Where Everybody's Crazy

OK, I said it was coming. Here goes.

I've always believed that professional development is a really important thing. If you're not moving forward in your knowledge of your profession, you're moving backwards as things change around you. More fundamentally, if you're not learning from others and then reflecting about your own work, then you're going to end up plodding on without thinking, and that's the most terrifying thing for me.

So when I was a programmer, I joined the london.pm mailing list, went to their meetings, and subscribed to our trade magazine, The Perl Journal. I also kept up with three or four technical news web sites - I still do, in fact.

And when I became a missionary, naturally I did the same. If you want to know what's influencing me, I subscribe to Encounters, the missions magazine of Redcliffe College, EMQ which is generally pretty meh but occasionally there's some good stuff in there, and IMBR, which is the closest to a professional journal we have.

So that gives me an international perspective and some useful cross-fertilization ideas. (I also read everything on BBC News, occasional copies of the Guardian and Mainichi news, and a few sites on American political news. That and the programming news is why it takes me two hours to get moving in the morning.) But Japan has its own culture and challenges and I want to know what missiological thinking is happening here as well.

Our missionary trade organisation here in Japan is the Japan Evangelical Missionary Alliance, and today I decided not to renew my membership.

I'd been considering it for a while. They run a mailing list which tells you about what events they're putting on. All the events are in Tokyo, apart from those of course in Higashi Kurume, which is OK for those working with 10% of the population of Japan but rather does give the impression that they don't give a damn about the other 90%.

JEMA also has a trade magazine, Japan Harvest. It's very much a magazine rather than a journal, which is fine for people who want stuff at that level, but I was looking for something a bit more solid and that's not meant to be it. It has articles expressing how amazing and surprising it is when the Japanese church come up with ideas for themselves. There was an article last time explaining what manga and anime are, which I think can only be helpful if you've spent all of your time in Japan living in a cave or in the sterile santictity of a church building... oh, wait, yeah, maybe that is useful for some.

And that's basically what my JEMA membership gives me. As far as I'm concerned, JEMA is a waste of time, money and effort.

And now they've gone to war against their Japan-native equivalent, the Japan Evangelical Alliance. Grab me some popcorn, guys, I want to enjoy this one from the sidelines.

The topic that they've chosen to go to war about: Christian support for going to war. According to JEMA, (which is mainly made up of American missionaries) the foreign missionary community in Japan is shocked, shocked I say, that the JEA has put out a theological paper condemning both nationalism in the church and the (largely American) church's support for the Iraq war. Who would have possibly thought that Japanese Christians might be anti-war?

But why stick to the issue at hand? That would be boring! If you're in a fight, the first thing you need to do is escalate! The title of the article on the cover of this issue of Japan Harvest is "Theology in Japan: JEA Theological Pamphlet No. 6 an Example of Reactionary Cross-Cultural Theology?" That's right, it's nothing to do with the fact that the Japanese church won't support America's bloody stupid war like all the foreign missionaries do, it's because the Japanese church are all bad theologians. And they smell of soy sauce.

The author of the Japan Harvest article seems to think that "reactionary theology" is in itself bad; he fails to understand that all theology is fundamentally reactionary. Theologians would sell even fewer books than they currently do if all they ever said was "I agree with him." People do not do theology in a vacuum; they do so in reaction (or perhaps, more generously, reflection) to what they read, see and experience. The article that he writes is, indeed, in reaction to the JEA paper.

But I see little point in pointing this out, since the author also writes that:

The pamplet makes some strong statements regarding views held by many American evangelicals. These kind of strong statements have the potential to cause friction between evangelicals separated by the Pacific Ocean.

Which provides more depressing proof, as if more was needed, that irony is truly dead. (I could continue with a point-for-point refutation of the article, but I'm not morally obliged to, it's a Friday night, and I'm writing for a blog, not a bad magazine.)

Now I have slight reservations about Theological Pamphlet No 6, because I think it could have been a much better critique of nationalism in the Church if it had stuck to nationalism, rather than what it did do, which was treat nationalism as the inevitable outcome of fundamentalist American Christianity, and to examine how some of the doctrines of Fundamentalism has led to American Christianity. Which is nothing I haven't said here in the past, and I think they're dead right. After all it's a Theological Pamphlet, so they had to tackle theological issues.

But it would have been a better critique of nationalism in the church if they had just stuck to historical and social issues. The Japanese church knows very well from its painful history how bankrupt it becomes when its message is compromised by wartime nationalism, and it is, as such, in a good position to show the American Christian Church how bankrupt it has become as its message has been compromised by wartime nationalism. Introducing the theological category of fundamentalism isn't actually necessary to make this point, and potentially weakens it - the Japanese church was not compromised by fundamentalism, but by plain old compromise.

But Fundamentalist Christianity is one of the most dangerous threats to the church in our time, and I respect the Japanese authors for having a go at tackling it. And of course, to progress the debate there needs to be dialogue.

But not with this attitude. And not in my name. So I'm resigning my JEMA membership.