So I’ve given a translation of Yasuo Furuya’s thoughts on the word “教会”. Here’s my commentary on it. Read more about Neither a teaching-meeting nor a common-meeting

Recently, I heard about Yasuo Furuya’s new book, “Is Japanese Christianity Real?” and decided to buy it with some birthday money. It’s a collection of fairly short, simple essays, examining the history of Japanese Christianity and asking some pertinent questions about it. Here’s my translation of a portion of the chapter “Why do we use the words Christianity (基督教) and Church (教会)?”

The problem that you come up with is that linguistically you want to be as much of a native as you can, but culturally there is a delicate dance that you have to perform. In one scene the dancer behaves like the locals. In other scenes he pulls back and asks am I going too far, am I crossing a bound­ary and interfering now with the local sense of identity. Occa­sionally the dancer goes too far and confronts an attitude of “Look, you’re obviously not one ofus; you’re trying to pretend to be one of us and the more you pretend the more we find problems with that, the more you make us feel uncomfortable. You’re intruding into our identity. You’re being presumptuous that you can really be one of us.” And that’s why I talk of being the ideal foreigner, that there comes a time in which you say, particularly in some cultures, “Look, I’m never going to be anything but a foreigner here.”

- Ronald Walton, National Foreign Language Center, Johns Hopkins University

So, I’ve been rummaging through archives to try to understand more of the history of our churches and why things are how they are. In the course of that I’ve found a whole bunch of field reports, which are the mission leaders’ reflections on how things are going, to be sent back to home bases. Fifty years ago, cultural sensitivity was not necessarily a strong point for missionaries, but the power relationships in churches seemed to be somewhat the same as today:

The JEMA Strategy Forum was commissioned to research a guiding strategy for mission in Japan. They’ve done a lot of research and produced a 65-page PDF of raw data, which will be used to create a strategy document. “The final Strategy Statement will be ready for the 2010 JEMA MLC and Plenary meetings.” It’s now obviously mid-2011, and if that did happen, the Internet doesn’t know about it.

But the great thing about having raw data is that you don’t have to wait for other people to do the analysis for you. You can do your own. Here’s mine. Read more about Missionary Strategy in Japan

After a clean-up of the mission headquarters library^* - I’m currently reading and enjoying Gordon MacDonald’s Ordering Your Private World.

MacDonald talks a lot about the need to budget your time and, in that budget, to ensure that you are giving priority to the things that you really mean to. If you don’t, then your time will be filled up by things which are not your strengths, which are imposed upon you by domineering persons, or which look urgent but aren’t.

That got me thinking: is my time being filled by the things I really consider important? Read more about Meetings

Sorry for the lack of posts here recently, but tomorrow we leave this house and Sunday we fly back to Japan, so we’ve been quite busy trying to finish everything off here and pack everything up.

But yesterday I had the chance to have a really interesting conversation with someone. They’re part of a organisation which is having a bit of a revolving door problem at the moment: new workers are entering, sticking around for a couple of years and then leaving. The older workers seem to be quite happy, but the younger ones don’t seem to be able to settle. The organisation is haemorrhaging talent, and I’m not even sure it knows it. Read more about Everything must change

So I sent messengers to them saying, “I am engaged in an important work, and I am unable to come down. Why should the work come to a halt when I leave it to come down to you?”

Here’s my new toy: a searchable database of articles, books, theses and so on related to missiology in Japan, with links where possible. Please let me know if you have any additions or recommendations for the database. Read more about Bibliography of Japanese missiology

In the first year of the reign of Cyrus, king of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken through Jeremiah, the LORD stirred up the soul of Cyrus, king of Persia, and he sent a proclamation throughout his kingdom by messenger and also in writing. The message said:
“Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: All kingdoms of the earth have been given to me by the LORD God of heaven, and He has appointed me to build for Himself a temple in Jerusalem. (which is in Judah)