How do you convert a nation?
You probably don’t.
Like an inverse Tardis, Christian Japan is a small world that looks much larger from the outside. The exterior view is of the many Christian hospitals, universities, schools and kindergartens highly visible in every city, boasting sumptuous and well-used campuses, liberally adorned either with statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary or whichever bearded Victorian Protestant came from Gaikoku to spread the faith. Churches are a fairly common sight, though the casual observer may be fooled by the myriad “wedding chapels” that I suspect outnumber real places of worship. But despite all these institutions founded by vigorous missionaries of old and their generous foreign funders, if you look behind the grand facades and statuary of the churches and campuses, you will find few actual Christians inhabiting them. Few, and getting fewer. Once estimated at 2% of the population, 1% is more commonly cited today.
This seems to hold true regardless of denomination. We Anglicans, for example, used to have several religious orders here, but our last convent closed last year. Whether Catholic or Protestant, all the churches suffer from a shortage of clergy, the majority of whom are close to retirement. Most of the laity are elderly. Christian educational institutions overwhelmingly cater to and are staffed by non-Christians. Their Christian character is little more than residual, marked perhaps by a Bible reading and prayers at matriculation and graduation ceremonies. The Orthodox are in a similar position, despite having started with different missionary methods. Their mission to Japan made great advances in the late 1800s under St Nikolai, who concentrated more on founding local churches and catechising people than on establishing grand public institutions. This tactic yielded rapid mass conversions and longer-lasting success, but an Orthodox source in Japan tells me that St Nikolai’s mission has in most places ground to a halt. The Orthodox are suffering from exactly the same problem as the Anglicans: few clergy, a shrinking, ageing laity, and no monastics. The last is a particular problem for the Orthodox, since only monastics can become Orthodox bishops, and given that the late Metropolitan of Japan has very recently gone to his reward (requiescat in pace), I suppose that the problem has become more pressing still.
Neither the Catholic and Protestant attempts to Christianise Japan through big public institutions nor the more local, church-focussed methods of the Orthodox have endured the century or so since the deaths of their foreign founders. Some complain that the churches have become “too Japanese,” a phrase which requires some caveats: the Japanese can of course run churches as well as anyone else. However, the larger Japanese churches have become isolated from the outer world by the barrier of their difficult language. Japanese confounds all but the most committed foreign learners, resulting in a lack of native-language catechetical materials. There is also in Japan, as in the UK, a certain reticence towards speaking foreign languages. A cleric from the Philippines told me recently that the Anglican Church in Japan is something of an outlier among the Asian Anglican churches, preferring to keep to itself rather than engage with the English-speaking majority. It therefore misses out on trends that could lead to growth, or comes to them decades too late. For example, Japanese Anglicans are just now considering “team ministry,” whereby small groups of clergy collectively minister to a number of churches, despite the fact that we started it in the Church of England in the 1980s and is now increasingly regard it as a contributing factor to decline. All of this makes it harder for the Japanese Anglican church to be truly international. Immigrants or short-term visitors have to be quite fluent in Japanese even just to understand church services, let alone join in with hymns or responses, and despite having church-affiliated universities which could offer language courses, the church seems wary of recruiting foreign clergy to fill the calamitous shortage.
My Orthodox friend tells me much the same story about the Japanese Orthodox Church, especially since Moscow granted it autocephalous status, which he claims has effectively cut it off from the rest of the Orthodox world. He also noted, as several foreign Anglicans have, the tendency to conform the church to the secular business culture of Japan, replete with compulsory meetings of life-draining length. I have heard from Japanese Anglicans that these responsibilities put off younger people from being baptised and confirmed, and myself have known one member of the church leave rather than be forced into continuing with unwanted administrative duties.
There are, however, green shoots. I know of two relatively new churches in Tokyo which boast large numbers, including young people and families: Mitaka Evangelical Church, and Grace Christian Fellowship in Ome (Pastor Thomas Cotton has a Substack
). The older Tokyo Union Church, founded in 1872, is also thriving. They are all broadly Evangelical but self-consciously liturgical in their worship. They have flourished by paying attention to their local community, setting up single churches, without aspiring to set up great public institutions such as schools and hospitals. Of course, there is much to thank the old missionaries for in establishing those institutions, so many of which endure to this day, and succeed in the same fields as their secular counterparts: but as a means of mass conversion through service and social prestige, their impact has been limited.In contrast, the three growing Protestant churches I mention more closely reflect St Nikolai’s Orthodox model of mission than the 19th-20th century Catholic and magisterial Protestant methods. They have focussed on local church growth. Yet what all three have in common, and might lend them greater longevity than the older Orthodox mission, is that their membership is international. Their worship is conducted in both Japanese and English. At least two of the three also encourage and support bilingual home schooling. This makes them attractive to Japanese converts and the foreign presence lends them a credibility without which they may be perceived as cults, an ever-present concern in Japan. I understand that
’s new Anglican presence in Japan, under the auspices of ACNA, is going to work with Mitaka Evangelical Church, and with such heritage as the recently televised coronation of King Charles III at its disposal, should easily be able to dispel any such concerns, to both churches’ advantage.e recently, two Orthodox churches outside the Japanese Orthodox jurisdiction have also seen similar growth by similar means. The Romanian Orthodox Church here, originally envisaged as a chaplaincy to Romanians living in Tokyo, has grown into a much larger, international community because divine service is offered in English and Japanese as well as Romanian — to the extent that the parish has now bought its own church building. St Jude’s Ukrainian mission is also multi-lingual, international and has grown as a result. Internationalism, multi-lingualism and localism seem to have a heady effect on church vitality here.
