Where Everybody's Crazy

From God's Plan For Children, by Dave Roberts, here are some really good questions.

• Do the adults in our church greet the children by name?
• Is there any cross-generational conversation?
• In the case of toddlers and younger children, are we willing to crouch down to their level to talk with them?
• Are the facilities we provide for their classes warm, comfortable, age-appropriate and well kept?
• How many times a year does the church leadership meet with the children's ministry team?
• Is there a role for a children's activity in the main congregational worship time?
• Do we use younger people and children in servant roles in church life, such as ushering, worship groups and a myriad of other tasks, thus significantly increasing their sense of belonging?
• Do we publically affirm those who teach our children in the same way that we honour others in the congregation who undertake major projects or foreign trips?
• Do the children in our church ever get asked to read the Bible publicly or pray?
• If the church prays for people who respond to what God may have said to the congregation, are their children amongst those doing the praying?

So I do read the comments here, even if I don't always respond to them. And if there are good and interesting questions I do try to answer them. (Gervase, I am not ignoring your question about doctrine; I have half an answer in my head, and I'll post it in a bit, but it's a good and interesting question so I want to spend some more time thinking about it.)

One of the questions was about how supporters can help missionaries overcome the work guilt I wrote about previously. Well, I'm aware there's a danger in generalizing too much from my own experience; I'm just one guy who happens to be workaholic, and I don't mean in any way to say that all my contemporaries are. (There do seem to be a lot of them, though.)

But anyway, it got me thinking about how supporters can support missionaries. What do we guys on the field want from our partners back home? Well, again, I don't want to generalize too much from my own experience, (so please note that any passages written in the first-person-plural are so written for stylistic reasons) so I can give you a few things which I would really appreciate from churches and individual supporters.

This is not meant to be a list of demands or a cry for help, either. I'm actually doing pretty well at the moment. But the question was asked, albeit in a slightly different form, and it got me thinking. I've put down as much as I can think of because any supporter who does at least one of these things is doing a good and appreciated job, and I want to include as many people as possible.

1. Prayer. That has to be number one. Now remember who's writing this. You know that I'm not normally some super-spiritual "we can nothing without the supporting hand of God" type. We can do loads of stuff without the supporting hand of God, as many millions of people prove every day. But prayer is the fuel of the mission engine. Without it, the car might move, but only if we're pushing it hard. I have experienced the difference it makes to my life and my work when people are praying; I have felt supported and comforted even though I only found out afterwards that people were praying for me. I've experienced that, and I really don't want to do without it.
2. Communication. When I go back to visit my church in August (oh yeah, I'm coming to the UK for a bit in August. Should probably have said. We're not necessarily great at communication either.) I'll probably know about half or a third of the number of people I knew there when I left. I'm aware of this and prepared for it, so it's not going to hit me that hard. But still the blow can be softened by hearing a bit more of what's going on in church. What's the teaching on at the moment? What challenges are you facing, and what new stuff are you doing? Are there any projects starting? What's going on? Who's getting dedicated/married/buried? If you've got a weekly newsletter in electronic format, send it to your missionaries. Here's why: I came back from Bible college once to a service to find that my church had a new vicar. That was a surprise. Don't do that. (To be fair, he's been one of the best communicators with and encouragers of missionaries in the church.)
3. Challenge. Most of us are providing the teaching in our churches. If we get off track, our church gets off track. So we need some contradictory and thought-provoking stuff thrown at us to keep us real. And hey, expecting us to get our own spiritual nourishment from our sermon preparation is all well and good, but it's nice to hear stuff from outside the echo-chamber once in a while. Has there been a really good and gritty sermon in church recently? Send us a copy of it. Have you read anything that impacted your spiritual life? Tell us about it. Do you think we're talking a load of rubbish on our blogs? Say so. :)
4. Encouragement. Out of sight can mean out of mind; we know this, and so it's not a huge problem. But that's precisely why just the occasional note every so often to let us know that we're still remembered and we haven't dropped off the radar is a huge, huge encouragement. Replying to the prayer letters we send is a good one, even if it's just a few words, it stops us thinking we're talking into a vacuum.
5. Participation. In these days of Skype and high-speed Internet access, I can "virtually" turn up at your events. You don't actually need to make a big thing of me being there. I did a couple of Skype interviews with my church groups recently, but actually one of the nicest bits was just sitting there and listening to the service like everyone else. Give me an AV feed and I'll be happy. It helps with the whole catching-up thing I mentioned above, and it keeps that connection between us going.
6. Places to stay. I know this is the biggest issue for me when I return to the UK. My mother is in Wales but my church is in Oxford. I was renting a flat there but now I'm not renting one any more so when I visit I have to rely on the kindness of friends and church members. It's actually pretty stressful having to approach people and impose on them for however long. Organising hospitality for me when I visit is one of the most practical and powerful ways you can show that you care. Nothing amazing, just a bed for the night; but someone on location is much better placed to ask around and find people who can offer than trying to do it from five thousand miles away, and it takes all the stress out of it.
7. Care packages. I'm in two minds about this one. I love my life here in Japan, and I'm happy living like a Japanese. But I hope that even those who are into radical contextualization would be prepared to turn a blind eye to the odd jar of Marmite or Fray Bentos pie every six months or so, and of course it's the thought that counts more than the pie. Oh man, the pie... (Kudos to my pastorate for their gravy-and-stuffing drop around Christmas time.)
8. Briefing and debriefing. When we come back to our home countries, or set off again, we're going to be in a whirl. Maybe those missionaries in troubled countries are going to have seen some disturbing stuff - now mostly the mission agencies will help them deal with that or put them in touch with professionals who can - but everyone will come back to reverse culture shock, disorientation and above all change. And as Marjory Foyle puts it, you can have stress without change but you can't have change without stress. Getting us in for a debriefing will (a) help us adjust to what's changed so we can expect it, and (b) show us that you are prepared to invest some time and organisation into helping us. (b) is probably more important than (a), when it comes down to it. Similarly for briefings when we go again. Having some sensible questions prepared to talk through with us can help identify any areas where you can help us more or we can help you more. (Oh yes, that reminds me: this isn't a one-way thing, and it actually helps maintain that connection between us if it's not one-way. If there is anything we can do to help serve you better, we want to know about it.)
9. Money. It would be a bit insane to pretend that this isn't a consideration but honestly, it's got to appear at the bottom of the list because it's often the least of our problems. We can tighten up our belts and our budgets, we can borrow from the field or pitch in with other missionaries, but we can't magically create a connection with our supporters from out of nowhere. I would honestly much rather be supported a church which couldn't offer me much money but which loved me than one which gave me all the cash I needed and just left me to get on with it.

