Tokyo City Team

I first joined the Tokyo City Team as a short-term staff in February 2018 and have recently been accepted to rejoin them as a long-term staff. We are a team of nine adults and seven kids from both America and Japan. Originally established in Tokyo in the wake of the 2011 triple disaster in Japan, our team has grown in the years since and felt a collective calling to plant churches in Tokyo. Our team has also established ongoing prayer ministries, made lasting connections with a local university, and continues to reach out to our communities through relational evangelism. Watch the video below to find out more.

Called to Central Tokyo

Our team has purposely established ourselves in the center of Tokyo within the Shinjuku ward. With Japan being a country of less than 1% Christian and having a population that makes up the second largest unreached people group, we have decided to focus on Tokyo because it is the center of life in Japan and gives us the opportunity to reach the most people. As a team we feel called to bring the Gospel to the Japanese and we believe we can do that best in Tokyo.

We have also located ourselves nearby Waseda University which is one of the largest and most prestigious schools in Japan. It also has one of the largest international student populations. About half of our ministries revolve around the school and its students. We see students and recent grads as one of the key groups we want to reach out to since they will be the next generation of leaders and they are often more open to the Gospel.

Prayer Ministries

We know that nothing we do would be possible without God, so we place a high value on prayer and asking Him to work in Tokyo. Before our team began any of the ministries we are currently involved in, we started a prayer initiative called Pray Yamanote. There is a train line that makes a complete circle around the center of Tokyo. There are 30 stops on the loop and it takes about an hour to complete the circle. For the last seven years every Tuesday at 10am JST someone has been praying for the city.

Originally inspired by the Israelites circling the city of Jericho, we go around the city of Tokyo praying for God to move in the hearts of the Japanese people and for the chains of spiritual oppression to be broken. Each of the 30 stops represents a unique area of the city with different needs and prayer requests.

We start each time of a prayer with a short devotion and then get on the train. Once we’ve come back to the same station we gather together again to debrief and talk about how it went. It’s always an encouraging opportunity to hear how God has spoken to different people or directed them to pray.

If you’d like to pray alongside us then you can go to prayyamanote.com to check out our prayer guide.

Along with Pray Yamanote we are involved in other prayer initiatives and frequently prayer walk around other areas of the city. One initiative we started recently is Pray Waseda in which a group gathers every other week to walk around Waseda University and pray for the students there.

Church Planting

Our main ministry, to which everything else flows into, is church planting. When our team was first contemplating church planting though, we saw a few issues with the traditional church in Japan:

• Property is incredibly expensive so getting a building would be difficult.

• Because the Christian community is so small, it’s difficult to find seminary trained pastors.

• In the last few centuries that missionaries have been planting churches in Japan, the traditional model hasn’t seen much success. Most churches cap out at 35 people and end up dying off.

With these things in mind, we wanted a church model that would avoid these issues while also being reproducible and facilitate genuine growth through community. In late 2016 our teammate Shige presented the idea of the Small Church model to the team which is a modified version of the three thirds process for discipleship.

Although it looks different for each small church, we essentially meet as small groups in homes and other public places to eliminate the need for a building. There is no pastor, but each group has a facilitator that leads them through the three sections outlined in the guide below. The questions are meant to be kept simple but still spark meaningful discussion. In this way, the group uses the scripture to teach itself instead of relying on a pastor to teach them.

We use the name “small churches” intentionally because each church is meant to be small and to multiply when it gets too big. The facilitation is intentionally simple as well so that it’s easy enough for anyone to lead.

So far this model has worked really well for us and we have planted three small churches. Usually every other month we also gather all three small churches together for a service we call Celebration. It’s meant as a time for fellowship and sharing what God has been doing in our churches. We’ve also used the time for baptisms, testimonies, and training on sharing the Gospel.

