Hanging On, Or Forging On?
Two years ago, the north-east coast of Honshu was devastated by the triple disaster. In a matter of hours, decades of community development were reduced to rubble.
On the north-west coast, we were almost unaffected. But a different disaster—economic and demographic decline—has gutted our communities just as effectively as a tsunami, only more slowly.
In 50 years, the population in our town, Ajigasawa, has dropped by half. The number of elementary school children is one sixth what it was. We have ministered here since 1985, and our numbers in church are the same now as they were then.
Why do we stay?
What future is there for a church in this place?
Well, the town has not yet disappeared. While there is no way of knowing when the slide will slow, the town will remain. At this time, it is still home to 11,000 people, and with the 10,000 in the churchless town next to us, there is a sufficient number of people to warrant making a continued effort at evangelism. Mission literature is always talking about “reaching the unreached”. Well, here they are, all around us. Why leave now? Where could we go that would be better?
Yes, there are only a handful of Christians. Do they warrant the attention of a missionary couple? A better question is, “Who will care for them if we don’t?” It’s hard for them to make it to church as it is, with crazy shift-work schedules. How will they manage if they have to drive 50 minutes to the next nearest church? And, if they are just left to make out as best they can with TV (one weekly program at 5:00 am on Saturday) or Internet church, how will they grow in Christ and reach the people around them? They need a place to meet, to rally and encourage one another. They need a place from which they can visibly demonstrate their faith to the rest of town.
But how long can we be expected to stay? What if the church has to be closed? Many rural churches are in danger of just that.
The closing of Ajigasawa Church would delight the many who dislike having a Christian presence here. It would serve to strengthen their belief that no one can be a Christian openly in rural areas and survive, and the attendant belief that no Christian worker can hack it here.
“You’ll just leave, like the rest of them.”
Six different OMF missionaries served in Ajigasawa from 1961 to 1965. At that time, Japanese were flocking to the cities to take part in the nation’s rapid economic recovery. Missionaries who had been in small towns followed. Care of the small Ajigasawa congregation was taken over by the JECA (then Tanritsu Renmei) church in Goshogawara, 50 minutes away. Worship services were held in the afternoon, in the home of a single woman of the Ajigasawa congregation. She was very active and vocal for the faith, and took on the Sunday school for several years. Everyone in town knew she was a believer.
Elders of the Goshogawara church offered to help her find a Christian husband. She declined, saying she was happy to be single. Then, out of the blue, she announced to the group that they would have to find a different place to meet, as she was marrying the non-Christian widower next door—that week! Apparently she was confident that she could convert him, while he, a businessman well-known in town, vowed to his friends he would “knock that Christian nonsense out of her”. Guess who won?
Twenty years later my wife and I arrived in Ajigasawa to re-open the work. Our first baptism was of a young woman who had been one of the girls in that Sunday school. This young woman remembers that, at the time of the above story, she found one of the older girls by the railroad tracks, crying and saying, “If our teacher can’t make it as a Christian here, how can we?”
The woman herself actually showed up at our first meetings, but seldom attended, because her husband and his family (who lived close by) would make serious trouble for her if they caught her. When we were introduced to her, we were stunned when she remarked, “I’m not going to bother learning your names. You’ll just leave, like the rest of them.”
The challenges of rural ministry
There are other small-town congregations with similar stories of being assigned to the care of nearby urban churches because there was no one to minister to them. Inevitably, despite the best efforts and intentions of the larger congregations, they ended up being sidelined, and eventually closed.
The fear of abandonment is very real to rural Japanese Christians. Not only is local witness lost, but the perceived failure of Christianity to prove itself viable to rural Japanese results in a setback much more significant than just the closing of a so-called “tiny church”. Is God the God of the urbanites only? Is He not God of the countryside as well? How can we speak of “reaching the unreached” if we work only in urban settings, and ignore the 14 million (that’s equal to the population of Cambodia) living in rural Japan?
The demographics are daunting. Did you know that “tiny” Japan is bigger in area than three-quarters of the world’s nations? These millions of unreached people are spread out along the coasts and mountain roads of the nation. Being near enough to reach them effectively means the missionary or pastor is isolated from other Christians and Christian workers. How can we ever find enough people for the 1,800 towns and villages with no church? Well, ask the Lord of the Harvest to send out workers. And what will you do if He says, “You go for me?”
God’s economy is different
As a part of the universal church, the Body of Christ, Ajigasawa Church has a place and a purpose in God’s economy that goes beyond anything thrown at us by the nation’s economy, or by trends in mission, or dismal looking charts and graphs. In a reversal of Christ’s parable, there are 99 lost sheep for every 1 in the fold, here. We have the privilege of being their shepherds.
Photo by Kevin Morris (OMF)