   I'll add more ideas as I think of them, but again, this is (a) just personal opinion, and (b) not a wishlist but a set of ideas. Don't stress about doing them all. Just feel good if you're doing one of them. :)

It's a bit of a shameful admission, but after five years of Japanese degree and then six years of private study, I've finally read my first book in Japanese from cover to cover unassisted.

I may be in danger of becoming a complete Mitsuo Fukuda fanboy here, but it was his "Mentoring Like Barnabas", and it was very very good - and in lots of ways, very humbling. It made me think about what right or experience I have to be talking to others about leadership, which is a good question to ask, whatever the answer.

And it contained a lot of good stuff about coaching, mentoring, counselling, church management and general Christian life. One of the bits that really hit me was something that everyone who is working as a pastor in Japan should know:

In the words of the pastor and counsellor Nobuo Tanaka, many Japanese come to church in search of a father figure. This is a part of a conversation with a consellor: "In my thirty years of counselling, not one person has honestly come to be honestly for a consultation. It may take the form of a consultation, but actually they are looking for a substitute father in me. So proposing any kind of solution is a waste of time. A consultation is the name they put on it, but it is merely an excuse to see me; they come not to seek a solution to their pain, but to find love." Many people coming to church choose the pastor or pastor's wife as a substitute parent, subconsciously seeking the acceptance that they did not receive from their natural parents. If this is true, then what the church needs to provide in order to face their situation is not teaching but relationship.

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.

More jewels unearthed during my hunt through old academic journals:

The key lesson here is that lay religious movements can thrive in contemporary Japan without an organized clergy. Organized religious denominations will continue to play their traditional functions, but the new religious groups that have grown since 1945 will prosper even without the benefit of the orthodox clergy. The danger is when one tries to mix a conservative organized religious organization with a modern mass lay movement. Their goals, world views, and practices are too different to enable a permanent marriage. Each can probably survive on its own, but bringing them together may eventually lead to trouble.

- The dispute between the Sōka Gakkai and the Nichiren Shōshū priesthood: A lay revolution against a conservative clergy.

Given that a lay revolution against a conservative clergy is what a lot of missionaries here want, we need to acknowledge the possibilities of "trouble" as well.

I've got loads of blog posts in the mental queue, it's a Friday night, and the cricket is washed out, so let's make a start...

