Where Everybody's Crazy

William Vories was a missionary in Japan in the early 20th century. He came to Omi-Hatchiman, in this county, with the YMCA, first as an English teacher in a local high school. He set up preaching tours of Lake Biwa from his boat, Galilee-Maru. He established an architect's office, a pharmaceutical company, and a printing press. As well as preaching, he was a great believer in social action, and founded a school, a library, a women's society, and a hospital. As an architect he designed many churches and schools in the region, as well as many of the main buildings in Omi-Hatchiman. His name became synonymous with the town. He brokered the talks between Macarthur and the Japanese prime minister. This, together with his work for Omi-Hatchiman, led him to be awarded many civil honours by the Japanese government, as well as a public commendation from the Emperor.

He wrote ten books. His first, in 1915, was "The Evangelization of Rural Japan". His final book, in 1970, was his autobiography. He called it "The Autobiography of A Failure."

What does one have to do to be a success around here?

Anyway, today, many of the churches in the county met at Vories' school, for the Shiga Jesus Festival. We had one of these in 2000, and Martin thought it would be a good idea to do it again, but we needed a sufficient cooling off period for people to recover from the last one... It was a very encouraging day. I'd never seen such a big gathering of Japanese Christians - it was bigger than the European Christian Convention.

We as WEC Japan were running a "missionary experience corner", where people had to try learning a foreign culture and then explaining their faith through that culture.

If you want to talk to the fisherman about religion, you've first got to talk to him about fish. After all, isn't that exactly what Jesus did? Oh, there's a lesson in there for us missionaries too, but that's another topic for another time.

I was at the end of the circuit, so I got to ask people what they thought about their "missionary" experience. The two most common responses I got were "it's hot" - well, not much I could do about that - and "it's difficult, isn't it?"

Do you know, I wonder if that means that, like Vories, we were a failure. We've managed to show that the job of a missionary is a really difficult thing that the average Christian can't do, and it takes a special kind of Christian to do. One or two people got it - "Ah, obviously it's hard, but 'with God nothing is impossible.'" - but I think many people left with a new respect for missionaries and no desire whatsoever to do it themselves. This wasn't what we were aiming at.

By the end of the day, I had my patter down. "It's difficult", they would say. "You mean, it's more difficult than it is fun?" "No, it was fun!" "Well, that's the missionary life for you - it's difficult, but it's fun." I don't know how well that redeemed the idea for people.

That's the negative side. On the positive side, I think it really did encourage people to think more about crossing cultures and how different people think in completely different ways. (One person said to me, "some of us in Shiga think it's scary enough going to Tokyo, but that's nothing compared to going to another country." Yes, we're in the sticks here.) I honestly believe that for some people this was the first step to thinking about mission and what this means for them.

As well as presenting mission, we also wanted to present prayer. Which, to be honest, is not an easy thing to do in a conference setting. So we set up a "prayer labyrinth".

I think part of the point of this was to stretch people's comfort zones a bit. I don't know how it went because I was over at the missionary experience corner for the whole afternoon.

All in all, it was, as I said, a very encouraging day. Well, anything that encourages communication and collaboration between churches is an encouraging thing, and it was all thanks to Vories that we could hold the event as we did. Maybe he wasn't such a failure after all.