The power of a good baton

This is a very special year. Exactly 50 years ago, I arrived at Haneda, a bedazzled blond kid from California. This was the land of Ultraman, ramen, and manga—what could be better! A very different Japan than when my parents first arrived, exactly 75 years ago, to a land that was burned, beaten, and barely beginning its blast upward. It has been a lot of years to see, to learn, to fail and succeed, and to galvanize a few convictions, and, for the record, I am over-the-top optimistic about what is coming!

Believe me, I know all about the headaches of ministry in Japan. I have banged my head on countless concrete walls. I have also seen such outlandish stuff that made me literally pinch myself to check if was real. And I grew up seeing one of the most fruitful works in Japan Protestantism. In my parents’ 16 years here, they planted 17 traditional churches, something that’s not supposed to happen. One of the Sunday schools in Yamagata even had an enrollment of 500 kids. And although my father has been gone 40 years now, the work my parents began continues to multiply.

Japanese reaching Japan

So getting back to those galvanized convictions . . . first, although I have seen terrific mission works here, I believe, quite simply, that Japan will only and ultimately be reached by Japanese. Certainly, foreign support can be helpful, but only when Japanese believers enter their real identity and call will Japan be reached. Why? First, because that is their God-given privilege . . . and no one else’s. Second, because they can do a better job at reaching Japan than anyone else.

The logical conclusion for anyone coming to Japan then should be not how to reach the Japanese, but how to help Japanese reach Japanese. How well is that happening right now? Not very well. My estimate is that 1.26 million people die each year in Japan without Jesus. In pre-Covid years, we were seeing about 8,000 baptisms in Japan each year. That’s a mere one baptism per church. And this includes missionary efforts. I am sure that you, like me, are not okay with that. It’s like a boat sinking in Tokyo Bay with 158 people on board and in all of our efforts, we rescue only 1. That number for any rescue organization is totally unthinkable.

Meanwhile, too many believers and leaders here are accustomed to those kinds of numbers. Year after year the dreary trend continues, the sense of urgency lies limp, and with the church here in decline, we are flatly in a crisis. Japanese believers have not taken up their call or their identity. But when they do, when it finally happens, everything will change.

How do we help that happen?

Personally, I think the solution is quite simple. We need a baton. This baton can be passed from person to person with ease and hopefully without getting dropped. And this baton should contain only the most vital elements, nothing extra to weigh it down or complicate it. This baton will ensure that everyone is practicing Kingdom-expansion basics. And then we want the baton passed swiftly because there are another 1.26 million dying this year without Jesus!

So about six years ago, I began crafting a baton, not having a clue where the journey would lead. Admittedly, I have a doctorate in spiritual formation, which basically means I probably know how to make things too complicated. But deep down I felt we needed to make things as simple as possible. Of course I examined what was available globally, but in the end, everything was made in Japan (and hopefully better then?). Everything was field-tested in Japan and involved copious local power and smarts. The baton took an interesting shape.

My father came up with a baton years ago, a symbol for the multiplication of churches. He used a strawberry. The plant that, before it begins fruiting, sends off runners to start new little plants. His reasoning: at its inception, a church must be moving to birth daughter churches—before it has everything stable and running itself. That model is still going, and today, churches with that focus continue to flourish.

Testify, share, disciple

My baton is a clover—a symbol of what every believer has been called to do. If you see one clover, before you know it, there is a meadow-full. As such, clover is a great symbol of personal multiplication. And if you look at the three-leaf clover, you will notice there are three little hearts. Each heart symbolizes the most basic Kingdom-expansion directives Jesus gave us. In love (heart) we testify, in love we share the gospel, and in love we disciple others. Testify. Share. Disciple. If we do these three simple things, God’s love multiplies and God’s Kingdom expands.

But how do you testify? Share? Disciple? It seems complicated. Actually, it is. But think of this: how complicated is the Japanese language . . . you know, the kanji part? It stumps most missionaries, and yet Japan is over 99% literate? How does it happen? They don’t expect kids to figure it out themselves or each parent to do it; they designed a systematic and comprehensive plan.

Pardon the bluntness, but a good system is a no-brainer, and yet for some reason, in Christian circles we expect every believer to figure things out on their own. Years ago, I was training believers at a church in Kanto to craft their testimonies. An elderly woman who had attended church for 50 years was thrilled and exclaimed now she would finally have something to testify with at her funeral. But I pondered, what if she had been testifying for the last 50 years? Voilà. She had been expected to figure it out herself.

I’m afraid that if anyone from outside the church looked at things, they would marvel at how sloppy we are. For decades I was doing half-baked discipleship; it was neither systematic nor comprehensive. So some years ago, I went back to where I ministered in Hawaii and apologized to all the men I had supposedly “discipled.” Astonishingly, they are all doing good, but what if I had done better? How much more good might there be? Frankly, discipleship in this country—even half-baked discipleship—is probably a rarity.

Look all around Japan and it’s clear: systematic methods work. They’re part of so many institutions—from business, to education, to sports, and on and on. But what about Christendom? What if we employed a system to ensure everyone got kingdom basics and passed the baton?

The clover is simple. Everybody testify, everybody share, and everybody disciple in God’s love, and God’s kingdom multiplies naturally—maybe that’s as basic and biblical as you can get.