I was asking someone the other day why Buddhist monks in Japan get married when the first premise of Buddhism is that you have to avoid attachment, and the first rule of the monk's code is that monks shouldn't have sex.

It was my opening gambit in a time-honoured evangelistic technique: take someone's deeply held beliefs, caricature them beyond recognition due to a superficial understanding of them, and then paint an overly-rosy picture of Christianity to show how my deeply held beliefs are better.

In other words, the same trick we pulled with Judaism, and it was wrong then as well. It goes something like this: we look at a religion with a lot of rules, then we ask why people don't live up to those rules, then we conclude - on their behalf - that it's because either (a) they're weak and/or (b) they're not meant to live up to a system of rules, and then produce Christianity, "a relationship, not a religion!" I've done this countless times.

But it's completely bogus. Jews don't follow the covenant in order to gain favour with God, they follow the covenant because they already have favour with God. That might sound a bit too unfair to be true, but that's grace for you. It's not fair.

As for the question about Buddhism, the answer is that, since a lot of temples ended up being owned by the monk's family, the monk needed a heir for the temple to survive. But isn't it against the rules? Sure, but if there's a good reason, the rules can be bent or broken. That might sound crazy to us, but that's just because deep down we're legalistic and so we expect everyone else to be. "You see," said my informant, "Buddhism isn't like Christianity."

This wasn't the turn the conversation was supposed to take. I was supposed to say "Christianity isn't like Buddhism", and then point out how Christianity frees us from all these onerous rules. But of course it's not true. Given that I'm working with a national church that has a Puritan streak a mile wide, (to give it some credit, this is at least the widest thing in Japanese church thinking) the list of things I must and mustn't do as a missionary has increased drastically since coming here. I mustn't drink alcohol in public. I must turn up for the 10:30am service every week, since that is the main service; the early service is not enough. (Have you noticed how the vast majority of Protestant churches have the main service at 10:30? You'd think it was Holy Writ, but it actually just dates back to the days when most people had jobs to do around the farm until that time in the morning. Now most people don't have farms, they could have the service any time they like but...)

Lest you get the wrong idea, I love the local church here and I don't begrudge it the rules it puts on me. I want to be part of the community, I play by the community's rules. That makes sense. But it does give the lie to the cheap debating point that Christianity is about a relationship, not about rules. I am reduced to trying to argue that at least our rules are better than your rules, and apologetically that one goes down like a brick parachute.

And with good reason. Because the rules we put on ourselves are not like the Buddhist rules. The Buddhist rules are supposed to free Buddhists from attachment - they develop those who live by them. The rules we put on ourselves in the more Puritan wing of the church are more concerned with how we look in front of other people. I can drink alcohol in private, but not in public, because I must be seen to be upright. (as it were) I must turn up at a certain service because that's where I'm expected to be seen. Since when, I wondered, did Christians judge each other based on external appearances?

The Bible has a word for those who are more concerned with external appearance than internal renewal: it is the word "hypocrite", and it is something that Jesus said an awful lot about, especially those who "load people down with burdens difficult to bear". As Dick Dowsett of OMF puts it, when writing about the scarcity of men in the Japanese church, the church needs to stop "creating man-made rules which exclude mainstream males." What do you do when the church becomes a barrier to mission rather than an agent of it?

You pray. What else can you do?

I may moan about church unity from time to time, but the solution is to just get on with it. Love Oxford is doing just that, and I take my hat off to them.

(Thanks to Jamie for the tipoff)

My church is now Godcasting. Of course we're not Godcasting anything recent yet, but it's being worked on. As far is I know we're the first church in the UK to be doing this.

Yet another Maypole application, of course.

The shukoukai is pretty much over - I'm just about recovering from the last night's seinenkai (20s and 30s) emergency meeting. It's been a seriously fantastic experience. In a sense it reminds me of the Crusaders camps that I used to go on, in that I'm returning in a spirit of naive optimism. And that is not particularly usual for me, but I've entered into it all the same.

There's been quite a lot of emphasis on the role of returnees in putting the Japanese church to rights, but also on the fact that such a thing has to start with the individual. The topic of this conference has been "living in peace" and with the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima there's been a certain amount of handwringing about the war, but this has lead to really practical discussions - what sort of attitude should Japanese Christians take towards the recent laws about the Japanese flag and anthem, for instance. It's been fantastic to see Japanese Christians engage in this sort of stuff.

There's been a lot of blue-skies thinking too. Morinaga-sensei wants to reunite the church. No, I mean, the whole damn thing. Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic. Yes, he knows how difficult it's going to be and he still thinks he can do it.