So why do I think that training to convert a nation is futile? It has worked in the past, in parts of Africa and Asia, and longer ago, in Europe, too. The Jesuits almost managed it in Japan. In all these cases, what worked best was working from the top down, converting the leaders and upper echelons of society so that the peasantry would follow suit (often with little choice in the matter). It worked, for example, in the Philippines, where three hundred years of Spanish rule left much to be desired (says the Englishman!), but nonetheless handed over the deposit of the apostolic faith so successfully that it thrives to this day.
But this top-down approach is not going to work in a world where people are no longer pliable vassals of warlords, already have access to western technology and medicine, and where being Christian no longer conveys social prestige among the richer nations. Outside despotic regimes, conversion by nation is surely impossible nowadays. Nonetheless, Christ’s Great Commission remains to make disciples of all nations. Some quibble over the detail, and argue that this means we should aim at recruiting representative people from all nations, rather than the conversion of the whole world. This can be used to justify an embarrassment about evangelisation, one which I know is keenly felt among Japanese Anglicans. But it falls short of the truly cosmic scope of the mission of Christ, which is to reunite all things in heaven and on earth in Him. Outside the Church, there is no salvation: the mission of the Church, therefore, is to restore all things to itself, the Body of Him by whom all things are made.
To attempt anything less than the reconciliation of the cosmos to the Creator is to turn from the ploughshare. But attempting to convert a nation, if Christian adventures in Japan are anything to go by, is a Sisyphean task. Making big public institutions has not proved the most effective way of winning souls to Christ. We have to start at a much more local level and build from the bottom up.
One of Endo Shusaku’s characters famously declared Japan a “swamp” for missionary endeavours, but demographic trends may help to harden and fertilise the soil. Last week, I was in a small Japanese village in Gunma prefecture. Like so many, it is in indisputable decline. Houses stand empty and decaying. Once a thriving ski resort, many of the inns, lodges and cafés are now closed permanently, and not just for summer. The barbershop has closed. The local primary school closed years ago, and a beautiful nursery school is now disused. Even the local Buddhist temple has been stripped and abandoned.
The Japanese countryside is in a sad situation, but it does present opportunities to which foreign entrepreneurs and people looking for a cheap home are already savvy. There have also been successful secular attempts to regenerate communities while respecting Abe even reverting to older ways of living, farming and construction: Karl Bengs’ rebuilding of traditional Japanese country houses is a well-publicised case, featuring in several NHK documentaries.
If it can be done by secular commercial and nonprofit groups, then churches should be able to do it, and to much greater effect. It would take only a handful of families to commit to relocating to one village. Property is cheap, even in places where cities are commutable. There are buildings like the disused nursery which could be hired to set up a small bilingual school on Christian lines, an attractive prospect in a country where so many children have dropped out of mainstream education and where the English language is valued. This would offer one avenue of employment for adults moving to the community. Others would come from filling gaps in the local economy. The church would need to conduct a simple community audit to determine local needs. I imagine that care work, home help and the establishment of some sort of social space would be viable in these very elderly villages. So might a weekly market for people to trade produce.
And of course, one would need to buy or rent space for the church itself. The abandoned temple might not be a bad place to start. Groups of foreigners suddenly moving in and taking over may not be so welcome, but a mixed foreign and Japanese church family that puts in the work to restore moribund institutions, tidies up the rotting and overgrown houses, boosts the local economy and brings children to the village might just win hearts and minds — and yes, even souls for Christ.
Respect for tradition, small-scale bilingual education and civic-mindedness could do much to restore confidence in Christianity, nowadays lumped in with any number of new-age cults in the popular Japanese consciousness. But a firm faith must be at the heart of the endeavour. I am minded of a story I heard on Ancient Faith Radio recently from Fr Chad Hatfield, Principal of St Vladimir’s College, New York, himself an ex-Anglican. Two Orthodox priests were sent to Madagascar to set up a mission. They didn’t even speak Malagasy. At a loss, they just found a space and started singing the hours and liturgy there, day by day. People came, and around them there is now an Orthodox village.
Beauty, prayer and antiquity are by no means alien to the Japanese heart, and may yet prove a straighter route there than any modern strategies.
So… who wants to try?
This had made me feel sad today. Perhaps it is just the day.