Why Japan?

Churches in Japan are dwindling. The number of pastors, missonaries is decreasing. Japan is called "Missionaries' grave-yard." Most of the churches in Japan failed to raise the second generation. Many children of "Chiristian familes" are leaving Christian churches. They marry non-believers, and we cannot see the third generation any more.

We are failing in making the citizens of the Kingdom of God.

Some would say, "For 150 years tremendous amount of resources such as manpower and financial aid have been invested in 4 tiny islands called 'Japan' and we see few converts, little fruit. " Even the word of the Lord "shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them.(Luke 9:5)" might be applied to this situation.

Then we hear statements like "Why Japan? Why not other Asian countries?"

Not only Christian communities but also the whole population of Japan is decreasing in size by 500,000 people from the year 2005.*

*Under the Eugenic Protection Act that legalized abortion in Japan, at least 600,000 babies are murdered every year. The Japanese murdered many innocent people in the War, and after the War innocent babies. Even the churches have been indifferent about this fact. We have an aged society, through which we are receiving God's covenantal judgement.

In political scenes or economical scenes, Japan is gradually being bypassed. People's attention goes to China and other Asian countries.

Will God cast away Japan?

Why has not the evangelism in Japan been successful?

Do we have solutions?

Here I would like to try to cast a new light on these subject.

First we should focus on the 5 main causes of failure in evangelism in Japan. they are as follows:

1)Importation of the liberal theology at an early stage of church planting in Japan in the 19th century.

2)Failure in building Christian families as covenantal units in the society

3)Misapplication of "contextualization" in terms of evangelism, church planting, and academic discipline.

4)Christians' avoidance of the confrontation with pagan society.

5)Failure in Christian education.

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1)IMPORTATION OF THE LIBERAL THEOLOGY AT AN EARLY STAGE OF CHURCH PLANTING

JAPAN IN THE 19TH CENTURY

At the beginning of the evangelism in Japan in the 19th century, liberal theology accompanied with higher criticism was imported mainly from Germany. This type of Christianity is only another version of humanism since it denies the absolute authority of the Scripture. Purely evangelical Christianity was introduced mainly from the US, right after the World War II.

Therefore the history of evangelcal Christianity in Japan is only 60 years.(not 150 years!)

Other Asian countries such as China, Korea, and the Philippines have a longer history of evangelism. America has an even longer history, because the ancestors of the settlers have been already evangelized in their European countries since 4th century.

We have not attained a good Japanese translation of the Bible.

2)FAILURE IN BUILDING CHRISTIAN FAMILIES AS COVENANTAL UNITS IN THE SOCIETY

So far within the evangelical circles, one on one evangelism was mainstream, and this resulted in individualism in the church. In terms of evangelism, the approach towards families are weak. Theology that backs up the covenantal nature of the family(such as a father/husband is a covenantal head of a family) is not well accepted and rooted among Christians in Japan, which leads to the weakness of the Christian families in Japan. In most cases, Christian families are not well integrated for the cause of the kingdom of God. Husbands mostly spend their time with their colleagues in the company, and wives are quite often out for part-time jobs. Children are mostly taken care of by public schools. Then the distinction between the Christian and non-Christian is blurred. This disintegration makes families weak in respect of being covenantal units not only in the ecclesiastical community but also in the Japanese society as a whole. In other words, Christian families do not function properly. Thus we see the difficulties in establishing Christian families as covenantal units in the society.

This leads to the fact that we have great difficulty in having strong leadership not only in families but also in the ecclesiastical community. Children cannot have their Christian father as their role model. They cannot learn leadership from their father. Then they grow up to be leaders who are not well grounded tc the solid doctrines of the Scripture. They are moved by the humanistic, syncretic, or seclusive mind-set. The fact that we lack good leaders is one of the main causes of the failure of Japanese Christianity.

3)MISAPPLICATION OF "CONTEXTUALIZATION" IN TERMS OF EVANGELISM, CHURCH PLANTING, AND ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

In the history of Japan we have experienced the cultural paradigm shift two times as follows:

a. Importation of Chinese/Buddhistic civilization that occurred in 8th century.

b. Importation of Western/Christian civilization that occurred in 19th century.

The first paradigm shift (importation of Chinese civilization, or in other words Buddhistic civilization) laid the foundation of "the traditional Japanese culture" as we call it. At the same time they successfully planted "Buddhism" on the soil of Japan. Buddhism became a national religion.

