FLM (The Finnish Lutheran Mission)
The Finnish Lutheran Mission (FLM)1 is one of the official organizations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) channeling international work. FLM was founded in 1967 in response to a strong revival movement among young people in Finland.
One of the main ideas of the revival was a strong desire to share the Gospel where Christ is not yet known. Therefore, in 1968, one year after establishment, our first missionaries went to Ethiopia and Japan. In recent years, FLM has had about 80 missionaries in 13 different countries.
Today Japan is one of the FLM’s priority regions for mission work. In Japan FLM cooperates with West Japan Evangelical Church (WJELC) in Kansai and Shikoku. We currently have 13 long-term missionaries and 2 short-term (1-2 years) missionaries aged between 27 and 70. Four of the long-term missionaries are former missionary kids, who were raised in Japan.
Within WJELC, we are responsible for three churches, in Nishinomiya, Kobe and Awaji Island. In addition, we support the Lutheran Hour broadcasts and provide workers for the Kobe Lutheran Bible Institute. Next year we will also become one of the organizations running the Kobe Lutheran Theological Seminary.
Our vision
Our vision is “to be a dynamic Lutheran movement which offers Christian fellowship, known for its strong emphasis on Bible teaching and sharing the Good News where Christ is not yet known”. The foundation of our work is reliance on God’s word. We aim to work in an unprejudiced way and in a spirit of cooperation. We do this because we believe that salvation is found in no one else (but Jesus), for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
In the future, FLM wants to continue to support the local church (WJELC) in reaching out to Japanese people. FLM still sees a need for long-term missionaries in Japan. Instead of simply sending money, we want to keep sending new missionaries to Japan. We also think that to survive in Japan, the Church needs to reach out to new generations. So we emphasize work among young people.
One of our challenges is the fact that international schools tend to be located in big cities. Although we would like to focus our work on rural areas, missionary families with school children prefer to live in big cities so their children can attend international school. This is something we have to take into consideration more in the future with our partner church WJELC.
We also want to be open to new approaches of doing mission work. Thus, we’ll continue to review how we work, to plan new strategies and search new opportunities with our main partner WJELC. Through continual strategic work, we believe that we can make the best use of our resources in order to do the mission work in this beautiful – but in many ways unreached – country of Japan.
1 https://www.sekl.fi