The pre-departure message (2012).

The following is a slightly edited version of the message I shared at my home church on September 23, 2012, before I left for Japan. I found it while going through some old files and thought I'd share it with you all.

Good morning. Or, as I will be soon be greeting people, ohayou gozaimasu. Originally, I was going to head out to Japan in two days, but some surprise bureaucracy has put a delay in my work visa approval and I get the feeling I'm about to learn some valuable lessons about patience as I wait for confirmation of my travel dates.

Eventually I'll head to Japan to teach English and work at a church for the next two-and-a-half years as part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's so-called "J-3" program--"J" for Japan, "3" for the approximate 3 years of service. I'll spend about three months in Tokyo, and then fly down to the city of Kumamoto to get acquainted with my school and church placement. I will start teaching at one of the two Lutheran junior/senior high schools in Kumamoto next April.

Some of you might be asking (quite reasonably) why I'm doing a mission program with the largest Lutheran denomination in America and not the Presbyterian Church (USA). I promise I'm still a Presbyterian, and proud to be. The PC(USA) has a solid mission program, and Presbyterian missionaries do a lot of great things. We read about them in bulletin inserts every week. One of my closest friends from summer staff at Westminster Woods just finished up a year teaching in Miami with the PC(USA)'s Young Adult Volunteer program, and had an amazing experience of serving God in intentional community there. But the PC(USA) mission program doesn't have a J-3 program.

It had everything I was looking for--an opportunity to work in Japan and to live in intentional Christian community, which is something I learned to value during my three summers at Westminster Woods. Japan is less than 1% Christian; finding a Christian community with people my age while working at a secular English-teaching job would be next to impossible. With the J-3 program, I'll be living in it.

Ever since I first went to Japan back in high school, I've been hooked on studying its language, history, and culture, and knew that after college I wanted to go back to Japan for a longer time. But the program I'll be on is quite different from the standard English-teaching jobs most college grads get. I'm about to become a missionary.

Protestor at FanimeCon 2012 wearing
handy T-shirt listing who's going to hell.
Photo by Foxtrot1988 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For many people, including myself, that's a term filled with myriad connotations, ranging from excitement to revulsion. Christian missionaries have done and still do amazing things--Mother Teresa feeding the poor in India, for example. But Christian mission also has a past strongly associated with cultural imperialism, racism, and coercion. Even in this postcolonial era, there are people out there calling themselves Christians and believing that when they stand on street corners, shouting and waving huge signs listing all the kinds of people that are doomed to hell, they're doing God's work. My friends and I attend nerdy conventions every year, the kind where people show up in costume, and have seen these people firsthand. Every Memorial Day Weekend they stand on boxes outside the convention center, holding signs that say "Cry to God" and "Jesus Saves From Hell," shaking their Bibles and shouting that dressing in costume is idolatry and if every costumed attendee doesn't get on their knees now and beg Jesus for forgiveness they will be eternally condemned. Even uglier than their rhetoric are the reactions of some attendees, who mock them and shout abuse. It breaks my heart every year.

The Japan group at the ELCA Summer
Missionary Conference, 2012.

Shouting condemnation from a street corner. Leaving Bible tracts instead of a tip. Making nonbelieving friends targets for conversion. These are things in which I know I don't want to take part. So when I and the other two women going with me to Japan, Morgan and Caroline, were discussing what mission meant with our coordinator in Chicago, we gave mostly mild answers. Performing acts of service and love. Forming deep relationships with people and listening to them in conversation. But then our coordinator said, "Well, anyone can do those things. What makes us different as Christians?"

In the silence that followed, old anxieties from middle and high school suddenly bubbled up in me. If I really believe all these things about Jesus, why aren't I out there handing out tracts and saving souls? Why aren't I taking every opportunity to snatch my friends and neighbors from the jaws of hell? Do I hate them that much? I'm not even comfortable talking to people I don't know about the weather; how could I just go up to them and give 'em the old "Can I tell you about my friend Jesus?" talk? I felt like I had the burden of their eternal fate on my 13-year-old shoulders.

There are plenty of forceful preachers in the Bible. The Old Testament prophets were often taken for crazy by the Israelites themselves. In the New Testament, both John the Baptist and Jesus call certain groups of people "broods of vipers"!

But I'm not any of those people. I've never had any prophetic visions, angels didn't foretell my birth, and I'm certainly not the Son of God! But the Prophets and Jesus and John the Baptist aren't the only preachers in the Bible. That guy we heard about in Acts wasn't any of those things, either. In other places in the New Testament he even calls himself the "worst of sinners," (1 Tim. 1:15) and agonizes over his slavery to the sin living in him (Romans 7). A little more relatable than wearing camel's hair and eating locusts and wild honey like John the Baptist.

When he was in Athens, Paul wasn't looking for notches to add to his witnessing shotgun. He didn't march in and try to dictate the Athenians' individual spiritual needs, wring tearful conversions out of people, or hit 'em with a turn-or-burn ultimatum. He engaged with the people and their culture in a respectful way. He participated in the discussions already going on at the time. And he offered his testimony. That was all he could do. Then he left it up to the people to decide.

