Christian Academy in Japan; Church Information Service; Grace Chapel

Sorry, this is rather long-winded. I may come up with an executive summary later; please stay tuned. Also, no pictures in today's entry; I'll see about adding some later.

What a day! We started by taking the bus from Mitaka to Hibarigaoka and then the Seibu line to Higashi-Kurume to visit Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ). Calvin Johnston gave generously of his time to share with us the mission for CAJ and some of their accomplishments and challenges.

CAJ was founded by North Americans with a mandate to provide a Christian excellent education for missionaries' children. This enables many missionaries to stay in Japan who otherwise might feel compelled to return to their home countries for the sake of their children.

These days, there are many Korean missionary families whose children speak Korean at home and learned Japanese in the early grades of public school; their parents want them to go to college in North America. So their English capability, which starts out quite low, has to be revved up to score well on the SAT or ACT and to handle college classes after completing high school. This is a non-trivial feat.

At the same time, not every child of missionaries can or will go to a 4-year college, so CAJ tries to cover their needs as well. And CAJ wants to expose every student to experiences that will encourage them to think Christianly - because affluent countries produce a lot of apathetic kids.

So there is a tremendous breadth of needs that CAJ is trying to address, but they're a small school - 466 students (K-12). Because they're chartered to educate missionary kids, they don't want to price themselves out of missionary budgets. As a result, they can't pay real salaries - everyone has to raise support.

One issue he mentioned, which isn't unique to Japan and certainly isn't unique to CAJ, is that people find it hard to ask for help. So that's something to pray for.

My overall impression is that the expanding mission of CAJ, combined with the economic constraints (both the student body size, and the missionary budgets), makes for a very difficult situation.

Church Information Service

We saw Hanazono-san, who shared some interesting statistics about protestant churches in Japan. Perhaps you've heard that the average church size is about 35? That's the number of attendees divided by the number of churches. But the distribution is skewed, so the median is lower -- something like 23-24. And if you put the weekly attendance figures into buckets by 5 (16-20, 21-25, etc.) then the fullest bucket is churches with 11-15 attendees per week.

There were about 8800 baptisms in the latest complete year, which is down from the 9600 number I heard in the 1990s. 65% of the churches in Japan didn't report any baptisms at all in the past year. These statistics indicate the great need in Japan for missions that can help change the current way of "doing church," which doesn't seem to be working very well.

Grace Chapel

We had a wonderful time talking with the Sagayas and the Colliers and Shigeru, hearing about the vision for church growth. We heard about how Mr. Sagaya started working at the church (as office manager) and was led into the pastorate. Basically, the Lord gave him a vision of Christ's purity, and he had the impression of being led into vocational Christian service.

The building that the church uses (which also houses the CRM-Japan office and CIS) will be torn down, so all these need a new place to meet/worship/work.

We had lunch at a restaurant whose name looks like it could be "san-ei" or maybe "mi-ei", which specializes in sushi and unagi -- just south of the station. Which station? Ummm, it's one past Higashi-Kurume. The food was delicious.

As you can tell, your reporter's head exploded (information overload) some time around here. All that's left are some fragments and factoids:

Perplexing/frightening social trends in Japan

NEET: No Education, Employment, or Training. These are young people who don't go to college, don't get a job, don't get training for a job. Instead they plan to live off their parents forever.

There's also the hikikomori phenomenon - kids who refuse to go to school but just hide out in their rooms, coming out only at night to raid the fridge. Their parents are perplexed.

Church growth in Japan: Inhibitors and how to overcome them

First, the inhibitors:

• Pastor-centered churches: the pastor does it all
  
• Members who only receive and don't give
  
• Members don't do evangelism either - leave it to the "Pro"s

Strategies to overcome this:

• Celebration in the worship service (change the atmosphere of the weekly meeting)
• Cell groups
• Discipleship: not just pastors training leaders, but everybody training everybody

I had written down "Don't bring them to church!" The idea there is, once they see a "pro" preaching, a band playing, etc., then they won't be willing to start a cell group themselves; they'll think they need a "pro" and a band and certain kinds of chairs, etc.

That was the theory, anyway. But Grace Chapel is connected to a parent church, which has a lot of older members. So the trick now is that the Sagayas want both to be faithful to the parent church, and also try to implement this vision for growth based on cell groups. (Ralph Neighbour was mentioned in connection with these cell groups.)

Something very exciting about this chapel is that Pastor Sagaya is not micro-managing, is not threatened when Sean and Alice Collier are engaged in outreach activities and don't come to services.

This is the kind of pastoring that Japan needs, and why catalysts like the Gills and the Colliers are so important for the future of the church in Japan.

(posted 8:51pm which was 4:51am in California)