The second paradigm shift (the importation of the Western/Christian civilization into Japan) that started around 1850 set the foundation for modern Japan. But we find a big difference between the first paradigm shift and the second one. Concerning the second paradigm shift, the leaders of Japan meticulously and intentionally deleted the "Christian factors" from the imported western civilization. This effort was intense. The word "wakon-yosai" which means "even though we're outwardly importing western culture, inwardly our Japanese-ness (Japan-ism) won't be changed." In other words, they contextualized what they imported, on their own terms. By the end of the World War II, state Shintoism played a decisive role as the ideological backbone of Japanese society.

In both cases, the assimilation of foreign civilization took less than 100 years.

These two historical events manifest the incomparable capability of Japanese people concerning the assimilation and contextualizaion of different civilizations.

On the other hand, because the stand of Japanese mind-set is immovable(Japan-ism which is nothing but another version of humanism), this is the reason why Japanese could assimilate and contextualize what they import from all over the world.

In terms of missiology we have been overlooking this fact as we applied the "contextualizaion theory." The Japanese contextualize the Gospel in THEIR own way far better than missionaries! We shouldn't have contextualized the message of the Gospel. For example, usually Japanese Christians tend to avoid the issue of the final judgement. Rather, they choose topics like "consolation, piety, etc."

Our society is cohesive or group-oriented, and Japanese people almost always try to avoid confrontation. In return, they often become too polite to each other to protect themselves. In this situation, missionaries tend to misunderstand and think the Japanese are welcoming the Gospel message. It might be even possible that the Japanese simply consent to the content of the gospel and join churches without having complete commitment to it.

In many cases Japanese Christians accept the Gospel but are not free from Japan-ism.

They distort the message of the Gospel and to make it accommodate the pagan society.

In putting what they have learned into practice, they modify it in the Japanese way which is detrimental to the Gospel itself. We can see this unbiblical contextualization in every aspect in evangelism, church planting, and academic discipline.

4)CHRISTIANS'/CHURCHES' AVOIDANCE OF THE CONFRONTATION WITH PAGAN SOCIETY

The Japanese society is throughly pagan. Shintoism and Buddhism permeate every aspect of the society. Often Christians fail to discern subtle pagan influences on customs, mind-set, and routines. Above all, Christians fail to stand on a solid biblical worldview, and this makes it difficult for them to stand for the truth. As I have mentioned, Christians here tend to accommodate themselves to the pagan society, and gradually makes compromises with idolatry. Since Japanese are tightly bound by conventions, weak-minded Christians compromise with idolatry on occasions such as pagan funeral services of their supervisors, relatives, etc.

From the beginning of the history of Japanese churches, liberalism has influenced and pre-conditioned Christianity in Japan.

Liberalism denies the absolute authority of the word of God. Japanese Christians tend to regard the scripture as simply an authoritative document. In this context, they are allowed to bow down to idols if they do not pay respect to the them. (This is also seen in the Japanese translation of the Bible. The translation of Exodus 20:5 runs, "You shall not pay respect to them," instead of "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them.")

The Japanese language itself makes it difficult for us to understand the message of the Bible. Every word has been deeply rooted in the teachings of Buddhism and Shintoism, so we have to re-define the meaning of almost every word when we preach the Gospel. In many cases, this redefinition of the words are incomplete.

The situation here is very different from the situation in English-speaking countries. The Japanese language has not yet been Christianized, unlike English, German, and other European languages. The message of the Bible is usually dulled by using the Japanese language. This stems from the semantical and syntactical shortcomings of the Japanese language in terms of describing the Biblical worldview.

The defective nature of the Japanese language often causes the following problems in church planting.

First, missionaries come to Japan and establish churches. Then they hand over the churches to Japanese pastors. The churches decline and cannot pass on what they have received from the missionaries to their next generations. This is one of the main reasons of the decline of Japanese Christianity. We have to note that the Japanese language used by missionaries differs from that of indigenous Japanese, since they speak the Japanese language while they stand on the Christian worldview with the help of the English language. When Japanese pastors use Japanese, often they are either not well equipped with the Christian worldview, or they cannot handle the Japanese language in a Christian way. In this way, the message of the Gospel loses aggressiveness. Because of this, and the shortcomings of the Japanese language, Christian Japanese fail to convey the message of the Scripture.

This has something to do with fidelity of communication.