Do you know, no matter how cynical I am, I think he's actually got a reasonable shot at it. He's planning to start by uniting the church in Japan, and then working outwards to the church in the world. To be honest, if anyone is going to reunite the international church, I'd be happy to put money on it being Morinaga-sensei. It's going to be a lot of fun working with him next year. (Oh yes, that's only recently been decided - I'm going to be working with London JCF next year.)

There's also been a lot of talk about the church in Japan being reformed by those who are coming back to Japan after having been saved overseas. I think that, well, this is about time and whatever works, works, but (a) Japanese converts coming back from overseas are probably going to be bringing with them Western thought-patterns as well as Christian truth, but (b) this doesn't matter because the church in Japan is pretty much Western already so bringing Western thought-patterns isn't going to screw it up too much. So I can be excited with them about the changes that returnees are going to bring.

The shuyokai (20s and 30s group) is really the reason I'm here. I just love hanging out with Japanese people of that kind of age trying to work out their faith. It is, after all, what I plan to do for the rest of my life. Shuyokai is theoretically the day before the main conference but we have a number of "emergency meetings" every night to make up for it.

One of the groups who come along to that have been doing the very thing that I've been hoping for for years - they're writing Christian songs about where they're at, as Japanese people overseas, right now, and offering all this to the Lord. It's this sort of thing that gives me hope that missionary work will someday end. (Because, of course, the goal of any missionary is to go home because there's no need for missionary work any more. That is, if they're honest, and that they don't want to stay in charge of the church that they've planted, or whatever...) It's basically the sort of thing that I thought, in my naivety, that I would have to teach the church, but here they are getting on with it without our help - Hallelujah!

Here's a quick and dirty translation of one of the songs that they've written:

We were all born in different places,
And we've come different roads towards different dreams,
We can't do anything by outselves,
But we're glad that we're all made one in the Lord,
So we praise Jesus, O Jesus,
Only you lead us on,
with power and love,
So we praise Jesus, O Jesus,
Only you lead us into truth,
And in your light we walk.
Even if we're suffering, and even if we're worried,
We'll still sing of your salvation.

They write songs about the fact that their friends are going back to Japan, and that they won't see them any more; or that, as foreign students in a foreign land, they feel like strangers and wanderers on this earth. They write songs about where they're at, and I can only hope that many other Japanese churches start doing the same...

Oxford Meeting Point is still going well. Last night we visited St Ebbe's church for our guest service. Ebbe's is a nice little church in the center of Oxford that thinks it's All Souls Langham Place. (Whereas, of course, Aldate's is a nice big church in the center of Oxford that thinks it's either Holy Trinity Brompton or St Barnabas Woodside Park. Or, increasingly, Kensington Temple.)

I'm starting to feel that certain strands of Christianity all have Classic Mistakes, and that I shouldn't judge a church based on the Classic Mistakes it makes. If it's a pentecostal church, I shouldn't worry if they make experience normative over Scripture, because that's what pentecostal churches tend towards. It's just what they do. Similarly, if I go to a conservative evangelical church, I shouldn't worry if:

• They underrealise eschatology. Sorry for the theology, but that just means that they think everything is predicated on what happens when you die. Because there will be a judgement one day, you should live like X and Y. The downside of this is that they can tend to pay little attention to the state of the world at the moment. Jesus said that the kingdom of God was at hand, and that people were laying hold of it, and even that some people who were around him would see it before they die; for him, heaven is much more about how you live now than how you'll live then. We sometimes talk about the "now and not yet" of the kingdom, but as with all things, steering a middle course is important.
• They misuse "logos". This one, on the other hand, should be made a criminal offence. The word "logos" or the compound "logos thew" in the New Testament is a philosophical term which relates to (a) God's creative word which spoke the universe into being, or (b) that same word incarnate in Jesus Christ. Just because we refer to the Bible as "the word of God", that does not mean you can pick up "logos thew" passages and interpret them as referring to the Bible.
• They would rather attack than contextualize. Postmodernism is bad, pluralism is bad, relativism is bad. Please get these unhelpful ideas out of your head, so we can preach at you like it's 1950 again. I'm always amazed at the extent to which Paul contextualized his message, working very much within the culture, especially in Athens, in ways which would horrify most church leaders today.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things they get spectacularly right; in particular, their handling of Scripture (apart from the logos thing) puts many others to shame. I'll think more about the various strands, their classic mistakes and classic successes when I get around to answering Dave's question.