Simon and Henrietta Cozens

I'm starting to get uneasy with those (I'm looking at you, Brian McLaren) who have been romanticising the Non-church movement started by Uchimura Kanzo and how it's a wonderful example of contextual organic church. I understand the desire to appropriate interesting things in history in support of one's latest Great Idea, but really, this isn't one you want to be appropriating.

I'm not going to get onto Uchimura's theology, his views on Buddhism (see his lovely piece "Buddha and Christ" for that, which even Kennedy's gushing book on Mukyokai calls "at its worst evaluation, heretical, at its best highly ambiguous, and certainly unwise") and so on, because that's not what people hold him up as an example of. Really, it would be shooting fish in a barrel, but the wrong fish. He's being held up as an example of organic, authentic, indigenous church structures, so let's see how he did that.

Before we do, though, I want to think about one part of his theology: his amalgam of Christianity and Bushido, the samurai code. "Christianity grafted upon Bushido will be the finest product of the world. It will save not only Japan but the whole world." (Complete Works, vol 22, p.161)

My old language teacher in Kyoto - we studied Nitobe's classic book, "Bushido", together - was not a Christian but was very familiar with the Non-church movement and he had a pet theory: Uchimura was not a Christian. Uchimura was a samurai, a firm believer in Bushido and Confucianism at a time when Japan was Westernising rapidly and the samurai classes were passing into history. In Christianity, Uchimura found the vocabulary of Bushido: love, faithfulness, sacrifice and so on. In Christian characters, he found - or he projected - what he wanted to see in terms of samurai models. He called the Apostle Paul "a true samurai, the very embodiment of the spirit of bushido". (Complete Works, 25:362)

So I think it's a fair question as to whether really Uchimura changed his faith, or whether it's closer to the truth to say that his new-found faith allowed him to maintain the worldview that seemed to be slipping away from the Japan that he loved. It's perhaps a bit extreme, but I think there's something in it, and so it's worth thinking, when you read Uchimura, about what he means by the words he uses. When he talks about "love", does he mean Christian love, or does he mean filial piety?

I bring this up because it has a profound effect on the ecclesiology that he is now being lauded for: the reason he rejected the ordained ministry is not for any great theological or ecclesiological justification - that would come post hoc - but because his samurai virtues had a very high view of independence and a very low view of charity (which I thought was supposed to be "the greatest of these"). "Priests live by charity, and we believe the sword to be a more honourable means of existence than charity." (Complete Works, 3:131)

Let's now take more of a look at his Non-church movement in practice. A good question to start with is how authentically indigenous it is. Uchimura was trained in Amherst College in the US, a New England Puritan college, and befriended by a Quaker couple during his time there. There are so many Quaker and Puritan influences in the Non-church movement that "insiders define the Nonchurch movement as an expression of Christianity whose 'father' is Puritanism and whose 'mother' is Quakerism" (Mullins 1998:59)

Tosh Arai's article "Mukyokai: Churchless Christians in Japan" in the Japan Christian Quarterly also provides examples of the "deep roots" connecting Mukyokai practice and 1880s missionary conferences: "The long Bible-centered sermons, the simple anti-liturgical services, the attacks on church symbolism, and the teetoaler moralism were all there."

In terms of structure, Uchimura's idea of "a churchless Christianity, calling no man bishop or pastor, save Jesus Christ" did not work out as well in practice as in theory. He rented halls - which is of course what many of the denominational churches did when they were getting started - in order to set up the Mukyokai along the lines of a juku, a private school. Uchimura was a schoolteacher, so this should not be unexpected. Mukyokai meetings were lectures. He was a Confucian and an intellectual, and his Christianity was an Confucian, intellectual Christianity. (Mullins' book has a lovely photo of a Mukyokai lecture, the people sitting in neat rows, men on one side of the lecture hall, women on the other.)

It was "lay" laid, of course, but, hey, my mission is a lay mission. All that means is "unordained" - there was still a sharp distinction between "lay" teachers and lay believers.

Each sensei functions as a minor "shaman" who has charisma. He is not only the teacher for the religious subject concerned, but also an advisor in the personal affairs of his disciples - as in arranging marriages and choosing occupations. (Ohara, in Moore 1981)

This is, of course, what would expect for someone fulfilling the teacher role in Japanese society; but not what one would expect if one thinks of a "lay Christian movement". Nor should one expect a man who both distrusted the ecclesial trappings of Christianity and the dependence on others' charity to be accepting a gift to build a churchlecture hall, Imai Hall, which is what happened in 1908.

Looking now at the recent history of the movement to give us a sense of how it did long term, Mullins notes a number of factors. First, the leadership of Mukyokai is self-appointed and charisma-based, and so many years after the founder, the number of people with the same charismatic drive has decreased rapidly and now "many groups operate on the basis of a rotating leadership." Similarly, and because there is no formal leadership development, there is no provision for a group to continue after its leader retires or dies. Because many members are elderly, this leaves them without any pastoral care. There has been, since the 1950s, a considerable decline in membership, from about 30,000 to more like 3-4,000 today with an even sharper drop-off in the number of independent evangelists - there are probably between three to four-hundred Nonchurch groups in Japan at the moment, with an average of 10 members each.

Since 1987, there has been a national conference of Nonchurch groups, meeting at the central churchlecture hall, trying to take "coordinated national efforts" to address these problems. The whole "Churchless Christianity" idea - while never being strictly true in practice - just didn't work long-term, and now they need to put in structures and hierarchy to make it work. Not exactly the shining example it's meant to be, then.

Which of course leads me back to the central dogma of my dissertation: "Everyone systematizes in the end. Everyone."