Here we see how the peculiar Japanese style of "Contextualization" works. Christianity goes through the process of metamorphosis and becomes "Japanized." Then churches lose the Gospel. This process has been repeated for 150 years.

Thus, in the history of modern Japan, we see little confrontation between Christianity and Japanese paganism.

5)FAILURE IN CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

In most cases, the churches in Japan fail to raise the second generation. Public education plays a significant role in "de-christianizing" children of Christian families. In Japan, Christians are not well grounded on the Christian worldview and they have little interest in having their children stand on the foundation of the Biblical worldview. Here, education doesn't mean giving children a Christian worldview but only vocational training/education. Christians pursue the same objectives as those of the non-believers, such as entering into prestigious collages or getting good jobs. They mainly focus on how they can be accepeted into the Japanese Society.

The antithesis between the Christian worldview and pagan worldviews is always avoided and blurred. Here in Japan, even in the case of Christian education (as practiced in "Christian" schools* in Japan) we can see little difference between Christian education and pagan education. This problem partly stems from the fact that we lack good Christian resources such as textbooks, curriculums, teaching materials in Japanese. The size of the market for Christian books or curriculums is considerably small.

*Most of the accredited "Christian schools" are under tight control of the Japanese government. This makes those educational institutions completely pagan in their character, even though they are founded by the missonaries or mission board. In other words, they have been already Japanized. Around 150 Christian families in Japan are pursuing the homeschooling, but they are in a standstill because they lack the methodology---curriculums, textbook, good Christian resources.

The Japanese language itself contributes to this problem.

For instance the Japanese word for God "Kami" primarily refers to pagan gods. In every aspect of the Japanese language, we see the immovable influence of paganism. We have not yet achieved a good translation of the Bible. The Japanese Bibles we have now are defective. As I mentioned before, in Japanese Bible, Exodus 20:5 says "you must not pay respect to them." This dumbs the Word of God down for Japanese Christians. During World War II, the Japanese government forced Christians to bow down to the image of Emperor before they began their worship service. They did bow down to it. They had been taught by the ministers that it didn't matter because they do not pay respect to that image.

Because of this situation, we see tragic results in the Christian community. In the case of the Presbyterian Church in Japan, 46% of the covenant children left their churches in 1997. We might conclude that parents and churches don't equip them with the Biblical Worldview and Christian apologetics. We are failing to raise the citizens of the Kingdom of God

In terms of the Japanese, some peculiar characteristics must be taken into consideration.

Since we have lived in 4 tiny islands in a long history of time without being invaded or colonized, we form a strong cultural foundaton as Japanese. I call it "Japan-ism." Japan-ism can be described as a Japanese civil religion, but it covers more than that. Japan-ism is a defective worldview. It cannot offer you a systematic understanding of the world we live in. The foundation of Japan-ism is based on the mixture of Shintoistic pantheism(Original Shintoism), Manipulated Shintoism(State shintoism) which has a taste of Judeo-Christian mind set (Hirata-Shinto), confucian philosophy, and various sects of Buddhism.

Children are raised in the atomosphere of Japan-ism. This happens even in Japanese Christian families. In raising children they fail to raise citizens for the kingdom of God. Instead, they send their children to pagan public schools, and we lose the future generations of the kingdom of God.

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SOME THOUGHTS FOR THE SOLUTION

As I mentioned before, the Japanese society has experienced two paradigm shifts.

Now we pray to our Lord that He would give us the third paradigm shift to the Japanese society so that Japan would repent, both on a nation-wide scale and on an individual level. Otherwise, the nation of Japan will be judged by God and destroyed.

This third paradigm shift would be from Japan-ism (which is one of the variations of humanism) to Christian civilization.

In order to realize the third paradigm shift, we have to raise Christian leaders.

The education of our children is the key. It is imperative that we raise leaders among our children.

The assessment of "success" in transmitting Christianity to the next generation would be based on the following two causes:

1)That our children have repentance unto God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, so that they can glorify God and enjoy Him for ever. They should become active parts of the body of Christ.

2)That our children have the Christian worldview, with which they can manifest the glory of God in every area of their life, raising future generations so that they can contribute to the Kingdom of God and build a Christian civilization. In doing so, they would impact the world and win this world for the Lord Jesus Christ.

