. That Sunday morning, I walked out the gate of Wallace Air Station (now Naval Station Ernesto Ogbinar) looking for a church. I found one, easily recognizable by the wooden cross and the sounds of singing.

The pastor glanced my way often. At first, I thought he was wondering why I was there, but I realized he had been checking my face for signs of comprehension when he smoothly added English interpretation and began preaching in three languages. I was astonished. That was my first multilingual church experience.

In 1996, I retired from the Marines, and my wife and I came to Japan as missionaries. Eight years after that, I was doing bilingual messages for the Saturday evening worship at Osaka International Church. I doubt I would have attempted self-interpretation if I hadn’t seen Pastor Freddie in action that Sunday morning in the Philippines. When Freddie added English to his message just for me, I felt included and valued.

Advantages and disadvantages

Presenting the message, to the extent possible, in all the languages of the audience shows that you welcome and care about each person. This is one of the best things about multilingual ministry. Of course, in a large city an international church congregation may include a dozen or more nationalities, and interpreting into all the languages is untenable. Resources need to be considered, and pluses and minuses should be recognized.

With a focus on ministry in Japan, here are some key advantages and disadvantages of a multilingual church:

Advantages:

• Models the global church and a heavenly community of all nations and languages.
• Leverages interest in English and may offer chances for international partnerships and cultural exchanges.
• Can provide a support community for new missionaries who need help.
• May offer Japanese and internationals who are far from their home communities a strong sense of “found” family within the church.

Disadvantages:

• Fails to model a reproducible Japanese church and makes contextualization of the gospel for Japanese more difficult.
• Risks becoming a foreign church that welcomes Japanese but is dependent on missionary leadership and leaves little room for the development of Japanese leaders.
• Will likely be an uncomfortable place for those who lack English skills or who dislike English, thus making outreach to the families of Japanese and the local community difficult.
• May result in new missionaries becoming overly dependent on bilingual assistance.

Of the disadvantages of the multilingual church, the most serious may be that it offers a model of the church that cannot be deeply contextualized to Japanese culture and that Japanese church planters cannot reproduce without international assistance.

A need for wisdom and leadership

An energetic mission group can plant a network of bilingual churches in cities across Japan, but these churches will probably never play any direct role in reaching the rural areas, which the previous issue of Japan Harvest focused on. In that issue, Dawn Birkner argued that the pressing needs of unreached Japanese towns indicated missionaries should refocus their efforts from cities to plant churches in rural areas that lack any viable Christian witness.¹

The needs of rural communities in Japan are felt even more acutely when the crisis of the aging of Japanese pastors is considered, as is made concrete and tangible by the plea for help that Pastor Yutaka Sugawara penned in the Japan Update (Fall 2025), bound together with Japan Harvest. As he makes clear, many of the rural areas that currently have churches are at risk of losing all those churches because of loss of pastoral leadership.”²

In his article “Multiplying Disciples,” Matt Parsley wrote, “Furthermore when we invite Japanese people to church, we may pull them away from their oikos (family or other relational network) as we ty to integrate them into our relationships. If they come to Christ, it becomes very difficult for them to ever take the gospel back into those relationships that have been strained because they ‘left the group.’”³ These words were not written with the multilingual church model in view, but his concerns are even more serious in the case of multilingual churches, which inevitably pull Japanese even further from their families than Japanese churches.

Following God’s guidance

From the standpoint of modern missiological theory, multilingual churches face an array of challenges that make them a questionable strategy. Yet, as I have personally experienced and as is clear when we look at how many multilingual churches are flourishing in cities across Japan, God is using these churches to reach and disciple many Japanese and internationals alike. Furthermore, in our increasingly connected world, the spaces where multilingual ministries can flourish are likely to continue to increase in the future.

However, considering the missiological concerns mentioned above, I want to encourage those involved in multilingual church ministry to prayerfully consider a few suggestions:

• Prioritize the development of Japanese leaders and make room for them to exercise their leadership gifts. As they mature, encourage them to prayerfully consider how and where they might best focus their ministries. Be willing to release them and send them out to serve in areas beyond the reach of your own ministry.
• Make deep study of Japanese culture and language a priority for yourself and for other missionaries serving with you.
• Offer Japanese language small groups and/or additional worship services to make entry points for Japanese who are uninterested in English. Consider planting a Japanese sister church alongside the international church.
• Don’t allow yourself or new missionaries working with you to become too comfortable serving in multilingual ministry. Prayerfully consider how you and your church can support ministry to Japanese in unreached communities and those facing the loss of pastors.

As Christians, we are all continually faced with opportunities, needs, and callings. As we are able, we should take advantage of opportunities to further the gospel work, but we should not ignore needs; rather, we should help however we can. Ultimately, the focus of our ministries must be on whatever the Lord has called us to do. God alone knows how he will finally weave all the threads of diverse ministries together to make a beautiful tapestry.

1. Dawn Birkner, “Rural Japan: Will our generation take up the call?” Japan Harvest, Vol. 76 No. 4 (Autumn 2025): 18–19.
2. Yutaka Sugawara, “A Cry and Plea from Shikoku,” Japan Update No. 90 (Fall 2025): 3–4. Note: Included within Japan Harvest, Vol. 76 No. 4 (Autumn 2025).
3. Matt Parsley, “Multiplying Disciples,” Japan Harvest Vol. 76 No. 3 (Summer 2025): 12–13.