This is a little something about my church back home that I wrote up for a friend who has a missions prayer group.

JAPAN

In a country of about 127 million people, less than 1% are Christian, and that 1% includes pretty much anyone and everyone who claims to be Christian, so the real number of true believers is far lower. For some basic facts and figures about the country, you can take a look at the CIA World Factbook about Japan.

In addition to having so few Christians, there are few missionaries. As far as we know, after living and ministering in Tokyo for over 25 years, the Mitaka Evangelical Church is the only postmillennial, paedobaptist, paedocommunionist church in the entire country!

Some mission boards are pulling missionaries out from Japan because it is one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in (for example, it costs about one million US dollars to buy a piece of land 1/10 or 1/12 of an acre) and Japanese people are not receptive to the Gospel. It is more economical to send missionaries to countries where they can support an entire missionary family for less than a tenth or twentieth of what it would cost to support them in Tokyo.

Most Japanese people do not consider themselves religious at all, but they are superstitious and practice a philosophically impossible syncretism combining Buddhism (ancestor worship, via China via India) and Shintoism (emperor worship and Japanese racism). One of the weird results of this religious combo is that many see no problem believing in BOTH reincarnation AND in heaven and hell. For more info, here is a tidy little article about religion in Japan with concise explanations about Shintoism and the Japanese flavour of Buddhism. There is a short section about Christianity in Japan that’s pretty good, too.

Setting aside religious philosophies, to put it simply, though, ancestor worship is the religion of Japan. In many families, if you quit worshiping your ancestors, you cannot be a member of the family.

This, of course, creates all kinds of problems for Japanese Christians. A few families in our church have been disowned for refusing to worship dead parents and relatives at funerals and memorial services (which occur every so many days after death, and then regularly every few years for 50 years after death) and in the shrines set up for the dead in every home.

There is also a yearly festival for the dead, one of the major consecutive holidays of the year, so as you can see, refusing to worship the dead causes family friction all year ’round.

Historically, one of the main problems in the Japanese church for the last few centuries is compromise with ancestor worship and emperor worship (esp. during WW2).

MITAKA EVANGELICAL CHURCH

The Mitaka (mee-TAH-kuh) Evangelical Church started a little over 25 years ago. Due to prohibitively high land prices, it is still meeting in my grandmother’s home where it started. The church now has about 125 members, half of whom are children high school age or younger. Most of the members are younger couples with young children. The average age of our church is just 22 years old.

Although there is no persecution in Japan, it is definitely a pagan country and there are various difficulties for those who are living there as Christians. Specifically, the biggest problems would be ancestor worship (see above) and education, which are related.

Public schools are beginning to push emperor worship and private schools are impossibly expensive, especially since most of the church families have numerous children, so with a very few exceptions, all the church children are taught at home.

There’s some info about our church here.

PRAYER REQUESTS

- Pray that God will send more long-term missionaries to Japan, especially to Tokyo, where over 10% of the population is located and where people are most receptive to the Gospel.

- Pray that God will provide us with land and a building so that we can expand the ministry. The house is packed full beyond capacity (the foundations are starting to tilt, even) and we are in sore need of a place to gather during the week for classes for adults and children. Here is some info on how you can help us by letting us help you.

There are 6 billion people in the world, give or take … that’s FIFTY-FOUR BILLION MONTHS of pregnancy, people. *falls down in a dead faint*

My midwife tells me not to count down to the due date, but I have a counter on my desktop that tells me I have 41 days to go. I can’t help it. Braxton-Hicks contractions have started and before dawn this morning, it hurt for the first time, just a little. It’s getting harder by the day to eat or sleep, heartburn comes and goes 24/7, and the dreams are weirder than ever.

Baby Girl is growing daily, too, quite visibly. She used to kick a lot but probably with less and less room, she’s given up on that. This morning, she squirmed and wriggled for hours. It’s a weird tickly stretchy feeling. You can put your hand to your cheek and use your tongue to push your hand to sort of replicate the feeling. Sort of.

And speaking of stretchy, my baby has no concept of uterine symmetry. Until a couple weeks ago, it never occurred to me that when this pregnancy is over, I could just be saggy on one side but now it looks like that’s what’s gonna happen. She likes the right side and the right side only. My belly is lopsidedly stretched out during the day and it looks and feels weird. When I touch the right side, my stomach is really hard. I’m guessing I’m feeling her back. She likes to tuck her feet over my ribs and nudge from time to time. Sometimes she pushes the ribs and I can feel the right side of my rib cage opening up. Aaaaaaaaagh. The other day, I heard about a baby who broke the mother’s ribs during pregnancy … but except for one day, my baby has been gentle with my ribs so far. The left side is just empty. I can push my hand way in and there’s just liquid, no baby.

Here are some pics from a couple weeks ago that Mama took while she and Papa were visiting. The baby is a lot bigger now but I haven’t taken any pictures since they left. (The woman in the fourth pic is my midwife.)