For the above-mentioned causes, our children must be equipped with biblical epistemology and ethics. In terms of epistemology and ethics, there is no neutral zone between Christians and Non-Christians. Quite often, non-Christians might act similarly to Christians, but their starting point and motive are completely different from those of Christians.

Robert Thoburn says in his book "The Children Trap,"

"Neutrality is a myth. Jesus said that we are either for Him or against Him. We cannot serve God and mammon. There is no middle ground or neutral zone. .... To believe in neutrality is to believe that God is confined to only part of the universe."

Robert L. Thoburn, The Children Trap (Thomas Nelson Inc., 1986), p. 82

The language we use is the most important tool for realizing the above-mentioned causes. We must admit that the Japanese language has not yet reached the level for that purpose, as I mentioned before.

Indeed, we have a problem of our language. But looking back on the history of the English language, there were almost the same problems sometime around the 11th century. In those days, Christian civilization was stored and transmitted with the help of the Latin language. Some say William Tyndale completely reshaped the English language to the

Christian way. Then came the King James Bible. English was Christianized.

Whenever a good translation of the Bible comes, the language it is translated into will be Christianized. This happened to the German language when Martin Luther translated the Scripture into German.

We should always remember that Reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox received academic discipline in Latin. They published the 95 Theses and The Institute of Christian Religion first in Latin. Then they translated those works into their people's language.

The Latin language was the language of the leaders of Christian churches during the reformation era. In this sense, the English language could be "the Latin language for the Japanese" in the 21st century.

English should be used for the academic training of Japanese children. (I propose that 80% of their academic discipline should be carried out in English. The remaining 20% should be done in Japanese, since the Japanese language is their "heart language" for their communication with their parents, relatives, friends, etc. We see this kind of double language system in many countries, such as the Phillipines, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.)

This might be a strange illustration. But children are somewhat like computers. More specifically, I am talking about Operation Systems. Japanese OS's are defective. It is so easy for Japanese people to have Japanese/pagan OS's. So we first install the English OS. Then we install the Japanese plug in. What happens is that our children will have the mind-set of missionaries. Because of the "English OS" they can quite easily own the Christian worldview, and this enables them to stand on the Christian worldview even when they are using Japanese. When they speak, their Japanese is depending on the "English/Christian OS."

In this way, we can succeed in "Gospel Transplantation." Our children would be fully equipped with the Christian worldview. They would be able to make direct access to the original sources stored in the English language. They would communicate and unite with Christians all over the world. (Being united with Christians all over the world is the key to success in evangelism in Japan) And above all, they would become strong leaders in the churches in Japan. They would have a heart like that of missionaries sent to Japan. They would clarify the antithesis between the Christian worldview and the pagan indigenous worldview.

Japanese Christians must stop being Japanese. Otherwise, they cannot be Christians. We must raise "Third Culture Kids" out of Japanese children. Not only children but also parents must become "Third Culture Kids" if we do not want to compromise with the pagan Japanese society. As Christians, we have already been separated from our native culture, and at the same time we don't belong to the society from which missionaries are delegated.

"For our conversation/citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ."

"But we are citizens of the state (commonwealth, homeland) which is in heaven, and from it also we earnestly and patiently await [the coming of] the Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah) [as] Savior,

(Amplified Bible)"

Phillipians 3:20

So far, we have been failing to evangelize the nation of Japan. The cause of our faillure is becoming gradually obvious. The attempt of "contextualization" ended in failure.

We have to do something new, something completely different from what has been done for 150 years.

I strongly believe that the Gospel should be directly imported into Japan so that we can avoid unbiblical contextualization in every aspect in evangelism, church planting, and academic discipline.

This "direct import method" would surely make the realization of the third paradigm shift possible. We should import Christianity with the English language so that children can learn the Bible using English, not Japanese. We need to transplant Christianity in Japan as we perform "skin transplantation" in the case of severe skin injuries. We also anticipate rejection from the Japanese society, so that Christians will have confrontation with pagan society. We believe that God would surely bless our confrontation with the pagan culture.

"Direct import method" or "Gospel transplantation" will give us completely new possibilities of evangelism in Japan.

In this context I strongly propose that the churches in Japan should be placed in a bilingual(English/Japanese) format where worship sevices, business meetings, Sunday school are carried out in a bilingual format.

In doing so we can destroy the language barrier. This opens the door to evangelism in Japan widely, so that we can receive more messengers of Gospel, establishing strong ties with Christians all over the world. This enables us to contribute to the kingdom of God more.