Where Everybody's Crazy

Today I had a small explosion at my pastor. I think he was probably expecting it, and he dealt with it very well. Mind you, I decided not to say all the things I'd thought about saying beforehand.

Basically I told him that I was fed up of the legalism and the emphasis on appearances that is so prevalent in the Japanese church. He agreed that it was a big problem and tried to point me to some explanations - the need to keep a diverse people together and to provide some kind of uniformity and structure to their expression of faith; the fact that if people leave the church due to conflict, in the West they'll usually go to another church, whereas here they'll usually leave altogether. And the ever-present fact that pastors just plain don't trust the laity. Until that changes any chance of a lay revival is dead in the water.

I managed to come up with an analogy which made him wince, and rightly so.

I said that in Japan the pastors are building bonsai churches. They look very neat and pretty, but their roots are tightly constricted with the rules that we impose upon them. Any time they do anything interesting, we cut them off to keep them looking neat. And then we wonder why they don't grow.

And discipleship is the same. So long as pastors exercise control - and don't exercise trust - we get bonsai Christians. All neat and tidy, but too constricted to grow properly. There is a leadership issue here, of giving trust and giving people the freedom and the safety to try, to fail and to learn; there is also a fundamental cultural issue of control relationships in societies. Think about the control a traditional business extends over its employees, and that's what's being replicated in the church. And it has to change, somehow.

I don't quite know where to go from here, but I'm happy that I managed to vent my frustrations and we didn't end up arguing. I'm getting more and more sold on the house church movement, simply because I can't face the idea of committing 25 man-years (5 people in a team for 5 years) to build and prop up another bonsai church somewhere while millions still don't know about Jesus. It doesn't seem like the best use of our time, and anyway there's no evidence it produces the kind of Christians we think are mature at the end of it. I don't know why we do it.

But anyway the Japanese church is not going to go away, and despite all its faults it's the only one we've got, so we have to work with it. Perhaps the idea would be to train Japanese pastors in how to exercise appropriate and Biblical leadership. Which was, coincidentally, what I was planning to do all along.