Now, a small disclaimer: God can work and has worked through all kinds of evangelical approaches, regardless of our personal feelings about them. I've actually heard of tracts left on windshields changing lives, and several months ago I had a really amazing encounter with a couple of girls walking around UC Berkeley talking to people about Jesus, something I know I don't have the courage to do.

But evangelism is easily reduced to just another way for people to wield power over others and leave people feeling like pet projects—ironically leaving God completely out of the equation. I'm guilty of that—at one point in college I was trying to steer the conversation with a dear friend toward Jesus and she caught me red-handed. She smiled sympathetically and said in the kindest possible way, "I know you're trying to convert me, but..." I immediately backpedaled, but she was right. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do as a Christian. I confess, I was kind of hoping for an epiphany. But was the epiphany I was wishing for a conversion to God's work in her heart or just a conversion to my beliefs?

Jesus is the True Vine. He chooses us to bear the fruit that can only come from him, and commands us to love one another. I'm not the one that diagnoses spiritual conditions or saves souls. Only God can do that, because only God knows the heart. Like Paul in Athens, my job is to show up where I'm called and be ready to love.

So to Japan. It's not generally thought of as a "mission field" since it's so wealthy, stable, and developed. But it does have its own issues under the surface. The suicide rate is one of the highest in the world, largely attributed to societal pressures and the acceptance of suicide as a morally responsible act in certain cases. The societal emphasis on conformity and lack of anti-discrimination laws leaves ethnic minorities marginalized and virtually unknown outside Japan. Even descendants of a medieval lower caste are still discriminated against in certain areas in employment and marriage, though few even in Japan are aware of it. And the Japanese have recently had the need to coin words for "death from overwork" and "young people who shut themselves up away from society in their houses." So, no, wealth, stability, and technological advancement do not save.

In some ways, Japan's wealth increases the urgency for the Gospel of Christ—the whole "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" thing. Even the majority religions, Shintō and Buddhism, are on the decline, with much of it practiced through holidays and traditions rather than real, dedicated worship--much like Christianity in some places in America. Christianity, despite a missionary presence dating back to the 16th century, is a minority religion in Japan and still seen as largely foreign and aesthetic. Christmas means date night, strawberry cake, and KFC. (Apparently in Japan KFC has better marketing than Jesus does.) Christian weddings are incredibly popular (and incidentally cheaper than traditional Japanese weddings). One restaurant known as the Christon Café apparently boasts décor pieces from actual European cathedrals. Christian symbols are cool and mysterious, nothing more.

Which in some ways sets the stage for missionaries to come in, Paul-in-Athens-style. Last year the nine-year-old daughter of one missionary couple working at the Lutheran college in Kumamoto was chatting with her non-Christian Japanese friends about Christmas, and asked them "You know it’s not all about presents and Santa Claus, right?" Her friends asked her what it was about, opening the door to telling them the good news about Jesus--and correcting some of their pop-culture-influenced misconceptions. They'd never heard any of it before, and were fascinated, asking questions and eager to know about Jesus. And to this girl, it was the most natural thing.

Were I that young and confident.

I read this for a college class
called The Bible and Salvation.

There is a certain difficulty in preaching the gospel in Japan simply because of the collectivist society. There's a saying, "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." Individuality is not something to be celebrated. So when conversion and baptism happens for someone in a non-Christian family, it's hard. Often the convert doesn't tell their family, not for fear of retribution but for a desire to maintain the familial harmony that is so integral to Japanese culture. One thing to remember in working in global mission is how culturally influenced even our own religious beliefs are. I once read an account from a minister in Tokyo who lamented that Japan was not "Christianized" enough, that the Japanese language didn't have the right words for certain Christian concepts. With all due respect to this pastor, I think he meant westernized, not Christianized. In a case study of mission in Japan in their book Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker point out that in North America we tend to see justice in terms of forensic guilt, but in Japan they tend to see justice in terms of relationship-destroying shame. The truth of the Cross does not change with these worldviews--Jesus removed our forensic guilt and removed our relationship-destroying shame that results from sin. Jesus transcends culture.

Now I can do all the book research I want, but I know that as soon as I set foot in Japan I'm going to meet people that completely contradict everything I've assumed about Japan. I need to fight that urge to turn evangelism into a one-size-fits-all methodology. God does amazing things. I'm just thrilled to be along for the ride.

I'll close with a reflection from a woman in whose footsteps I'm about to follow, a J-3 missionary who first headed to Japan in 2006 and is now a teacher at a private Christian English school in Fukushima, where tsunami scars and radiation fears are still present:

Every time a Japanese person begins following Jesus, I am amazed at God, because none of the conversations ever make it seem humanly possible. There aren't any working formulas that I know of—every solid convert to Christianity that I know of moves because they've had an encounter with God Himself. So, we keep praying, and keep loving, and keep speaking—and wait for the Spirit to move.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean." (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship--and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead."
Acts 17:16-31 (NIV)