Developing a Contextualized Church as a Bridge to Christianity in Japan

"A breadth of research... based on careful missiological study... could hold an important key to the advance of the Kingdom of God in the land of the rising sun." - C. Peter Wagner What would a truly Japanese church look like - a church contextualized to Japanese needs, that sought to answer Japanese questions from a Japanese worldview? To find out, we first need to find out what those Japanese questions are and to understand how the Japanese worldview works! This study unpacks the social and religious assumptions that make up the Japanese way of seeing the world, and examines the cycle of rituals that make up a Japanese religious life. It then brings these views and assumptions into dialogue with the ecclesiology of the Apostle Paul and of contemporary Western theologians, producing new images of Church which resonate with a Japanese heart, and suggests new rituals which redeem and transform Japanese religious symbols.

MITSUO FUKUDA is Senior Research Engineer and Supervisor at Optoelectronics Laboratories, NTT-a world-leading telecommunications company. Dr. Fukuda is the author of Reliability and Degradation of Semiconductor Lasers and LEDs.