Something else that’s been exciting to come out of my ministry with my church has been working with the youth. About half of the people in my church were kids under 15. The cool thing about our model of church is that the kids get to participate with the adults in learning and interacting with the Bible, but we realized that they needed a little more support than that. So, my friend Kellie and I started an informal youth group. We took the kids bowling, we went out to parks, we did a lot of fun stuff together, but at the same time we made sure to listen to, encourage, and teach the kids when needed. Occasionally I would do a kid’s service with them all during the church time too. I loved working with the youth and I hope to continue the ministry with them when I get back.

Our goal as a team moving forward for our churches is that they will eventually all be lay led and will not rely on full time ministry workers to lead them. As missionaries we will continue to support the churches and the network we have built, but it will be from behind the scenes instead of on the front lines. Instead we want to raise up Japanese leaders. We believe that the church in Japan can spread and grow best if it is a native movement and not something led and run by foreigners. The Japanese are the best people to reach the Japanese. My role therefore when I return to Japan will be to come alongside people in my church, continue discipling them, and work on raising Japanese leaders who can plant new churches.

I’m excited to see where God continues to lead our team as we plant more churches and grow as a church network.

If you are interested in learning more about our church model I’d be happy to talk to you more about it. You can email me at adam.bailey@efca.org.

Student Outreach

Student outreach is another important part of our ministry in Tokyo. There is a big opportunity with returnees, Japanese students who studied abroad in America and have come back to Japan. Oftentimes they are exposed to the Gospel and Christians in America and might have even accepted Christ. Even if they haven’t, they are usually more open to Christianity so we reach out to them and try to build relationships with them. We do what we can to encourage them and have had Bible studies with a few students.

We do most of our student outreach through Waseda University though and in the last few years our team has developed a relationship with a Christian international dorm that’s attached to the university called Hoshien.

Within the Hoshien area there are the international students dorms, a church, offices for some Christian organizations, and a Japanese student dorm. They also have classrooms where they teach Japanese to foreigners. Many people on our team including myself have participated in those classes.

For the Japanese side of the dorm, every weekday morning they have breakfast and a Bible study. A few times a week a local pastor comes in and teaches on a passage of the Bible and the rest of the time is student led. Our team leader Shige is one of the four pastors that teaches and my teammate Kevin and I occasionally go to the Bible study as well. Even though it’s considered a Christian dorm, not all the Japanese students that live in it are Christians. Some of the students are Christians or come from Christian backgrounds and aren’t sure what they believe, but many of the students don’t believe at all. Through our connection with the dorm we’ve been able to become friends with the Christian students and partner with them to reach their peers. From those relationships we’ve had other Bible Studies and some of the students have participated in our churches.

We’ve also partnered with Hoshien to create an event called Dream Cafe where international students and Japanese students can come together and be in a multicultural community. We host the event in the common area of one of the dorms every other Friday during the school year. We serve coffee, tea, and snacks. Sometimes we play games or have live music or a cultural event, but mostly students just hang out and have fun. While it isn’t an explicitly Christian event, it’s an opportunity for us to meet students and get to know them more. After Dream Cafe we often get a group together to go out to dinner and have deeper conversations there. We’ve been able to share the Gospel with many of the students we’ve met and some of them have even started attending our churches.

Other Ministries

There are plenty of other smaller ministry opportunities that our team is involved in throughout the year and each team member also has their individual ministries.

Japanese Study:

Currently one of the biggest responsibilities I have is learning Japanese. I’m minimally involved in other ministries while I take full time language classes. I’m anticipating a year or two of full time study before I am comfortable enough in the language to start doing my ministry primarily in Japanese. I’ll never stop learning, but when I am at a more fluent level, I’ll cut back on my classes and take on more ministry responsibilities.

The reason I’m focusing so heavily on Japanese study in my first couple years on the field is so that I can be more effective in my ministry in the long run. Although I can use English for certain ministries, I want to be able to reach Japanese people in their heart language.

Hosting Short-Term Teams:

Because my short-term APEX trip to Tokyo in 2016 had such a big impact on my life, I have a heart for leading short-term teams. Our team hasn’t hosted a summer APEX team in a few years so one of my roles returning to Japan will be to host and lead APEX teams. I’ll be helping with the various other short-term teams that come to Tokyo as well.