Our Calling to Ministry
My first sense of a call to missionary work came when I was in junior high school. Though raised in a church-going family, I had only a couple of years earlier given my life to Christ at a church camp. One Sunday Michael Pocock of The Evangelical Alliance Mission spoke at my church. Something in what he said struck me. Although I was normally a pretty shy kid, I approached him after the service to tell him that I thought that God wanted me to become a missionary.
Perhaps because I was so young (and probably seemed even younger), he encouraged me to begin by reading missionary biographies. I began checking them out of the church library and devouring them. I was especially impressed by Shadow of the Almighty. Jim Elliot became my hero. This notion of doing mission work stuck with me through high school and college.
During college and for several years afterward, my primary mission interests were Bible translation and a particular closed country. I planned to go to that country soon after graduation, but got uneasy about the sending organization and reconsidered. I then applied to Wycliffe Bible Translators, but a health problem barred the way. While I figured out how to “get around” these closed doors, I contined to work as a picture editor at Science 86 magazine.
I have to confess that, although I had set my mind on mission work, I did not really understand the gospel. This lack of understanding came to a head during a period of rebellion at the end of high school, but it was a number of years before I really internalized that my salvation was entirely a matter of God’s grace and that it was accomplished by Christ’s death and resurrection without any help from me.
Destination: Japan
Since my departure for the field was delayed, I decided to supplement my linguistics degree by learning a non-Indo-European language. I signed up for an evening course in Japanese at Georgetown University. I learned very little Japanese in this class, but I did learn something about Japan. Because Japan was a technologically advanced and politically open nation, I figured that it didn’t stand in much need of missionaries. The course unintentionally taught me that Japan had great spiritual needs.
At that point the magazine for which I worked was purchased by a competitor and the entire staff laid off. I decided it was now or never for getting to the mission field. I took a weekend to pray about what I should do. Though Japan had not previously been on my radar, I emerged at the end of the weekend convinced that I should go to Japan. I dug up a brochure from an organization I’d encountered at an Urbana conference and sent off for updated information. The very next day I received a letter from a college friend living in Japan. She wrote that, if I ever considered going to Japan as a missionary, I should look into that very organization: LIFE Ministries.
Once accepted by LIFE, I had to raise support, and I had to raise a lot in what the home office staff told me was an impossibly short period of time. The story of what followed is a bizarre tale, too long for telling here. Suffice it to say that, when the deadline arrived, my account had exactly the amount for which I had been praying. So many improbable things happened the make this supposedly impossible achievement happen that I could have no doubt that God was behind my going. It wasn’t just some cockamamie idea of my own.
During that first two-year term, I met a young woman named Yumiko.
Yumiko’s Tale
Yumiko grew up in a Buddhist family. She believed that, if she did something good, God would reward her, and if she did something bad, God would punish her. She loved music and graduated from Kunitachi College of Music before entering the workforce.
One day Yumiko decided to study English conversation. Her mother had seen an advertisement for a church-run English conversation school, and Yumiko decided to give it a try. She quickly noticed that the school’s staff was different from other people she knew, and she wondered if this could be because they were Christians.
During each class there was a chapel time. In chapel she learned about the gospel for the first time: that God didn’t simply punish and reward people but loved them and even sent his Son, Jesus, to die to save them. After about a month, the chaplain asked if anyone wanted to become a Christian. Yumiko raised her hand.
The road ahead was not without bumps, and for a time Yumiko stopped going to church. The thought of baptism made her uneasy, like she would be trapped in a “religion” if she took that step.
During this period, Yumiko attended a Christian camp. In his final message the camp speaker said, “God is waiting for you.” This thought struck Yumiko as true: that God had been waiting patiently for her. She was baptized on the following Easter..
Training, Testing, and Tying the Knot
As I finished my first term in Japan, my sense was that I had found my calling. But I knew that I needed better training, and I knew that the calling had to be tested. So I began working on a Master of Divinity degree in Mission at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. While I worked on that degree, I returned to Japan more than once in different capacities, including a nine-month research internship. I also tried working in another country to test my call to Japan. Representatives from other missions worked hard to convince me that God was calling me elsewhere. All of these experiences worked to confirm my call to Japan.
After graduation, I returned to Japan. This time, however, I took a job. Before I could become a long-term missionary, I needed to pay off my seminary loans. I did this by teaching secondary school. I also did volunteer work with different mission agencies, co-led an organization of tentmakers, taught evangelistic Bible studies, and served as assistant pastor at a church.
It was during this period that Yumiko and I had our first date and eventually got married. You can read all about our courtship in the Family section.
Yumiko had never contemplated becoming a missionary, but we talked about it repeatedly as we dated, during our engagement, and in the early days of our marriage. Japan was her native country, and that was clearly where God had called me to serve. We began our marriage serving together in a church and we greatly enjoyed doing that. It helped make missionary work more real and the word missionary less intimidating.
So we turned our attention from the general calling to missionary work and from the question of where we should serve to the more specific question of what kind of work God wanted us to do. We traveled Japan and sought counsel from many people. In the midst of our search, God gave us a vision for what we could do.