Expectations and realities

I grew up in the Bible belt of North Carolina with a traditional church background and moved to Missouri for Bible college. Like many in my class, I had become disgruntled with the American church. Church as a building, works-based righteousness, and event-driven mission were just a few problems I thought I could start solving after graduating. At least that was my intention, until I became friends with a Japanese Christian. As our friendship grew, he encouraged me to visit Japan with him and do a short-term mission trip to his home church.

That trip was my first time I’d experienced a church outside of America, and I was amazed at what I saw. In my ignorance of the language and culture, I naively accepted all that I experienced. To my 20-year-old mind, the church seemed to being doing things right, unlike churches in America. There were early-morning prayer meetings, powerful outreach events, and a thriving homeless ministry that welcomed people to live on the church grounds in exchange for labor around the property. The church was multicultural with many Brazilians and Filipinos worshiping with Japanese. It seemed to be a perfect community and I wanted to experience more.

So the following year I returned to Japan on a school-sanctioned trip during which we visited several local churches in Honshu. As we visited the churches, I was shocked to find that they had very few members and many members were elderly. Some churches didn’t even have pastors. You could imagine how dumbfounded I felt when I learned that these were typical churches in Japan.

I decided I needed to learn more, so I headed back to Japan a third time. My aim was to spend the summer in Kashiwazaki, Niigata, fulfilling my internship requirements for college and hoping to learn more about the condition of the church in Japan while trying to reconcile the differences between my first and second trips. After only three weeks, my home was shaken to the ground as the little town of Kashiwazaki was turned upside down by the Niigata Chuetsu earthquake of 2004. I spent the rest of summer serving alongside various disaster-relief projects around the city. Eventually I connected with CRASH Japan through which I was offered a job as a teacher at Grace Christian International School in Ome, western Tokyo.

At the end of the summer, I returned home to finish my last semester of college and prepare for my big move back to Japan. Throughout this transition, I thought a lot about my previous experiences. The earthquake exposed a hopelessness in many people, which resonated with a similar hopelessness I had felt in my own heart as a child. It was Christ who rescued me out of the darkness and gave me hope, and it was Christ alone who could fill them with hope too. That consideration became the deciding factor for me in becoming a full-time missionary in Japan.

Yet, on a deeper level, I couldn’t shake my desire to understand what was going on in the church in Japan. Why was the church in my first trip so different from the churches I visited in the second trip? I got my answer in the summer of 2008. As I travelled to Tokyo, I decided to call on my friend and experience some nostalgia from my first trip to Japan. I spent a couple of weeks with him and was still as impressed with his church as I first was. However, this time I had a better grasp of the language and culture of Japan. I began to see some flaws in my rose-tinted view of this church. As I looked deeper, I started to notice things that I had not picked up on during my first trip. Further conversations with a few missionaries and church leaders I had come to know eventually helped me determine the reason for the big difference between it and other churches. That church mainly had its roots in the prosperity gospel movement.

That realization left me broken. I was troubled to see that the state of the church in Japan was pretty bleak. Churches were unhealthy. Many were dying, while others were yielding to false doctrine. As I thought about this, the idols of control and approval began to swell in my heart, and the arrogance I had had as a young Bible college student came flooding back. In my arrogance, I had begun to plot how I would approach the problems of the church in Japan and begin a new church that would become a model for future churches.

I became even more broken a few years later in the wake of the 2011 tsunami. I had been given the opportunity to lead a CRASH scout team to the north to survey the situation. That experience made me realize that I didn’t know how to lead. In the following months, the church-planting team I had put together dissolved, and my wife and I found ourselves alone.

Through prayer, we decided to return to the States, where I began walking through a season of repentance. We found a home in Karis Church in Missouri. I began an internship at Karis and over the years God’s grace started to transform me from a prideful one-man show to a humble, teachable team player. As we served at Karis, we learned what a healthy church looks like and how to be healthy church members. Karis also began to invest in our calling to Japan and through our partnership with the church-planting network called Acts 29 we made several trips to Japan and explored what it might look like for us to return to Japan.

These trips enabled me to catch a glimpse of the future of the church in Japan and it’s one I’m excited about. In a way, the tsunami seems to have been a wake-up call to many of the dying churches in Japan. In other ways, it’s helped to raise awareness of the need for a new work to begin in Japan. This past spring, I was privileged to glimpse this at a meeting of about a dozen church planters seeking to network together to reach Tokyo with the gospel. We are preparing to return to Japan this year, and I now have great hope for the future of the church in Japan.

As we labor together for the sake of the gospel in this next season of the church in Japan, let us not forget for whom we are laboring. “For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe” (1 Tim. 4:10, ESV).

Image composite by Karen Ellrick from public domain sources