Patrick Boyle has lived in Hiroshima since 2018 and is a staff member at Mustard Seed Christian Church, Hiroshima. He is currently compiling a collection of essays based on his interviews with various senior citizens living throughout Hiroshima Prefecture.Â
It’s a Sunday afternoon in downtown Hiroshima, Japan. A large room in a building located not far from the iconic Atomic Bomb Dome is full. Seventy-five people are enjoying a potluck lunch after the morning service of a bilingual church. The guests mingle and laugh. No one seems in a hurry to leave. The seating that had been neatly arranged in rows during the service has lost all order. Throughout the room, circles and semi-circles of chairs have been haphazardly arranged into small dining groups.
The dishes on offer give a small, yet incomplete picture of the eclectic congregation this morning—a meat dish from South Africa, Domino’s Pizza, a Japanese salad topped with local yuzu dressing, American chili.
I scan the room. Two clean-cut Danish tourists who are just passing through converse with a tattooed American. A Filipino who normally lives in Canada speaks with a housewife from the Ozarks. Japanese regulars chat with a visitor from Taiwan. Even my daughter’s piano teacher is there—her first visit ever to a church. She’s come to the service this morning and stayed for the meal on invite from my daughter. This gathering—itself taking place after celebrating communion— is a living testimony to the unique ways that God is moving today in the nation of Japan.
When I first moved to Hiroshima, my aim was to become fluent in Japanese and help to form new churches of all-Japanese congregations. This seemed like a logical aim for one moving to Japan to reach the Japanese with the gospel. But over time, I came to see that many modern-day missionaries who arrived here long before I did, had asked some illuminating questions that led to a more counter-intuitive approach: Is a completely Japanese church really the most desirable thing? Isn’t the truest and fullest expression of God’s family a multi-cultural, multi-tongued congregation (Rev 7:9-10)? Wasn’t the early church a model of this (Acts 6:1)? These questions led them to conclude that perhaps the best way to reach the Japanese is to not focus exclusively on reaching the Japanese, but to plant churches that are internationally focused from their inceptions.
Oftentimes a stumbling block for many Japanese is the erroneous belief that Christianity is simply an imported American religion that’s only relevant when a couple opts for a Western-style wedding. The wedding chapels throughout the country with their “Christian” weddings (often officiated by unbelieving Caucasians looking only to make an extra buck) don’t help.
Nor does the widespread misconception that, in and of itself, to become a Christian requires the abandonment of one’s essential Japanese-ness. This inside versus outside mindset surely exists in all countries to some extent, but is extremely pronounced in Japan, most likely due to its unique move to voluntarily cut itself off from the outside world in the early 1600s.
This isolation remained until Commodore Matthew Perry, on errand from US President Fillmore, forcibly re-opened the country in 1853. Since that day, the Land of the Rising Sun has had a complex relationship with the outside. On the one hand, new technologies like steam power and Western dress were embraced relatively quickly when the nation re-opened after over 200 years of isolation. Shortly after, even new sports such as baseball were swiftly accepted. On the other hand, ideals such as individualism and Christianity (originally introduced to Japan, pre-isolation period) had a much harder time surviving in Japan’s intellectual and philosophical soil. To this day, that struggle remains. To many here, the way of Jesus is not understood as a living faith that provides truth, beauty and hope for peoples from all the world’s nations, but as an outside, Western system that offers little to the Japanese.
Highlighting (and celebrating!) the global reach of Christianity can go a long way toward overcoming these obstacles. It is one thing for a Christian to claim that theirs is not a Western religion, it is another to show it. What if the first time a seeker hears the message, it’s within the confines of an international family that demonstrates, in real time, the faith’s catholicity?
What if the image of a non-Christian Japanese seeing a Christian Japanese take communion with brown and white brothers and sisters is more powerful than we could imagine? I want to be careful not to oversell this. A bilingual worship service is not a silver bullet for reaching the Japanese. Getting our friends here to engage with the good news is a challenge regardless of how many nationalities are present in the church or exotic dishes are present at the potluck. However, observation of the current scene—especially in Japan’s large cities—shows that God is working here today in unique ways.
In a land that is stringently monolithic, with very clear-cut definitions of what it means to be Japanese, multi-cultural churches are compellingly pointing Japanese to Christ and welcoming them into his global body. God has already been pleased to touch this nation through such surprising means as black gospel music and the work of Bach—maybe now American chili can be added to that list.