Recently, we have felt a growing sense, almost an urgency, that we must go deeper in prayer in this nation. I believe the Lord is inviting us, not just us personally but the church, to pray for a shift in the spiritual landscape of this nation.
When I was in Korea last November, one of the Korean pastors stood up and shared about the heart of prayer in the Korean church. If you have ever experienced a real Korean prayer meeting, then you know that they pray with passionate fervor almost unlike anything else. He spoke about the Korean concept of han. There isn’t a good English translation, but he described han as the accumulated grief of the Korean people born of centuries of suffering and foreign rule, something experienced both personally and collectively. It was a cry against injustice, and for the Korean church, it became a prayer to God—a posture of dependence and a recognition that only He could save them. It left me with a question: What does it look like when prayer arises authentically from the Japanese heart?
We don’t have that kind of felt heritage in the church that I see among believers from other nations. Despite the intense effort and focus of many laborers over the years, the church of Japan is strangely lacking in spiritual depth. Much of what has been done to expand the gospel feels very surface-level. Of course, many men and women have prayed and interceded for this nation, but that kind of posture doesn’t seem to have been cultivated and transmitted to the Body of Christ at large. Why is that?
Prayer from the Japanese Heart
Perhaps one reason is that we have tried to teach and pass on practices that are not naturally intuitive to how people think and live. When you look at how Japanese people have historically engaged with the spiritual, you see a pattern of embodiment, engaging with the sacred in space, nature, and quiet. The famous example is Zen Buddhism, which, by the way, looks almost nothing like Buddhism found elsewhere in Asia. Of course, I’m not implying Christianity needs to become more like Zen. But there are ways people naturally engage with the sacred and spiritual, ways Japanese people would more intuitively encounter God, and these are likely different from the forms most of us are used to.
Christianity has a rich deposit of contemplative practices in prayer and worship. Traditionally, evangelicals tend to express this less in community contexts, while Catholics and Orthodox traditions carry it more visibly. Interestingly, those traditions have historically resonated more in Japan, and I believe that this is partly why: the gospel framed in embodiment and contemplation feels more intuitive to Japanese than the gospel framed primarily as decision. We carry evangelistic zeal and fervor, and we don’t want to lay that aside. But I think we Protestants here in Japan have been missing something in recognizing the language people speak when it comes to spiritual matters.
What we need are fathers and mothers who raise up spiritual sons and daughters in the Lord—men and women who model what it looks like to know the Father in the hidden place and who pass that on to others. We can do this individually, but we can also do this as groups and communities.
Weekly Gatherings
Our Thursday evening gatherings are one expression of this. The evening is simple: a meal, a short message, a time of prayer. But what we're really after is something beneath the structure: a community of faith where people are being formed in Christ and released into mission. We've been intentional about who we invite. Community has to be grown, not just gathered, and that means letting relationships set the pace.
People are hungry to be part of a bigger story. We're meeting with people individually to share the vision of prayer arising in this nation. We are inviting those without community to walk with us. To those who are already in ministry or part of another church, the invitation is this: Let’s seek God together in prayer for what only He can do. We want to see God move in hearts, in our midst, and in this nation.
-J