ARMY PADRE WRITES ON CONDITION OF JAPANESE CHURCHES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 80, 11 August 1948, Page 7

ARMY PADRE WRITES ON CONDITION OF JAPANESE CHURCHES

(Contributed by the Ministers’ Association) The war dealt severe blows to the young Church in Japan, writes Rev Russell F. Kenward, who served as a padre in Japan. Hundreds of churches were destroyed in the bombings and there are no resources with which to rebuild them. Pastors were not excused military service, and now, under the heavy inflation they are reduced to a mere pittance. Congregations are without Bibles, without buildings, without hymn books, without literature, and. yet since the close of the war under the stimulus of religious freedom more than two million Japanese have moved to embrace the Christian faith. From Kagawa’s meetings alone two hundred thousand were gathered into instruction classes in twelve months. This represents almost 70 per cent of those attending his meetings. In this forward move the Presbyterian Church is the most energetic of .all the groups, and is the best endowed with men of leadership and ability. It has a membership of over fifty thousand, some four hundred and thirty pastors working in four hundred and fifty churches throughout the land, three theological colleges, fifteen missionary schools, and two* colleges. Each church has its own Sunday school and many of them have a pastor’s Bible class. I supplied English Testaments to one class of fifteen keen young men anxious to learn to read the Scriptures in English. No Bible classes or Sunday schools were permitted during the war. The American Bible Society is donating two and a half million copies of j the New Testament and a hundred thousand copies of the Old Testament to the Japan Bible Society to assist in meeting the unprecedented demand for Scriptures. For the first time the Bible is a best seller in Japan. The recent Japanese elections give a striking indication of the tremendous increase in Christian influence. For the first time in history the Prime Minister of Japan is a Christian. Tetsu Katayama, successor to

the infamous. To jo, has been a lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church. He has three Christians in his Cabinet. The leader of the House of Peers, Matsuoka, is also a Christian. This is the first time that a Christian has sat in Japan’s Upper House. Up till now the Japanese have always asserted that a Christian could not understand the spirit of the nation. Katayama openly asserts his Christian convictions and in his inaugural speech as Premier asserted that without the spiritual devotion of Japan to Jesus’Christ the nation could not expect to recover. Three notable Asiatic peoples now have Christian leader §. There is Manuel Roxas in the Philippines, Chiang Kai-sek in China, and now Tetsu Katayama in Japan. None of us can estimate just how much this tremendous upsurging of Christian interest may mean. For the Japanese it means deliverance from the immaturity of mythical teachings and legendary ritu,alism that made them an easy prey to” the fatalism of war. It means the opening up of unimagined possibilities of moral force, spiritual strength, and dignified life generated by the central truths of the Christian faith. Hundreds of millions in the East will look to Japan and gauge their hopes by what happens there. That makes it a missionary sphere vital to the whole Christian Church. Further, the strengthening of this Christian bridgehead. is the best guarantee that Japan will one day come to an honoured place in the community of nations;. The. best chances of world peace lie today, as ever, in the spiritual sphere. The English-speaking peoples have offered the peoples of the earth many things: order, commerce, ways of government, cultural treasures, control o.Vjer nature, but too little have we offered them the one thing that can make them men—Jesus Christ. When the first great missionary to the Japanese was' on his death-bed his passing spirit was busy about his work, and even in the article of death, visions of further conquests flashed before him, and his last word was “Amplius”—Onward. Our generation may see the vision fulfilled.