Where Everybody's Crazy

(The title alone should tell you that I'm off on one.)

So the other day I read the thing on indigenous Japanese churches, and we found that actually, they're doing just as badly as the "mainstream" churches. So while there's a load of emphasis on contextualisation here at college, that was a welcome reminder that indigenizing the forms, even the content of the Christian message doesn't guarantee better association with it - especially in a country like Japan where import-and-improve is very much the norm. Nor, annoyingly, does turning churches over to local control.

So what works? Of course, who am I to say, having precisely zero years field experience, but I'm an academic, so here's the academic answer: instead of contextualising for form (what our services look like, say) or for content (what angle we take on the Gospel), couldn't we go one level back and contextualise for religiosity. By that, I mean, how people in general "feel" about a religion and what religion, in general, should like. There's a lot of thinking about what Japanese attitudes are towards particular religions - but not that much on the religiosity, why those attitudes are as they are.

Thankfully Joseph Spae's been doing a lot of work on this, with fantastic books like "Japanese Religiosity" and "Christianity Encounters Japan" - big thick books full of surveys about religious consciousness, sociology, anthropology and a fair bit of theology too. For instance, he talks about how religious motivation in Japan is founded on the family unit - yet our mission tends to center on individuals. And then there are mindblowing sentences like this:

The existence and nature of doctrinal concepts and moral rules within the religions of Japan is, existentially speaking, of comparatively little importance to the believer in determining the group of his choice... acceptance of a religion is made on a pragmatic or functional basis; it is practical, not noetic; it is utilitarian, not dogmatic; it is variable, not continuous; it is a mood, not a view of life; it is eclectic, and hence tolerant and pluralistic; it is integrative of even contradictory values and doctrines.

Translation: Japanese people don't join religions because those religions are "right", (religion as history?) or even "good", (religion as sociology?) but because they're "beautiful" (religion as art?) or they "work". (religion as ... economics?)

Indigenizing Christian religiosity to Japan would change the way we do apologetics. (We wouldn't.) It would make our faith broader, more accepting, less doctrinal, more mystical, less scientific, more emotional. And once we do that, that would have knock-on effects changing the angle we choose on our message (content) and the way we put it across. (form) The upper layers of contextualisation would fall out naturally.

So that's the academic answer. It's a theory; try it, I dunno, it might work.

But there's another answer, which Morinaga-sensei came up with at the shuyokai: unite the church. I think he's onto something, there - that sermon is a must-read.