Shifting paradigms

A prominent Christian leader in the US asked me recently: “How is the church in Japan is doing?” I have consulted several missionaries and mission organizations, and it is a mixed report (even before COVID). The number of Christians and churches in Japan has plateaued and begun to decline. Eighteen cities and 1,640 rural areas still do not have a church.¹ On the other hand, there is ample positive news about missional churches, networks, and models that are increasingly planting and growing multiplying churches.

In my book Multiplying Churches in Japanese Soil, I outlined characteristics of the common model of church in Japan. This church model is often clergy-centered, dependent on a building or meeting place, and focused on the Sunday worship service. Its evangelistic pattern uses a direct front-door attraction model for evangelistic meetings. This church model tends to be time-consuming, expensive, and often unsustainable. It seldom involves the laity, and it is not very reproducible nor can it multiply.

We are seeing a fork in the road where the common model of church in Japan continues to be ineffective, yet others have taken the other fork leading to evangelism, discipleship, and growth of leaders and churches. Since the triple disaster in 2011, we have seen more opportunities, results, and encouraging ministries, but not yet a spiritual breakthrough leading to movements. However, it could come sooner than we think.

We need new types of churches and new models for ministry. We need a change in basic assumptions about what a disciple, leader, and church are. What is required is not a mere tweaking, or implementing a novel approach or program, but rather a paradigm shift in what is important based on reflection of the scriptures and reality. We must see the resources of God and, in faith, train leaders and workers into a process that leads to reproduction.

Towards reproduction

For many, it is tough to think beyond the decline of the church; of the 7,000 or so churches in Japan, 16% are currently without pastors.² Instead of the status quo of addition, we require transformation to reproduction of ministry that grows disciples and nurtures leadership.

In my original research (for Multiplying Churches in Japanese Soil), I was surprised by how many times some churches had reproduced. The Japanese leaders of those reproducing churches thought about the church quite differently. Their concept was not an organization as much as a living thing, the body of Christ. Not a building, but a people. They view the church as a dynamic sending community.

Just recently I heard one church in Hyogo Prefecture has been growing into eighteen congregations. By means of training all their laypeople in evangelism and discipleship, they continuously locate new communities to reproduce their body. These believers have a new way of thinking of reproduction, leading to multiplication.

Towards multiplication

For churches to reproduce themselves is not enough—we want to see churches multiply. The annual Japan Church Multiplication Vision Festa started in 2014; each year over 100 workers have gathered to consider church multiplication throughout Japan. Dreams have grown about reaching all of Japan by saturating each community with a local church. If we consider that there are over 50,000 convenience stores in Japan, to saturate each community in Japan with a local church, this country would need at least 50,000 churches. This number is serving as a rule of thumb for the ongoing dream of a broad-based evangelical movement to focus energies towards saturating Japan with churches as we look towards the Seventh Japan Congress on Evangelism (JCOE7) in 2023.

It would be enormously challenging to find 50,000 church planters, but others faced similar challenges in the past and used risk-taking faith and innovation to address their issues. How can you multiply leaders for so many churches? Vision Festa has considered various “on-ramps” for leadership development, including formal education in schools and institutes, nonformal education in seminars and workshops, and informal education in mentoring and modeling. Believing in the priesthood of all believers, laypeople can be mobilized for leadership in evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. To reproduce and multiply means new perspectives towards movement thinking.

Towards movements

What we all truly yearn for are movements of God like in Acts where the Holy Spirit changes things faster than we can understand, let alone control. Movements are beyond great events, beyond systems and organizations, and even beyond church multiplication. Several years ago, I heard a story that still shocks me today—one church, in Kochi Prefecture, multiplied into three new churches in two years! I thought if this kind of multiplication could happen in Kochi Prefecture, then it could happen anywhere in Japan.

In just a few years, several key Japanese leaders have trained others who have been applying these principles in their churches from training in personal evangelism, disciples making disciples, and church multiplication. Train and Multiply (T&M)³ was developed by George Patterson in Honduras and has been effective in places like India, Iran, and Indonesia. Several are proving this training to be highly fruitful in Japan with multiple trainers and over 1,000 people from 700 churches trained since 2016 throughout Japan. That is up to 10% of all churches in Japan! I encourage many of you to investigate T&M because it might be helpful to your ministry partners and your future ministry.

Conclusion

Many Japanese workers and leaders are tired of the status quo. They have adopted major paradigm shifts to see reproduction, multiplication, and movements resulting in disciples, leaders, and churches.

In 1917, the Japan Holiness denomination had 1,600 members. Just 15 years later, their denomination had grown to nearly 20,000 members, a multiplied growth of over 12 times.⁴ Like the leaders of the reproducing churches I researched for my book, the Holiness Church leaders mobilized the laypeople for evangelism, and the leader equipped and released them to evangelize and disciple. Many churches were multiplied as a result.

Do you believe God can multiply his church again in Japan? If you are committed to multiplication, then whom are you developing? Whom are you training, equipping, and to whom are you delegating authority? And then how are you getting out of the way to let them serve with the Spirit? JH

1. From correspondence with Dawn Birkner and the Japan Rural Church Planting Network’s 2021 study of rural churches.
2. From a Powerpoint presentation at Ochanomizu Christian Center at the Church Multiplication Vision Festa on unpastored churches by the head of a “muboku network” (11/26/2021).
3. https://tam.oms.training
4. John Wm. Mehn, Multiplying Churches in Japanese Soil (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2017), 55.