Where Everybody's Crazy

Last night, for a bit of light bedtime reading, I settled down and consumed the first of the many books and papers I need to get through for my research paper. I'll be researching how to create a leadership training programme for Japan which is both Biblical and entirely culturally Japanese.

Last night's paper was a MA thesis by Richard Pease, Japanese leadership styles: a study in contextualizing leadership theory for church growth in Japan. It's come out of Fuller and it's got those magic words "church growth" in it, so it's based on a bunch of assumptions I find questionable at best: the most questionable in particular for this study is that if we have good leaders, our churches will grow. The most questionable in general is that if we do everything right according to these principles and formulas, our churches will grow. This needs to be clearly identified as not faith, but ritual magic.

Amongst other Classic Mistakes was a close alliance between "Biblical" and "American" models of leadership:

As the prime example of a Biblical model for church growth leadership, Paul's example fits well into the American perception of a strong leader.

and I thought that was really going to kill off how "contextual" the study was prepared to be. Actually, when it came to surveying and understanding Japanese models of leadership, the paper leant hard on the next MA thesis I have on my desk, Billy Ogata's Small groups and lay leadership training for church growth in Japan, and it did pick out a few important cultural points from that study.

The main value of the paper for me was that in thinking about what it had to say, I had an important realization: When Chie Nakane says that "Japan has never produced a truly charismatic leader", she is saying something positive, not negative. A leader who leads through autonomous strength of character would not be a Japanese leader! Japanese leadership is primarily leadership-in-consultation. Now we have another data point to answer one of the main questions of my research: is the church expecting of Japanese leaders a style of leadership which is totally alien to them?